This morning, my local baseball expert explained to me the logic of Brewers manager Ron Roenicke sticking with the rotation in the 6th game of the National League Championship Series despite Shaun Marcum’s grim performance in Game 2.  “If he (Roenicke) picks somebody else to pitch, Marcum might never recover,” said my expert.  He went on to explain how the Brewers had sacrificed a lot to get Marcum and that passing him over in favor of someone else could essentially damage the goods long term, which in baseball parlance, means next year. 

Read more about Shaun Marcum in ESPN’s article, “Shaun Marcum will try to save season.”  (His or ours?)

http://espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs/2011/story/_/id/7107384/marcum-season-hands

Like 99% of the human race, I tend to think about immediate strategy.  What makes sense this very minute – how to get out of the current pickle – how to win a grant or position a project.  All in the here and now.

Sometimes, I think I’ve changed the rotation because of my lack of faith in someone’s ability.  And it wasn’t always a fair assessment.   I may not have had Ron Roenicke’s wisdom to look at the long game, look at the repercussions of expressing lack of faith in someone, worry about the damage that would do to someone’s capabilities down the road, assess the cost long term to the whole enterprise.

They say baseball is a microcosm of life.  I’d say that in this instance, that’s really true.

You live and learn.

Let’s face it.  Most people could live without having an advisory committee for their new project.  But maybe the funding source has made it a requirement.  Or maybe the organization always sets up an advisory committee for a major project.  Either way, you’re stuck with putting an advisory committee together and making it work or, let’s be real, making sure it doesn’t bollux up the project or cause you endless grief.

It’s tricky.  I’ve set up advisory committees and been on them.  Here are five things I’ve learned that might help you.

1.  Create a job description for the Advisory Committee that clearly spells out its role as a group and the expectations for individual members.  This is harder than it sounds because people don’t generally want to be on committees that have no power and project administrators are usually reluctant to hand over much responsibility to outsiders.  Find the balance between making the group meaningful and protecting the integrity of your project.

2.  Invite people to serve on the Advisory Committee in a way that makes them feel special. That’s right, a mass email invite will not cut it.  The best strategy is a phone call to talk through the project and the Advisory Committee role, followed by a formal letter (remember letters?) from your executive director.  When I worked at the County, we made sure any Advisory Committee invitation would come from the County Executive.   This made the invitation seem more like an appointment by the CE, elevating its importance.

3.  Start off with a clear idea of what you want the Advisory Committee to do.  Develop a list of particulars.  There is nothing worse than a large group of people flailing around like 5th graders on a science project whining, “What are we supposed to do?”  Avoid that with a good, short work list.

4.  Designate the leadership in advance.  “Who wants to be chairperson?” is a dangerous (and nutty) question you want to avoid.  You know your project and what it needs by way of leadership.  Figure this out ahead of time.  Identify two people to serve as co-chairs, get their buy-in and start the Advisory Committee process with them already installed.  Don’t worry that people will ask you how they were chosen.  Everyone’s too polite to ask.  Thank goodness.

5.  Have robust, satisfying meetings.  Busy, important people are attracted to well-run, content-driven meetings that produce decisions that influence programs and systems.  Conversely, they disappear quickly if meetings are full of endless talking by staff and few opportunities to advise.  Unfortunately, not a lot of project directors pay much attention to the structure and content of meetings; as a result, attendance rapidly devolves in terms of numbers and the level of staff attending (you started with the CEO and now the girl who picks up her dry cleaning is attending).

A good Advisory Committee can be major value added to your project.  But not if you approach it as a throwaway feature of your project.  Your project will be stronger and more sustainable if you have a solid Advisory Committee behind it.  It’s worth the investment!

Would you put the word joy and your work in the same sentence?  Last week, I had occasion to meet several people whose obvious joy in their work surprised, pleased and heartened me.  It also made me want to give them money. 

No joke. 

I loved these folks for being so happy in their work and, here’s what really came through and was so impressive — for finding joy in working with people who most of us would see as very tough customers.  What came across was energy and interest.  Enthusiasm and pride.  And pride not just in their own work but in the successes of the people they serve.  It’s contagious – like a great cause.  Like how the pink ribbons and the cute pink running shoes and the story about how Susan G. Komen’s sister decided to go raise some damn money for breast cancer research just makes any normal woman get herself off the couch and marching down the street – that kind of enthusiasm and pride.

As it happens, the folks I talked to last week were working with people with disabilities, serious mental illness, and extreme poverty. They beamed when they talked about their work.  So much so I wondered if they went home at night or just took occasional naps and sipped Gatorade to stay on the job 24/7.

The hard thing is that it’s impossible to manufacture this kind of joy.  People either have it or they don’t.  The people who have it, though, have a magic that’s pretty special.  If you’re one of these people or you run an organization and you have a beamer on staff — you’re lucky.  You not only have the joy — you have a great big, wonderful magnet.

Use it.

So much of stamina has to do with not thinking about what you’re afraid of and never looking up to see how far you have to go.  Letting fear in your head generates the kind of panic you can feel in your chest and arms.  Seeing the finish line far in the horizon – or worse not being able to see it at all – drains the confidence right out of you like a plug pulled on a very fast drain.  I say this like I’m a marathon runner or something.

I’m not. 

This picture is of me getting out of the water after a half-mile swim for the Danskin Triathlon in Pleasant Prairie about four years ago. Aside from childbirth, this is about as physical a feat I’ve ever attempted.  And I did it – swam across the lake in about 20 minutes, all the while fighting off my panic about being in deep water, in the weeds, with other women splashing and flailing about, people in kayaks telling me I was off course, and the other side looking like Tinker Bell’s light hovering several miles away.

Diana Nyad – long distance swimmer – talked about how she just focuses on the here and now, breaking a long distance into small chunks and keeping her head full of songs and ideas totally unrelated to the fact that she’s in an ocean with gigantic creatures and currents and chop, not to mention the Portuguese Man o’ Wars that eventually did her in on this last swim.

What I didn’t understand when I was swimming across the lake I have understood for a long time when it comes to work.

Almost since the beginning of my career, I’ve had enormous projects due in short amounts of time.  I have felt the physical panic that comes from looking up to see the finish line pages and pages away.  I’ve been defeated before I started thinking about all the dangers, the mistakes, and the risks.  I’ve frozen in place looking at a blank computer screen, cursor flashing, the outline of a federal proposal in the wee-est possible print on my desk, the points for each section stoking my fear and paralysis.  Sounds bad?  Yeah, I’ve had some bad ones.  But I learned from them.  One step at a time, that’s the trick.

When Diana Nyad described her strategy for swimming 103 miles from Cuba to Key West, it was actually kind of familiar.  But not in a sports way – in a work way.  On a big project, I always break the work into chunks, constantly work a list, keep focused on the task at hand, and don’t think about the sharks and other evils lurking – like bad data, lackadaisical colleagues, and indecipherable proposal requirements. I also make sure I’ve got the best equipment (no computer failures for me), solid connections to great resource people (a carefully tended Rolodex – metaphorically speaking), and a strong personal support system (husband who cooks).

Chunk, chunk, chunk.  Stroke, stroke, stroke.  Don’t look up until it’s time to walk on shore.

It works.  It really does.

I have a couple Facebook friends whose posts have turned me against causes I was formerly for.  Well, maybe that’s an extreme statement.  But you know what I mean?  The constant picketing, call to arms, re-posts of political articles.  Eh. At the same time, there are nonprofits, a couple that I know and love, whose posts are stiff and uninviting, posts where I can tell that a committee thought long and hard about just how to phrase their next message.  Another eh.

But there’s the opposite, too.  I have Facebook friends that post amazingly well-worded, often funny, sometimes poignant statuses.  And I follow a bunch of nonprofit organizations who also seem to ‘get it’ — they change up what they post from day to day.  Sure, there’s the advertising and organizational promotion, but there might be announcements about community events, reflections on issues, and an occasional splash of humor.  The nonprofits that I think do the best job on Facebook have a little joy and hope in their posts — so it’s not all ‘oh, God, look how bad things are.’

Facebook is just one little piece of social media.  Today, I was talking to a couple of nonprofit folks (Rochelle Dukes Fritsch from IMPACT and Janet Peshek from Cathedral Center, Inc.) who are putting it all together – Facebook, Twitter, Tweetdeck, LinkedIn – with all the enhancements in between.  How to do this and do it well is the topic of our next Planners and Grantwriters Roundtable – October 13th – at the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.  Sponsored by the Nonprofit Center of Milwaukee, the Roundtable brings people together to yak.  Yep, yak.  We organize a panel of experts and then we encourage Roundtablers to have at it.

On October 13th, the topic is social media….yeah, yeah, there’ve been a million social media workshops.  This one’s different. THIS ONE IS REALLY DIFFERENT.

We’re going to ask 100 QUESTIONS.  We’re going to have a dynamite panel and we’re going to bombard them with questions.

So help us out.  Give us your questions.  Use the comment section below and send off a couple of ideas.  What do you need to know to make social media really work for you and your organization?

ASK!

Or another title could be, “Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes.”  Although I resisted it for years, I have finally become convinced of the wisdom of women and minority-owned businesses seeking designation as DBE’s (Disadvantaged Business Enterprise).  My business, Wilberg Community Planning LLC, has been a DBE for several years.  Initially, I’ll be honest with you, I sought DBE status because a local government official said to me, “It would be a lot less hassle to hire you if you were a DBE.”

DBE Decision.  So I went after the designation really as part of a customer service strategy.  This particular government official was a good and steady client who had to negotiate and finagle my contracts through the bureaucracy every time.  Not in my interest to be a high maintenance consultant, so I filed the paperwork.  This isn’t a simple deal, either.  Obtaining DBE status means #1 – you actually have to have a business that’s real and #2 – you have to be able to prove it with things like profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and lists of clients. 

DBE certification also requires sending the certification agency your personal income tax returns.  And then there’s the signatures and the notary and all that stuff.  They don’t let just anyone be a DBE and they don’t make it particularly easy.  Primary reason is that it’s too tempting for majority companies to set up paper DBE firms and game the system.

The Ethics of It.  At first, I was really bothered by the ethics of seeking DBE.  The primary reason was that I didn’t think I was really disadvantaged.  I thought other people/companies were more disadvantaged and deserved the designation but me, being a white woman, not so much.  This was during a period when I really had come to believe that my education and experience erased sexism, bought me a membership in the Good Ol’ Boys Club, and leveled my little playing field.  Hence, no need for DBE.  Right.

Now my thinking has changed.  The playing field — the big playing field — the one where the pros play – won’t get leveled without a major structural adjustment. Here’s my view — male/majority companies have had decades of implicit preference.  If we wait for the normal course of progress to balance things out, it’ll be the next Ice Age.

So What?  So I understand the complaints of students at UW-Madison who are torqued about UW-Madison’s efforts to admit more minority students.  And maybe it isn’t fair that they have to pay the price for decades of majority preference.  But we just can’t wait patiently for things to get better.  We have to make them better.  Last spring, only 3.0% of UW-Madison’s students were African American, another 3.6% were Hispanic. Not good enough.

“Group says UW-Madison admissions favor minorities,” JSOnline, September 13, 2011.  http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/129773483.html

 This is a small homeless encampment in the park next to the USS Midway, the massive aircraft carrier that anchors (so to speak) a tourist area south of downtown San Diego. Although it’s hard to see clearly, there are people sleeping on the grass or on blankets. Tourists on their way to the Midway Museum stay on the walking path and mostly look straight ahead.

I’ve been working on homeless issues for a long time. I’ve conducted a dozen focus groups with homeless people, supervised two citywide homeless surveys, and worked with the people who run Milwaukee’s shelter system for over ten years. So when I go to another city, I’m always on the lookout for homeless people.

What catches my eye as much as homeless people themselves is how other people react to homeless people. For most folks, the safest bet is to steer clear, give the strange-looking guy and his stuffed grocery cart a wide berth, maybe nod hello as if he was a nice office worker out for a stroll on his lunch break.

In San Diego, there are homeless folks in nearly every park, one or two walking bicycles with baskets full of belongings, small knots of people with their carts and gear, chatting at picnic tables or lying on the grass. Driving by the park next to the Midway and seeing the encampment, I mentioned to my husband how people in Milwaukee always talk about how much easier it is to be homeless in places where it’s warm, as if homelessness was an Olympic sport with degrees of difficulty attached to each location.

Long story short, I decided to ask whether it’s easier to be homeless in San Diego than in Milwaukee. And I did it for two reasons. First, I actually wanted an answer. And second, I wanted to force myself to talk to homeless people face to face without the protection of a focus group under the watchful eye of a shelter director.

I wanted to stop hiding behind my clipboard. I want to be a better advocate.

So I left my husband in the car, and set out to have a conversation.  Scanning the possible options, I aimed for the two women attached to the grocery cart in the picture.

I talked with a woman who described herself as a “true blue alcoholic,” a veteran of eight years on the street, who had quit on the idea of going to a shelter a long time ago because of shelter rules prohibiting drinking. She looked every inch the alcoholic although she seemed completely sober – reflective and detailed in describing her situation. She introduced me to her street daughter, a woman six months pregnant, lying on a blanket in the shade next to their shared grocery cart. Two other people, both men, rounded out the ‘family’. The woman I was talking to was mothering all of them.

In the space of ten minutes, she told me a lot — why she was there, what had happened in her life, how she managed day to day. And she said, in answer to my last question about whether it’s easier to be homeless in a place like San Diego, “Homeless is homeless no matter where you are.” She could not have been friendlier or more open. Once I introduced myself as working on homeless issues in Milwaukee, she talked without hesitation, with no suspicion apparent, a smile – although sometimes sardonic – always on her face. Her street daughter was the same, quieter but sweetly friendly. Our conversation ended when the older woman said she had to help one of her men friends to the bathroom.  She was so clearly the mom of the group, after all.

So for the past day or so, I’ve been thinking that to write about this woman in any detail would be exploitative – that she shared her story with me so freely and was so genuine, that it would be wrong to retell it here in this blog. So the things she told me about her life and how she’d ended up in this park on this day are maybe best summarized by her statement that she never thought she’d end up like this.

Homelessness in San Diego, especially unsheltered homelessness is a much bigger problem than in Milwaukee. A city twice the size of Milwaukee, San Diego has nearly 5,000 people living on the street – at the last homeless census, Milwaukee had fewer than 150. My ‘sample’ of two homeless people felt that being homeless in San Diego was plenty tough, the weather notwithstanding.  (Another blog will delve deeper into the comparisons between Milwaukee and San Diego.)

What I appreciate about my conversation with these two women was that, albeit unwittingly, they  helped me break past my devotion to surveys and focus groups and the safety of professional life to connect in a more real way. It was a little lesson in how to listen to the story without checking any boxes or rushing to the next question.  I hope my colleagues in the world of homeless policy do this now and then but I’m not sure.  Sometimes when I listen to policy discussions, it seems like we’re pretty far away from the day to day of homelessness.  I intend to get closer.  Yes, I do.  Because I need to get smarter and I think that’s the way to do it.

______________________

Here’s a link about San Diego’s 2011 Point in Time count of homeless people.  http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/feb/14/san-diego-countys-homless-numbers-rise/

I am speaking as someone who has made a career out of bad news.  Bad news has been good for business.  Rising poverty?  Good for business.  More juvenile delinquency? Line up the clients.  Chronic unemployment? Steer here.

I’m done with it.  Like Evilene in The Wiz….

Bring some message in your head

Or in something you can’t lose

But don’t you ever bring me no bad news

If you’re gonna bring me something

Bring me, something I can use

But don’t you bring me no bad news.

I’ve been a bad news monger so long I almost don’t know how to quit.  But I knew I needed to when I read that Wisconsin, with its 17% child poverty rate was below the national average of 20% and I was a little disappointed because having a higher than average poverty rate is so helpful with federal grantwriting.  And it was then that I realized that my view of the world had gotten completedly CRACKED.

(See “Decade saw leap in child poverty,” MJS, August 21m 2011, at http://www.jsonline.com/business/128130438.html)

My cousin, Joan, a mom of six kids, instituted a bunch of wacky food rules in order to stretch her budget.  One of my favorites was “No cheese without bread.” I’m starting that policy here — no problem without a solution.  Don’t fill me up with problems so I’m so overwhelmed and so immersed and so enamored with bad news that I can’t recognize or appreciate a solution when I see one.  You know what I’m talking about here — it’s so easy to be in love with social problems that we don’t even want to hear about solutions.  As if a problem having a solution means that it’s not a serious enough problem. 

How many times have you heard someone propose a solution only to hear, “It’s not that simple.”

I’m for simple.  I’m standing for simple.  I’m looking for simple solutions.

Bring me, something I can use.

And I’m going to do as I ask — find solutions, appreciate them and spread them around. 

You?

Fundamentally, the purpose of meetings is communication.  Whatever slick and quick social media exist, the face to face meeting has an essential, irreplaceable quality, otherwise, Hilary Clinton would text foreign leaders instead of going through all the headaches of traveling to meet them in person.

So a group face to face meeting serves an important function – primarily by providing a venue for interaction with people other people might not know they’re interested in interacting with.  (You know that makes sense.  You just have to read it slower.)

But a problem with regular meetings – say, regular meetings of a coalition or a group of funded agencies – is that the same people attend, month after month, year after year.  Often they say the same things at the same times in the meetings, reliably offering the same complaint or suggestion. Other than changing fashions or the weather outside the window, you wouldn’t know it was a different meeting and not just a twisted version of Groundhog Day.

So what changes it up?  New people change it up.  New people have new questions and new ideas.  Because they haven’t been through the drill for ten years, they don’t worry about who usually does what.  They bring new stuff — and it’s valuable.  Yes, it occasionally irks the elders and bends the agenda but eventually it gets the hamsters off the treadmill.

I go to a lot of meetings with directors of agencies – bless them, they’re brilliant and they work hard and they’ve done so much for the community.  But back in each agency, sitting at a desk or running around making home visits, is a staff person who is right in the middle of the issue.  That person is dealing with Mr. Jones’ food stamps getting cut off or Ms. Smith being reluctant to enter AODA treatment.  That person is dealing with the tangled up logistics of getting people benefits and the sweat and aching muscles of going door to door to organize a neighborhood clean-up.

We need those folks at meetings.  So I’m suggesting to you nonprofit and government agency directors our there — EACH ONE, BRING ONE.  You help your staff person get the bigger picture and  help your director colleagues keep their feet on the ground.  If nothing else, that young person brings a sense of urgency that we all need to have about the work of improving this community.

Try it.  Let’s change it up!

Nothing irks me more than a meeting where the agenda consists of one or two people giving reports while everyone else snaps their gum and fiddles with their Blackberries. These meetings remind me of the townfolk gathering outside the telegraph office to hear Old Ben in his suspenders read a message from the next town over.  Really — is this the purpose of bringing great minds together?  To sit and listen to someone ‘read the news’ that could have easily been disseminated via email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a bunch of other new social media that I don’t even know the names of yet?

Me, personally?  I think it’s a bad use of time and talent.  Meetings without a problem-solving purpose are a waste of time. Those with such a purpose can be extraordinarily fun, collegial, and productive. 

An Alternative

A few months ago, the Milwaukee Continuum of Care established a special work group to develop a Coordinated Entry system for the homeless services system, including shelters, transitional housing, and homeless prevention services.  Recognizing that work groups can quickly devolve into three people with no better alternative than to show up, the chair (Tim Baack) and I patched together a strategy that has really worked.  Here are some of the elements:

1.  Homework.

Work group members were asked to interview people in other cities about their coordinated entry (central intake) systems.  Someone interviewed the central intake program in Dayton, someone else called Kalamazoo, and so on.  Results were shared with the group in oral and written form.  This dispersed the responsibility for information-gathering and synthesis to the whole group. 

2.  Visioning

A visioning process is really about having everyone say what’s on their mind.  We did this early to try to surface some of the misgivings and apprehensions that shelter operators and others might have about a coordinated entry process.  When their concerns were recognized as legitimate by others, they became problems to solve rather than little land mines that would blow us up later.

3.  Decision List

We came up with a list of questions that had to be answered in order to establish Coordinated Entry.  Every work group member was asked to submit his/her answers to the chair so they could be recorded on a decision spreadsheet.  At each meeting, we tackle 2 or 3 questions, not closing the discussion until there is genuine agreement on the answer.  When a question is answered, we go on to the next, with no circling back (well, so far).  Having the decision list puts the end in sight – essentially when we answer the last question we will have designed the Coordinated Entry system.

4.  Cookies

The work group chair, Tim Baack of Pathfinders, sets the tone for the meeting with his preparation and his presence.  He is there to greet people as they arrive.  He has a fresh pot of coffee and a platter of cookies.  Agendas and meeting materials are at everyone’s place.  He is glad to see everyone and they feel welcome.  He guides the discussion but doesn’t rush it.  People are heard.  That’s huge.

When Coordinated Entry gets established, it will have a lot of fingerprints on it (and a few cookie crumbs). People will look back at the hard work they did and remember it as being challenging and energizing.  They’ll still go to the big meetings and listen to Old Ben read the latest telegram but they’ll be looking around the room for a problem to solve and some fun to have.