What they said...

I’ve spent the last few weeks buried in the U.S. Census Bureau’s new website, trying not to be paralyzed by the fact that the poverty statistics represent, of course, actual people who are poor.

A lot of them.

There isn’t anything truly surprising in the new data; poverty has gotten worse–dramatically so, in some cases–with people of color and children, particularly those in single female-headed households, especially vulnerable.

So, for me, reviewing these figures is not so much about gaining new insights, but about seizing an opportunity to focus our attention, once more, where it belongs–on how terribly our public policies are failing to effectively combat the scourge of poverty.

Because we’re failing not in explicable or unpredictable ways; we’re failing with tragic routine, reflecting much more a failing of political will than of technical ability.

And our failure is increasingly dangerous, as the numbers of people in poverty grow, and as we learn more about the lifelong effects of being poor.

Here’s what we know about poverty in my state in 2011. Now, what should we do about it?

• Between 2009 and 2010, 20,000 more Kansans were added to the poverty ranks, and the percentage of those living in poverty rose to 14.3%. Kansans of color were disproportionately represented among the poor, with 28.6% of African Americans, 29.7% of American Indians, and 25.4% of Latinos living below the official poverty line.
• Children are especially suffering in the current economic picture; nationally, 22% of children were in poverty in 2010. In Kansas, an alarming 23.7% of children under age 18 were poor in 2010, up from 18% in 2009 , a devastating decline in the fortunes of our state’s youngest and most vulnerable.
• The poverty rate “gap”, then, between older adults (65+) and children has grown. In 2010, only 7.7% of Kansas seniors were poor. This is a triumph of the social policy innovation we know now as Social Security retirement; without Social Security, the percentage of Kansas seniors living in poverty would rise to more than 40%.
• Work is no longer a guaranteed path to economic security. In 2010, real median household income in Kansas was $46,229, almost 5% lower than Kansas’ 2007, pre-recession median ($48,497). 27.8% of single female-headed households with children under age 18 had a householder who worked and yet, still, the family fell into poverty . In 12% of cases, these mothers were working year-round, full-time without being able to pull their families from poverty status, testament to the strains of low-wage labor and the difficult economics facing single parents raising children, particularly when they also experience the wage discrimination that still plagues female employment.
• Our current poverty measure’s woeful inadequacy makes these statistics all the more alarming; if we used a more realistic threshold (such as those used to determine eligibility for means-tested programs–usually more like 125% of poverty), for example, more than 45% of single female headed-households would have been poor in Kansas in 2010. Similarly, if we accurately defined and measured unemployment (as in, people who wish they were working but aren’t, instead of only those not so discouraged that they haven’t given up or involuntarily taken a part-time job instead), our unemployment rate would hover around 12%–frighteningly high.
• Appallingly, poverty in Kansas seems to be increasingly more rapidly than in other parts of the country, despite a job market that, in some ways, has not been ravaged as severely as that of other regions. While our overall poverty rate was slightly lower than the national figure, Kansas saw higher rates of child poverty and poverty in single female-headed households in 2010, and higher rates of growth between 2009-2010 in several categories.

We shouldn’t need new statistics to remind us that poverty is a dire and growing threat to community and individual well-being. We don’t need statistics to connect the dots about those we see living in homelessness, or our own coworkers’ concerns about their mortgage payments, or, even, our own fears about the precarious nature of our employment.

But we can, and, indeed, we must, use the release of these new data on poverty and its shadow–the economic insecurity that is nearly ubiquitous in today’s economy–to dedicate ourselves anew to developing public policy structures and investments that harness our considerable powers to improve people’s lives, individually and in the aggregate.

Because when the next set of poverty data is released, I want some surprises.

But, people.

Put yourself in my shoes.

This thing rocks.

The Nonprofit Policy Forum is a pretty new journal, which, in today’s age of the declining significance of print media, is fairly significant itself.

And its content is all available online, which is huge in the world of the peer-reviewed, since my former students find themselves abruptly excluded from academic literature as soon as their access to the university’s considerable subscription library expires.

AND, it focuses on policy process and content, and how both affect and are affected by the nonprofit sector. In other words, giving greater official legitimacy to the study and practice of advocacy and policy change, by nonprofit organizations, as well as discussing emerging policy trends that impact how nonprofits operate.

So, now you understand.

In the first issue, which is the only journal I can remember ever reading in its entirety, is an article reporting that putting clients (here, “constituents”) on a nonprofit Board of Directors and increasing their participation in strategic decision-making significantly increases the intensity of the organization’s advocacy, just as receipt of government and foundation grants tends to decrease it.

In other words: what we know to be true about the countervailing pressures that weigh on nonprofit organizations in the advocacy arena, confirmed empirically and actually citable. Oh, happy day!

There’s also an interview with Ambassador Andrew Young, specifically discussing the effectiveness (and limitations thereof) nonprofit organizations in shaping policy and a conceptual paper outlining how foundations can approach their philanthropy with an eye towards transformation and systems change. And an article introducing the challenges related to the emergence of social businesses has particular relevance for social workers, who can struggle at times to find ways to practice ethically and effectively in these newer organizational models.

I’m never one to pretend that academic journals make the world go ’round. Perhaps that’s part of why I’m so hard-pressed to find the time to submit to them?

But, when sometimes I feel very much like an outlier in the world of academia, given my particular areas of interest, it is very affirming to find communities of like-minded souls, and to be able to turn to their ideas on which to build my own. The way that scholarship is supposed to work.

Here’s to happy reading (and citing)!

But I’m committed to making sure that my consulting practice is way more about meeting the needs of the organizations and communities I serve than it is about satisfying my own intellectual curiosities. So I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this process really work for the organizations and their constituencies, and I’ve been reflecting over the past few weeks about what I’ve learned, and about what lessons those experiences might hold for others undertaking community needs assessments. Unless your history with needs assessments has been much different than mine, you’ve seen how they can sometimes be exercises in futility–things we have to do because some grant requires them, or things we do because we’re not sure where else to start, but things that end up being a whole lot of input and not much in terms of insight.

And we were intent on avoiding that.

It’s certainly too soon to tell exactly how successful we’ve been, really. The true test of the impact of this or any research endeavor will be in how people change what they do to respond to what they now know, and, while we’re seeing some evidence of that, the real measure will be over the next few years. But I think it has been a better-than-average effort that avoided some of the common mistakes. Here’s my list of what made some difference:

But when it comes to seeking guideposts for our own work, deciding on policy priorities, allocating scarce resources, and determining the extent to which we’re reaching our goals, good statistics can be much more helpful than anecdotes (which, as powerful as they are, are really, really bad bases for policymaking–I found that out the hard way when I gave legislative testimony that included the story of a legally-present immigrant student who was still ineligible for instate tuition, and then the legislature wanted to amend the bill to only cover kids like him, which would have excluded the VAST majority of students who were targets of the measure).

So what that means is that, while we must personalize our claims to social justice, in ways that compel right action, we also must be comfortable and skilled enough with statistics to keep those very compelling stories from leading us astray.

An example from Super Freakonomics (I’m kind of getting hooked on these guys), and one from my consulting work, illustrate this, probably better than I have so far.

The example from the freak-economists is truly crazy: apparently, an intoxicated walker is eight times more likely to die than an intoxicated driver. The authors certainly don’t suggest that the work of anti-drunk driving advocates has been in vain, but they do use data to convincingly redirect our attention to the dangers caused by excessive consumption of alcohol, period, not just the preoccupation with drunk driving. They point to other, less surprising, clashes between data and story–the high-profile death of a young boy from a shark attack, for example, when only 4 people are killed, worldwide, on average, by sharks each year.

Here’s how they state what I’ve been trying to, about why statistics still matter, even in this digital storytelling age:

“While there are exceptions to every rule, it’s also good to know the rule. In a complex word where people can be atypical in an infinite number of ways, there is great value in discovering the baseline. And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking–our daily decisions, our laws, our governance–on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality” (p. 14).

Which brings me to my consulting work, where I’ve been working with some anti-poverty agencies around assessing needs in their community. One of the realities that is quickly apparent is that, many times, perceived needs diverge from actual needs, such that figuring out what actual needs really are (because, when we’re talking about the willingness of powerful entities to recognize and address them, perception matters so much) becomes very difficult.

An example of this was the discussion in two communities about teenage pregnancy. In one area, teenage pregnancy featured prominently in key informants’ assertions about priority needs in the community and yet barely registered in the actual data about births to teenage mothers. Clearly, there was some reason that these different entities kept pointing to teenage pregnancy as an “alarming trend” (in the words of one respondent) when there was no trend that we could find, nor much cause for alarm. I’m not sure what all was driving that, but what is certain is that, if the community diverts resources from other efforts towards preventing teenage pregnancy, there may very well be an uptick in the incidence of those other social problems, some of which (in this community, lack of access to affordable, quality childcare, for example) may be, in any absolute terms, far more problematic.

In the other community, as you might guess, the opposite dynamic is playing out. Despite staff at the agency recognizing that teenage pregnancy is nearly epidemic, and despite statistics that show that fully 50% of young women ages 13-19 have given birth, hardly anyone talked about teenage pregnancy or related issues in the needs assessment process. Here is an example of a community that must confront its statistics in order to have half a chance at effectively solving the problem.

So, tell your stories, absolutely. Appeal to values, and connect with people’s hearts.

But when you sit down to check yourself, make sure that you can find, understand, and face what those not-irrelevant averages are telling you, too.

Map of Ex-Offender Employment Options, from www.spatialinformationdesignlab.org

So it’s been established that I am very spatially challenged. Still true. My oldest son spends practically the entire time that we’re at our local petting zoo just looking at the map that shows the place, and he calls from his carseat in the back of our van, “Mommy, why are we turning around again?” whenever Mommy is trying to go to a new place.

And he’s only three. Sigh.

But, I can certainly appreciate a great map, and how this kind of visual presentation can help people to connect with data in new ways, and, most importantly, expose new patterns and new insights that can transform what we do with data, too.

That’s why I’m so excited about NonprofitMapping. It’s a project that is collecting data about the impact of the current recession on the nonprofit landscape across the country, and, interestingly, actually rating states based on the quality of their information about the nonprofit sector. When states can see themselves on a map as being deficient in what they collect and disseminate about the existence (and, hopefully, soon, the effectiveness) of nonprofits in their state, it should lead to a more systematic examination of the sector, that can only serve our interests of better defining our value and articulating our impact. I don’t totally agree with the premise that the loss of nonprofits in a given area is necessarily a bad thing, and I even have hope that some of the reduction in numbers of nonprofits during this recession is a sign that less-effective ones are fading away and that good programs are finding ways to consolidate and grow to scale, but I am completely on board with their open-source strategy and ambitious goal of changing how we think about and look at nonprofit organizations nationwide. For social work advocates, who have such compelling stories to tell and, increasingly, even good data at our fingertips, the next challenge is to figure out how to tell those stories in powerful and visual ways, in order to resonate with today’s audience.

One of my favorite parts about NonprofitMapping, then, is not even their own work but their “blog roll”, of sorts, where they list other awesome mapping projects, like the Justice Mapping Center (criminal justice and policy information), and the completely awesome Map4Change (‘discover’ injustice by looking at maps like this one, and then click on their site to take action and find groups of others concerned about the same issues!!!).

The folks at MapTogether will definitely be hearing from me–they provide free map-related training and tools for nonprofit and community groups. They have a free guide to GIS and online mapping tools that even I can understand. They’re also working to make maps more accessible, including braille and audio features.

In today’s crowded information environment, social justice advocates need every advantage to help our appeals receive the attention they deserve. This is especially true in the context of the transparency movement, which will (assuming it succeeds) increase the amount of information available and increase, therefore, the importance of finding ways to make sense of the data. We may never be into orienteering like my husband and son, but we can rely on these outstanding partners to help us better use the rapidly-evolving tools at our disposable to, pardon the pun, put our issues on the map.

And, while you’re at it, there’s this neighborhood where my son’s friend lives that I ALWAYS get lost in…

We hear it all the time, right? From grantmakers and politicians and our own executive directors: Thou Shalt Not Duplicate Services.

It’s one of those things that, on its face, seems like the most reasonable prohibition in the world. We have limited resources and so many problems, so why in the world would we want to duplicate what someone else is already doing?

Some of my thinking about organizational effectiveness and how we measure social work impact has got me thinking about this in a new way, though.

Because, the truth is, there are many social problems where we’re really not making much progress. Whoever is occupying that field, so to speak, could apparently use some help figuring out the best way to attack the problem. Who’s to say that they’re not the wrong people to solve it (even if they did get there first), and that your approach might not be better?

At its core, I think a lot of the concern with duplication of services is that we’re still, too often, measuring “services”, rather than impact. And if your only deliverable is “an after-school program” rather than “increasing literacy rates among adolescent males” or something more, well, real, like that, then of course it’s going to be concerning to see several different programs all offering after-school programs, because it would arguably be more cost-efficient to centralize those resources.

But, in that scenario, the problem is with what we’re tracking (and not), not with the duplication itself. After all, if literacy rates are still lower than they should be, a funder or other interested party would be hard-pressed to argue that your organization couldn’t work on that social problem because “it’s already being taken care of.” It’s not.

But how do we make the case for innovative approaches to social problems, when there’s this preoccupation with avoiding what looks like duplication?

The key, I think, is to address the problem at its core: doing a better job of articulating the value we bring to the social endeavor, instead of talking about our outputs because it’s what we have figured out how to measure.

The book, the Wisdom of Crowds, talks about this in a roundabout way, providing evidence that multiple actors (most often in the scientific arena) conducting parallel experiments on the same problems, leads to richer understanding of the questions at hand and far greater confidence in the results. To achieve those gains, of course, we’ve got to be rigorously evaluating our interventions, demonstrating their impact against the baseline of the social problem, and making those results available to others committed to the same outcomes, so that we can learn from and adopt the best interventions.

But those are things that we should be doing for our own understanding, anyway, so that we’re sure that we’re headed in the right direction and likely to reach our destination. And, if that’s the case, then I think we’ll be able to make the case to the “no duplication” crowd that, after all, there’s an advantage in having traveling companions.

What do you think? Would such a shift away from the “no duplication under any circumstances” policy siphon off valuable resources? Is there too little overlap between the hard sciences and what we do in social work for these parallels to be useful? What have been your experiences with best practices work and outcomes research in social services? Funders, how would you respond to an organization making a case like this?

Think about it. As the article points out, there is a literal abundance of data available today, and, in fact, there are often too many data points for people to really make sense of, which can (and, unfortunately is) sometimes result in a gut reaction that spurns all logic and makes decisions instead from an ideological, even anachronistically anti-factual basis. For social workers, what this sometimes means is that, because we don’t understand statistics as well as we should (or just don’t trust our own understandings), we either attempt to make our cases entirely based on emotional appeal or fall victim to others’ flawed or deliberately misleading analyses.

Both are real dangers to our credibility and efficacy and, more importantly, to the quality of advocacy work we can do on behalf of those we serve.

We do our best advocacy when we can collect good information on the social problems we aim to solve and the strengths that our constituencies bring to those endeavors; analyze those masses of data in ways that value human realities; and help decisionmakers to use the data to make good social policy decisions.

I don’t know if it will ultimately be as revolutionary as the legendary, ‘plastic’, but emerging social workers would certainly be well-served by turning some of their intellectual energies to statistical analysis. That means that we social work educators have to find creative, engaging, relevant, accessible ways to communicate statistical expertise to students. Given how many of my students say (only half-jokingly, I think) that their dislike of math was part of what drove them to social work, I recognize that this won’t be easy, but important things seldom are.

It was 2001 when we first started, and there was quite an appetite for local information to supplement the Census data just beginning to trickle out. The Census had confirmed what Richard had observed in his own neighborhood–the Latino population increased dramatically in the Kansas City area between 1990-2000, and Latinos were also moving into new parts of the community, especially in the suburbs. In 2001, as today, then, the Latino ‘community’ in the area was far from homogenous, with very new immigrants, long-time native-born U.S. citizens or multi-generational U.S. residents, and everyone in between. Our research agenda came from a desire to better understand those we were serving, especially to prioritize our services as we often felt pulled in many directions, and also to define a niche for our organization in providing high-quality, relevant, recent information about a growing and rapidly-changing demographic. I knew, though, that I wanted to do this research a bit differently than might be expected; I wanted the participants to have a real part to play, and I wanted some commitment that we would act on the findings in a meaningful way.

Below, I sketch the process that we went through to conduct our research, as an example. This research has also been published in a few places, most completely in an article in Families and Society in 2008. Tomorrow, I’ll include links to the original survey instrument from the 2006 study as well as the report that came from it, along with lessons learned.

If your organization is considering a research project to better understand your client population or another facet of your work, where are you in this process? What resources do you need to get started? How can you ensure that your research participants will have a real voice in the project as it unfolds? What do you really want to know? How will you give people control over their own data/stories? I would love to take a look at your research instruments, help you think through data collection techniques, and brainstorm ways to creatively disseminate the information. It is definitely a significant undertaking to do research this way and to do it well, but it was also one of the most meaningful parts of my work, and one of the most lasting legacies.

El Centro, Inc.’ Survey Process:
In June every year, we would begin to draft the survey. The first year, that was a wild process–everyone from Board members to clients to staff to donors to volunteers had questions that they wanted to be included, and it was a lot of work to trim it down. In subsequent years, we worked with the previous survey as a starting point, cutting out questions that had yielded little helpful information, adding questions to help us make sense of ambiguous results from last year, and taking the document back to our administration, client leadership, and direct-line personnel. We also tested the survey with a representative group of respondents, often before or after an ESL class, to address problematic wording and change any questions that were confusing. Then, the copying began. To have a better sense of diversity among our clients, we color-coded the surveys, using a different color of paper for each El Centro, Inc. program and each external survey site.

The survey administration started in August and ran through the end of September. The first year, I think that we only surveyed about 200 people, but after that, our goal was always around 900 respondents. The bulk of our respondents were surveyed at El Centro or partner agencies, but, in an effort to understand if service recipients were in significant ways different from those not connected to agencies, we also surveyed people at some community locations. This took A LOT of time. Because we wanted to be available to survey respondents as they filled out the survey (because they might have questions sparked as a result of filling it out), someone was present while they completed it. Onsite, that wasn’t too hard; we included it in the intake process, as it only took about 20 minutes to complete, the time that clients would often wait, as drop-ins, to see a case manager. At churches or community gatherings or other locations, though, this meant an organizer (usually me) had to go, explain the process, request participation, and stay while people completed it. It was a great opportunity to talk about our organization, though, get people interested in our work, and probably bring in some new clients (although we could never be sure, because the survey was anonymous). I trained our front-line staff, as well as staff at our partner organizations, in survey administration; this required going through the survey with them to address questions and explaining the confidentiality procedure (including what to do with surveys before I came to collect them).

The data coding and entry started in earnest in October. We did all of the entry in SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). I did most of it myself, honestly, because it required someone fluent in English and Spanish (data all in Spanish, but entry in English) and also proficient in data coding. We used SPSS both because I was familiar with it and because we could use it for free at the local university; purchasing it would have been prohibitively expensive.

When the data entry was complete, the analysis began. This meant not only conducting the actual statistical tests (both descriptive and inferential) but also researching the context of the data, including what parameters looked like in other regions and how these respondents compared to non-Latinos. This was really important to us, because we wanted to be able to help interpret the data for our survey respondents and our audiences.

We produced three main products from this research and analysis: a full survey report (linked below for 2006), a Powerpoint Presentation that summarized the main findings, and a Spanish-language presentation that included not only the most significant findings but also additional questions that were sparked by the results. We made the report available on our website and also shared it electronically (and, in a few select cases, primarily for donors and policymakers) with allies and other targets. It was also used quite extensively by students, organizations preparing projects and grants for work in the Latino community, and even by policymakers directly (we had some great victories when politicians cited the report in debates or other proceedings). The Powerpoint presentation was presented, especially in the early years, to any group who had an interest in learning more about our community; the main audiences were law enforcement, educators, faith groups, civic organizations, and other social service agencies. In 2005, 2006, and 2007, we generated some earned revenue from presentations to stakeholders in January, charging $5/person or $25/agency to those interested in learning more about our research and results.

Where I think our process was particularly different is the way in which we made sure to ‘close the loop’ with presentations to survey respondents, in multiple venues, throughout the month of November. We asked for their help in interpreting some of the data, paid respondents to participate in more in-depth focus groups, and, really, began the process here of thinking about changes for the next year’s research.

Tomorrow (in a MUCH shorter post), I’ll include some of our lessons learned and the links to the documents produced, as examples. Please let me know if you have questions!