Distinguish programs from people who run them

Distinguish programs from people who run them
by Rodolpho Carrasco
Saturday, February 26, 2000
San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group
[ Rodolpho Carrasco is associate director of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena. Email him at rudy@qvo.cc

A number of years back, I was part of an effort to launch a national magazine out of Northwest Pasadena called Urban Family.

The team members agreed that we wanted our publication to do something about men who stood on street corners in the middle of the day. Our desire was to see these men transition into full-time work and away from crime and the drug trade. Our funders talked excitedly about getting this magazine into the hands of those men.

As time wore on, the obvious became painfully so. Thousands took quickly to Urban Family (i.e. put up money for yearly subscriptions), but not these men.

At best, our magazine ended up reaching those individuals and organizations who were interfacing with these men on a regular basis.

Missing the mark. Our magazine accomplished a lot. We helped educate Americans by suggesting effective social service methods. People today still approach me about that now-dormant publication.

Indirectly, we reached thousands of men standing on street corners. But, as to our stated goal of a magazine directly impacting these men, we missed our mark.

Public and private programs miss the mark all the time. Only the most spectacular misses make it onto television news or into the newspaper, usually because they involve some distasteful use of funds (do New Era Philanthropy, the past president of the United Way, and Baptist Foundation of Arizona ring a bell?)

A pattern follows. Individuals are blamed, the governing institution gets it next, but then someone widens the scope of blame to include Republicans, Democrats, The Government, The Church, The Right, The Left, and others. We all vigorously agree that something needs to change because something went wrong.

But there is another type of missing the mark. Programs often miss the mark because they are imperfect. One might say that this is not much cause for alarm. After all, we are all human, no program is perfect, all we can do is try our best.

This is true. But just because we were well-intentioned and gave it the old college try does not erase the fact that we missed the mark.

In the private foundation world, there is much fanfare about creative innovations and ground-breaking collaborations, funded by a particular foundation, that are meeting great quantities of needs.

One might think that all big money, foundation initiatives are booming successes. But foundations fail like the rest of us.

I remember a foundation that invested gobs of cash into small business loans in low-income areas. At the end of the program cycle there was a 100% loan default rate. On top of that, the small businesses that defaulted pointed the finger at the Foundation's loan policies, saying the Foundation was the ultimate reason for the initiative's demise. You better believe this foundation and its officers learned a quick, sure lesson about how to manage - or not manage - similar initiatives in the future.

Programs are good, planning is good, organizing is good, all sorts of collective action can amount to much good. But whether from vice or mere humanity, programs are imperfect.

The real engine of success is the self-sacrificing investment of a caring individual.

A few years back, Derek Perkins, Harambee Center's executive director, and I were persuaded to visit an innovative collaboration of social services in the Sacramento area. A deep-pocketed foundation invited us to witness a miracle in Sacramento, where government expenditures had been lowered while total service output had increased. (In plain English: less taxpayer money served more people.)

This foundation hoped that we at Harambee would be interested in bringing a similar initiative to our part of town.

We sat in a sparsely decorated room inside a community center as a coalition gathered, then presented their programs in front of the attendees. There was particular pride in one woman who ran a soup kitchen and had recently been featured in TIME magazine.

The problem was that this woman had been running the soup kitchen before the coalition existed and would likely keep running it long after the coalition disbanded (as coalitions inevitably do).

Derek and I talked to her afterward. Her motivation was her faith. She believed God had called her to run her kitchen for the needy. She felt out of place in the coalition because she wasn't able to call out her Deity's name in coalition meetings as often as she did in the rest of her life.

But coalition or not, she was going to serve some food to some hungry people.

Back in Brooklyn, my in-laws are part of East Family, an extended group of families and friends who came together in the late 1960s around the Black Consciousness movement.

Since then, they have served the community in umpteen ways, sometimes as part of massive programs and coalitions, and often as family and friends. No matter who is in office, or whether they have funding, or whether there is a formal program, East Family members work to improve the lives of people in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Let's not confuse the true source of social service. Committed individuals drive programs, give money, even serve as program watchdogs. Programs and initiatives - as well-intentioned, well-planned, and well-executed as they may be - are only as good as the people who run them.

The copyright for these materials are owned by Rudy Carrasco.  These materials were used with permission by TechMission