In one of the focus groups that I conducted with consumers at a community mental health center a few weeks ago, a client referred to her prior career as a product engineer in offering her assessment of the greatest problem in social policy development today:
“When I was an engineer, I had to go down to the factory floor, to actually see how my designs were working, and the problems that people were having on the machines. I learned a lot there, that changed how I designed, and I kept those workers in my mind when I was at my computer. I wish that the politicians had to see how their policies are actually working, on the ‘factory floor’, and that they would keep that in mind when they’re designing laws, too.”
Pretty compelling, no?
And I had that testimony in mind recently, when I sat down with a group of staff members who work with individuals experiencing homelessness. I was going to facilitate a focus group trying to help prioritize the advocacy agenda for the organization; I think of it like a funnel, with the organizational leaders needing help figuring out which of the items added to the top of the funnel should emerge at the end.
And, before I got started, several of the staff members were talking about how they routinely give clients money from their own pockets to wash their clothes, in part because of fear of a bedbug infestation, otherwise.
And it occurred to me, then and especially in many moments since, how far my professional life is now removed, in some ways, from the strains and sorrows of direct practice.
I don’t have to use my own money to buy clients toilet paper or shower curtains anymore.
No one calls me, crying, at 2am, having just found out her husband was detained by ICE.
I haven’t had to call the police on anyone in years, and I don’t usually work on Sundays anymore.
When I set out to work in the morning, I have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen that day, and a ‘bad’ day doesn’t include attempted suicides or evictions or tragic deaths.
All of this makes me committed to trying to ensure that what I bring to the organizations–and the staff–with which I work adds real value, and is rooted in their actual experiences.
I have been there, at least in parallel worlds at different times, and I know that I have knowledge and skills that can provide new context for their work, equip them with some additional tools, and connect them to resources.
And, yet, I leave these conversations, always, struck by how very insignificant my contributions feel, compared to the forces against which we are arrayed, and in light of the battles they wage on the front lines every day.
Because I care, about the divide in our profession between macro and micro, about the inanities of public policy when felt in practice, and about the strains that are placed on staff we expect to be capable of miracles. And I know that I can’t make real progress there if I’m too comfortable.
Yes, I believe in social change on a big scale, and I think that my talents are particularly well-suited for systems reform.
And, yet, I’m not sure that I understand well enough anymore.
Maybe it’s time for me to get back to the factory floor, at least in some more sustained ways, to be sure that my designs–for organizational effectiveness and advocacy engagement and policy impact–match the realities of production.
We have to start by claiming our failures
There is growing recognition, I think, of the importance of owning our failures—in advocacy and in life—so that we can learn from failings (ours, which is a sort of eternal life lesson, and, increasingly, those of others, too, through shared learning opportunities that have taken some of the ‘sting’ out of failure). We should celebrate the liberating power of being comfortable with failure, of even rushing to it, in pursuit of the victories that we know can and often do follow in its wake.
Certainly nonprofit advocates are not immune from this imperative to acknowledge, analyze, and even disseminate our failures; we can do more, certainly, through the deployment of systematic advocacy evaluation efforts, but I see a trend of reducing stigma around failure, and it’s one that I think will benefit us in the future.
But there’s an extension of this idea that is harder, I believe, for nonprofit advocates to embrace. It’s even more central to our advocacy success. And we’ve got to put it out there together, because it’s too much to ask any one organization, or even any one sector, to go out on a limb.
So here it is.
To fully transform our nonprofit social service organizations into effective advocacy forces, and to make the strongest case possible for the policy changes that those we serve so desperately need, we have to admit the truth:
Our services, our programs, our intense direct services, are failing.
Yes, I know; that sounds brutal.
And of course I don’t mean that there isn’t tremendous value in what nonprofit social service organizations do every day—feeding people who are hungry, mentoring kids at risk, helping people free themselves from addictions, training people for better-paying jobs. There obviously is.
That work meets people where they are, provides hope, helps people survive to fight the larger structures that create and perpetuate need. It is noble work, and it lifts my own soul and has the potential to transform individual lives.
But, measured against the scope and scale of the problems we face, it’s failing.
We’re working smarter, and working harder, and bringing more and more bright and talented individuals around to the ‘social sector’, and yet we haven’t moved the needle on very many of the most critical challenges that face our world. And the answer isn’t more services, or even more money for those services.
It’s changing the systems that create the problems in the first place. It’s addressing the root causes that make poverty and oppression and tragedy routine and predictable and crushingly continual. It’s removing the fuel instead of always putting out fires.
And it means that we have to acknowledge that, on its own, our services aren’t going to win the day. Which is a tough lift for nonprofit organizations that are, now more than ever (and not unrelated, obviously, to these structural issues) competing with each other for funding and trying to prove to donors that they have the answer. We absolutely should be measuring the impact of our services, because they’re certainly not all created equal. And goals of program accountability are not at all incompatible with this larger need to give up the charade of adequacy—we have to stop pretending that we can ever program our way to justice.
We have to stop for ourselves, because there’s no easier way to drive oneself crazy within a social service system. We have to stop for our clients, because how disempowering is it to think that you must be the only one whose problems aren’t being eradicated by this excellent case management or fantastic after-school program.
And we have to stop for our public policies, because we can’t be our best advocates if we’re simultaneously trying to convince policymakers that we’ve got everything taken care of.
I think we can start small, really. What if, in our annual reports where we highlight our programmatic successes, we included a column dedicated to the policy changes that would make next year’s annual report radically different? What if we added language about “ending homelessness” or “eliminating racism” to our mission statements, the way some organizations have done? What if we added “but our services can’t solve all these problems” to our agency brochures, or added an appeal to advocacy in every volunteer orientation?
It won’t be easy, but we can win.
We just have to first acknowledge that we’re losing.
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary
Tagged advocacy, direct practice, nonprofit organizations, radical practice, social change