There is something seriously wrong here.  The latest NAACP report on the state of Black Milwaukee is a yawner.  Same old stuff.  Same old disparities.  Maybe a little worse but, hey, it is what it is.  What’s happened  is that we have gotten used to having leprosy.

Yes, that’s just what’s happened in our lovely city.  We are years beyond caring about the disfigurement, the isolation, and the pain.  It’s enough, isn’t it, that we still have missionaries willing to visit the leper colony and minister to the people we don’t want to see on Main Street.  Keep us safe from contagion but still do the right thing.

The NAACP report includes interesting little facts like:

• African American students in MPS have a graduation rate of around 40%.
• Wisconsin’s African American incarceration rate is 11 times greater than whites.
• Half of African American males of working age (16-65) are unemployed.

More info here in Eugene Kane’s column in the Milwakee Journal Sentinel, “Latest snapshot of black Milwaukee makes the heart sink,” at http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/124547149.html

This isn’t the first time the NAACP has issued a state of Black Milwaukee report.  The first one I saw was in 1987; we used some of the findings to include in a demographic analysis of poverty in Milwaukee completed for the Social Development Commission.  We thought the news that African American male unemployment was 25.9% and the poverty rate was 29.0% would just stop traffic on Wisconsin Avenue.  When policymakers got that information, we thought (wearing our little candy striper uniforms with the “I may look 16 but I’m still really naive” sashes) they will for sure deal with the obvious racism, disparity, and injustice of it all.

Maybe it’s like the frog in the boiling water.  You know, you put a live frog in boiling water and he freaks out….but…..you put a live frog in cold water and gradually turn up the heat and he just floats into a state of being fully cooked.

I guess my question is this — HOW DID THIS GET TO BE OK?   How did we get so comfortable with tens of thousands of young African American men not having a prayer of a decent economic, social or family life?  Who’s mad about this?  Who’s grieving?

There is occasionally a great, impressive community ‘raring up’ of indignation and outrage about a pressing issue.  United Way’s anti-teen pregnancy campaign, especially the latest iteration that goes directly to the heart of the awful phenomenon of young girls getting suckered into sex with older men is an example of a group that decided, “This is completely f**ked up and we’re going to change it.”  Of course, United Way wouldn’t talk like that.  But I am.

This situation with African American males is a DISASTER and it has implications that reach into the next many generations.  We see that frog bobbing around in the simmering water — that’s us.  That’s what complacency has brought us.  We’ve been warned.  We can never say this took us by surprise.

Here’s my Father”s Day message to Dads, especially young Dads.  You matter.  It doesn’t matter what your wife or your girlfriend says.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to do anything useful or even if you have a job.  You matter.  Don’t buy into any of the junk that you hear that your kids will be fine without you.  They won’t.

Here’s the big news for Dads, again, especially young Dads who think they have nothing to offer because they’re not working and have no prospects.  Three-years olds don’t check resumes.  They don’t care what you do as long as you are decent to them.  It’s a very low bar to be a meaningful Dad to a child.  Would it be better if every Dad had a family-supporting job? Absolutely.  Would it be better if they all took parenting classes and were actually interested in child development instead of faking it?  Sure.

But what matters most to a kid is that you simply show up. Be kind. Be dependable in their eyes.  Put them on your shoulders and walk around the block. Make them feel big and important. Put them first in your heart.

Social service programs spend a lot of time on fatherhood projects.  And that’s a wonderful thing.  But the thing I want Dads to hear is that it is your physical presence that matters most, your strength and protection, your playfulness and your laugh, and the loving gaze that tells a child s/he can do no wrong in your eyes.  It’s no cost – you just got to show up. Not once or twice.  Not on Christmas and birthdays.  Regularly.  Dependably.

Men – if you’ve got a friend who can’t take that step to be with his child because he thinks he’s not good enough, take him by the hand and show him.  And remember sometimes it’s the big blowhard Dads who say they don’t care and can’t be bothered who are hurting the most because they’re estranged from their kids.  Help them out. 

Our town would be an incredibly better place to live if all our kids were fathered well.  Many of the programs we develop to try to fix the damage done by absent fathers would be unnecessary.  It’s the little things that count – in the long run, that’s the big thing.  I truly believe that.

Constructive criticism is what you get when your husband tells you, “Yes, those jeans do make you look fat.”  This is separated from regular criticism which is severe eye-rolling and/or covering of one’s eyes.  It’s ok to get mad at the latter but constructive criticism?  Mature people take it in the kind spirit in which it is intended.  Or do they?

As one author noted, “Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.”

One experience that I and many of my peers share is having people review drafts of funding proposals.  Over the years, this has been a painful or productive process, depending on the proposal, how decent a draft I’ve given people, and whether they (the reviewers) know what they’re doing.

I’ve learned some things about the proposal draft review process which I happily put to use this past weekend on a proposal for a very important community project.  Here are my tips for not only surviving, but benefiting from, a proposal draft review.

1.  Start the proposal development process with the group in a face to face meeting.

2.  Review the proposal requirements, paying special attention to significant policy/program decisions.

3.  Get agreement on the major issues at the beginning – don’t let things ride.

4. Share two drafts.  An early draft with a lot of holes forces discussion about critical issues — this draft should be reviewed in a group meeting.  The second draft is the ‘close to finished’ draft – unless there are big issues, getting individuals’ feedback is sufficient.

5. Tell your reviewers when you will be sending the draft out and stick to that schedule — even if you are not entirely happy with your progress. 

6.  Ask people to send their feedback/comments to you directly.  One thing you don’t want in the late stages of a major proposal is outside kibbutzing – where some people in the group are talking to each other but not registering their issues with the proposal developer. 

7.  Take all the comments in before making changes.  Get a sense of where your reviewers are – are they all focusing on the same 3 issues or are they finding things all over the place to change?

8.  Schedule your review so there is actually time to influence the final product.  Asking someone to review a proposal that’s due tomorrow is a transparent attempt to avoid having to change anything.  I say you need to have a close to final draft at least a week in advance of the due date.  Inconsequential stuff can be missing but 90% should be available to solid review/critique.

9.  Alert the group when the concerns of a reviewer are such that the future implementation of the project could be impaired should it be funded as proposed.  This is tricky because you don’t want to disrupt the proposal process but you have to insure core agreement on the design.

10. Advocate only for the competitiveness of the proposal and do that sparingly.  Sometimes ‘regular’ people don’t understand what needs to be done to land major federal money.  However, they still know what will fly in their world.  A good proposal developer strives for balance here.  That’s hard — because it also means the you cannot be defensive or argumentative.  When you’ve spent days and weeks on a proposal, it’s hard not to defend every word.  But that’s a mistake and we all know it.

I used to be very reluctant to have people review my work.  Last minute scenes with supervisors and colleagues ripping the draft from hands were common.  Figuring if I gave them no time to critique I could avoid criticism, I completely missed the boat on the whole purpose of external review.  I had to learn it the hard way — it’s not about me.  It’s about getting the money to make something important happen.  So I have to suffer a little…..

Every time I go to the Milwaukee County Behavioral Health Division or Children’s Court for a meeting, I am depressed by the grounds before I even get to the building. 

I took this picture this morning at BHD.  The rain had washed off the dusty, deserted look, and it almost looked pastoral and welcoming.   But the fact of the matter is that many parts of county grounds look like ruins.

Like this 70′s era empty pond.

Planters with no flowers.  Weeds.  Very grim.

Public art?  What’s that?

I think elected officials figured that the fastest way to show people that county government was saving money was to stop caring about how things look.  Why do anything more than the bare minimum? Mow the grass and shovel the snow.

I’m not an architect or a landscaper.  I’m just a regular person who goes to these buildings quite a lot and, each time I do, I wonder why it’s so important to someone in charge to remind me of how busted the county is, that no matter how stressed or anxious I might be as a consumer of services in these buildings, I need to button up my hair shirt and quit complaining.

So as I was walking back to my car thinking this thought for about the millionth time, I saw this.

And it really made me smile.

See what I mean?

One of the great blessings of my professional life is that it started out in a frying pan.  I didn’t have a slow ramp-up where everyone at my job spent time training me and helping me get my bearings by giving me insignificant work I couldn’t mess up.  I started at the Social Development Commission and on the first day I was told to write a proposal for Tom Wynn. 

Not the Tom Wynn you see in this picture.  This picture (which I labeled Tom Wynn Nice) sure does look like him.  Because he was handsome and he had a smile that could quiet down a very noisy room.  The Tom Wynn I met on Day One at the Social Development Commission was the head of the National Association of Black Veterans and IVOCC (Interested Veterans of the Central City) and right from the jump, he was mad.  Mad that what he’d asked for was help getting a proposal done and what he got was me.  And mad at me because he assumed (rightly) that I was an ivory tower white girl who was against the Vietnam War and didn’t know anything about Black people.

That’s where our relationship started.  But it got better.  Over the years I did a lot of work for Tom Wynn, wrote a lot of proposals, did research on bad discharges and lack of access to services.  He would be polite and friendly, courtly even, until he sensed resistence or lack of high priority, and then he would let me have it.  And that’s where I learned a) to listen to an angry Black man without running away; and b) hold my own when I knew I was right.

Tom Wynn never really trusted me but he came to trust my skills – I guess that means he respected me.  I certainly respected him.  He was the first person I knew who lived his commitment to a cause every second of every day.  He carried the problems of Black veterans on his back and for a long time did it almost all alone.  He was fierce, that man.  Fierce and insistent and undeterred.

At his retirement party in 2004, when everyone knew that he was dying, people lined up in front of the chair where he was sitting – to shake his hand and have a few words.  When it was my turn, he gave me one of his Africa pins and we both at the same time, said “Thank you.” And he shot me one of those smiles.  Like in the picture.

So — when I drive by 35th and Wisconsin Avenue, I look up at the brand new beautiful 52-unit Thomas H. Wynn, Sr., Veterans Manor for homeless veterans, and I think – what a good, wonderful thing that is.  What a really fine salute to Mr. Wynn.  And I think how lucky I was to have him as my drill instructor.

I can’t imagine actually being a judge.  Every time I read about someone in the paper who is accused of a crime, I start thinking of reasons why he/she should be let off the hook.  I marvel at judges I know who can drop the hammer on a defendent – 10 years, 20 years, life without parole.  I could never do that.  I think I’m an extreme case, though.  A person who overdosed on Joan Baez in my formative years, who can get obsessed with thinking that ‘there but for fortune (or the grace of God) go I.’ 

Judgments about people aren’t just personal — they’re very often professional.  By that, I mean that our judgments about a group of people, say, teen fathers or drug-using moms or high school dropouts or gambling addicts, influences how we respond to them.  If we’re in a position to design programs or organize services, the essence of our judgment is manifest in those programs or services. How much we value people who have the problem we are trying to fix, what we think they are capable of in terms of managing their own lives, how much we blame them for being in the situation that requires our help.

It’s the last thing – the blaming – that surprises me the most.  Over the past year, in my professional life and my volunteer work, I’ve been astonished at the ease with which professional helpers – social workers, therapists, human service workers – seem ok with blaming clients for their situations, even when the clients are children. Acting as if their middle class playbook is the only one on the shelf, they are indignant that their clients aren’t playing by the rules.  Aggravated that phone calls aren’t returned in a timely fashion, convinced that clients lack motivation when they miss appointments, personally offended when clients — with years of addiction or mental illness — suffer a resurgence of their symptoms. 

And this isn’t just about individuals judging — it’s ultimately about how their combined judgemental attitude shapes a program or an organization.  In other words, the judgmentalism becomes embodied in the organizational culture – in everyday interaction, policies, expectations.  All of these things act out what the people in charge think of the people who want help.

But even in this tsk-tsk littered landscape, there are those professional helpers who know how to make it real – who understand people’s situations and can offer paths to recovery that are realistic and attuned to their reality.  Moreover, they know how to help people in a respectful way. I admire those people and strive to be like them. 

But it’s really challenging.  For the past year, I’ve been working on helping someone get their life straight and, in the process, chastising others who have been quick with their judgments and disdain.  I moved ahead like Switzerland – always neutral, just interested in peace and progress.  But I’m feeling my non-judgmental self cracking.  I’m getting tired of excuses, aggravated with the drama, and frustrated with the lack of results.  I feel myself kicking into serious judging but also realize that this is probably where the rubber hits the road, that now is when it really gets tempting to flip open the playbook and point to the right formation.  “Here, play it this way!”

I guess this is what separate what’s easy from what’s hard.  It’s easy and completely understandable to get fed up after an unfruitful year of trying to help someone.  Everyone would understand.  It’s hard to find yet another tack and take another run at it.  To be patient and not judge.  Which is, I guess, what you have to do if you buy into this ‘there but fortune’ business.

My new favorite term is generational error.  Developer Gary Grunau used this phrase to describe Governor Walker’s refusal of $810 million in federal high speed rail funding.  Blowing up downtown hotels that provided housing for hundreds of low-income singles in 1980 is another epic generational error.  The Randolph, Antlers, and Plankinton House provided over a 1,000 units of what would now be known as SRO (Single Room Occupancy) housing.

The downtown hotels offered cheap rooms — $8 a night plus a $2 key deposit in 1974 — coffee shops, a sense of community, access to stores and services in the community (what there were at that time), and independence.  People with disabilities or long-term addictions or family estrangement could just plain live on their own.  It was affordable and available. 

In the place of the downtown hotels, we have the fabulously successful Grand Avenue Mall, a development that has suffered in concept and reality practically since the day it opened.  We have rows upon rows of condos. And a lot of new buildings with the retro look that John Norquist loved so much and that is so reminiscent of of the old residential hotel era.

And we have a lot of homeless people – most of them single adults (76%) – and a large shelter system.  I’m not saying that these two facts are directly linked (well, I guess I am) but it’s an interesting coincidence that the Antlers and Plankintown Hotels were blown up in 1980 and the Guest House Emergency Shelter for Men opened in 1982.

The City of Milwaukee’s decision to acquire and raze the homes of about a thousand poor people was tied to the belief that commercial redevelopment of the downtown was a higher value — that the area’s economic resurgence would benefit the entire City.  Truth be told, it wasn’t just the downtown hotels that interfered with strategy, it was the people who lived in the hotels.  They weren’t good for downtown’s image and so they had to go.  And they did.  But we’re not better off.  We’re worse off. 

The community is scrambling to create truly affordable housing for very low-income people.  We had the opportunity to do that in 1980 when, if we had followed the lead of other cities like New York and Los Angeles, we could have upgraded the residential hotels to be more acceptable neighbors in the revamped downtown.  It could have been done.

That it wasn’t, that these historic buildings were blown up with so little regard for where poor people could afford to live is one massive generational error.  And we’re still paying for it.

This isn’t the first time that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has gone on a star search.  Remember last year’s fawning over Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone?   What was the matter with Milwaukee?  How come we don’t have a Geoffrey Canada?  Why aren’t we having phenomenal success educating low-income, African American kids?  What’s wrong with us?  If the education establishment knew what it was doing, it would replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in Milwaukee.

Now, about a year later, the new subject of adoration is Mario Drummonds, leader of the Northern Manhatten Perinatal Partnership.  Like Mr. Canada, Mr. Drummonds is a charismatic figure whose zeal, commitment and talent organized a blitzkrieg of activities on a single housing project, the 1,500 unit St. Nicholas Houses in Harlem.  (See “Milwaukee infant mortality rate still high, despite years of effort, millions spent,” in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 5/7/11))  http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/121449039.html

Immediately, the conclusion is drawn that if Milwaukee had its act together, our infant mortality rate would plummet.  If Milwaukee would marshal its resources and not have 112 different initiatives working throughout the city (a list which, by the way, seems to include every parenting program, research project, and child development effort in the city in addition to programs specifically addressing infant mortality), then we could beat this problem and get out from under being one of the worse places in the U.S. to be a baby.  In essence, if we could replicate Mario Drummonds’ program in Milwaukee, we’d have it made.

It doesn’t work like that, folks.

Because it’s not about Mario Drummonds’ program.  It’s about Mario Drummonds.  Just like it’s not about the Harlem Children’s Zone.  It’s about Geoffrey Canada. Each of these men is what is called a Monomaniac on a Mission (MOM), a very technical term for the one person who is willing to move heaven and earth to achieve something and can convince other people to leave their cars running in the street to come and help.

There are a million things that are different about the places where Mr. Drummonds and Mr. Canada developed their projects.  History, politics, access to wealth, receptiveness to innovation, diversity, and culture of challenge and confrontation are some of the elements to be considered.  Their programs were shaped by the environment, by opportunities that were presented, and by their own personal ability to convince others to invest substantial resources — millions of dollars — in achieving the desired results.

Rather than blaming the hundred small, shoestring agencies that are trying to help young parents do a better job, maybe we ought to look at what kind of environment Milwaukee provides for budding MOMs.  When one comes along, do we listen or tell him/her to sit down and wait their turn?  Do we get behind big dreams or resent them?  Embrace vision or write it off as tilting at windmills?  Do we recognize community anger and frustration as the growing power of change or run away from it?

Like 99% of things in the world, “it’s complicated.”  Replication of programs from other cities rarely works unless virtually all of the environmental features are the same.  The adult drug court model is an example of a very successful replication process throughout the country.  Programs that have been shaped and developed around a single personality usually fall flat.  It’s not a committee that makes those innovations work, it’s one absolutely electric person at the center.

We’ve got those live wires in Milwaukee.  We really do.  Time to let them loose and see what they can do.

It’s not even noon on Monday yet and this is my mental imagery.  My mother would say I am wound as ‘tight as a $2 watch” so I tried to find clip art of such a watch but it was stressing me out so I settled for the knot.

I pride myself on being able to work through a great deal of stress.  This comes from years of practice of juggling a lot of different projects at once and having a fairly interesting personal life.  But there are times when one really does just become totally discombobulated – a cutesy word like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious – which actually means to become unhinged.  Because complaining about being unhinged is likely to scare off clients, consultants use cute words like multi-tasking and juggling. 

Let’s be frank.  There are days when the harmonic convergence works in reverse.  When the dog has a seizure, child care falls through, a colleague gets annoyed, your project is late and there’s crap on your shirt.  (I just noticed that last one.)

I can remember being so stressed out that even though I had lit cigarettes burning in two different ashtrays, I picked up a pencil to smoke.  (This is a long time ago in the good old days when I smoked.)

All of this is by way of saying — man, sometimes it is really hard to focus on work.  This morning was one of those days.  Of course, I decided to add to the stress by deciding I needed to finish this blog by noon. 

The key to me is all about making a list and working the list.  Sometimes, I even make a little sticky sign that tells me “Work the list.”  What relieves my stress most of all is getting things done and knowing that even though there might be a lot of chaos and debris being flung around in my life, that I can produce what I’ve promised.

So that’s what I tell people who are flustered or stalled or paralyzed by their stress.  Make a list.  And work it.

Everyone has a hometown.  Sinbad’s is Benton Harbor, Michigan, a town that was recently taken over by the State of Michigan.  This morning, the Emergency Financial Manager tossed out members of the city’s Brownfield Redevelopment Authority and its Planning Commission and replaced them with new people.  This, after he basically ended local government on Friday by telling the City Commission it was free to continue to have meetings but not to conduct any city business. The city’s governance – not just its financial situation – is now in the hands of a person appointed by Michigan’s governor.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Detroit, Dave Bing, feeling Lansing’s hot breath on his neck, is trying to game the new state takeover system by seeking authority to act as an Emergency Financial Manager would – the equivalent of aggressively policing your own party so the real cops won’t show up.

I have pretty strong feelings about all this.  Starting off, I am attached to all things Michigan.  I was born in Michigan and did a little bit of a life tour of its great cities — Hudson, Hastings, Detroit, Mt. Pleasant, East Lansing, and Flint.  Like many people in the 70′s, I couldn’t wait to get out of Flint – a grimy, hard, tough as nuts city that was falling in on itself as a result of the slow, bloody death of the auto industry – and flee to Milwaukee, which at the time, seemed like the garden city of the universe.  The phrase– will the last person to leave Michigan, please turn off the light — was more serious instruction than joke.

That Michigan is hurting isn’t news.  What is news is the state’s decision to colonize one of its cities.  Because this is what this is.  The State of Michigan is essentially occupying Benton Harbor, suspending local government, and installing the equivalent of a colonial governor.  One could argue that the situation in Benton Harbor calls for drastic action and that financial mismanagement, terrible city services, and a host of other screw-ups warrant takeover by a little army of government technocrats.  The 11,000 people of Benton Harbor deserve a government that protects them from crime, saves them from fires, and keeps them safe from disease.  Absolutely. 

But I think there are other factors to consider.  First, there is the heart-stopping racial disparity evidenced by Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, its twin city, located just across the Paw Paw River.  Here’s all one needs to know on this front:  Benton Harbor’s population is 92% African American and its median household income is $17,471.  St. Joseph (wave hello across the river) is 90% white and has a median household income of $37,032.  Does anything else need to be said here?

Second, there’s that democracy thing.  For better or worse, the people of Benton Harbor elected their government.  They are free to recall their elected officials or to run against them in the next election.  They’re free to go to city commission meetings and raise hell.  Free to organize neighborhoods and community groups to protest.  They’re also free to ask for help, seek outside expertise, and engage in reform.  Or, should I say, they WERE free.

Sinbad is a smart, successful guy.  He grew up in Benton Harbor, went to high school there, went on to play ball at the University of Denver.  He’s a person of substance.  He’s not the only such person to have come out of Benton Harbor.  There are people there who know what they’re doing.  They’re not children.  They’re grown.  They’re taxpaying citizens.  They have the right to run their own damn town.  For better or worse.