 |
Your
roadmap to renewing communities
|
 |
|
 |
 |
||
|
A Memo to President George W. Bush Feb. 5, 2001 Your finest words as President have been the paean of praise you have given to compassion in America. Faith-based groups are indeed doing vibrant, life-changing work in America's communities, walking into gang-infested neighborhoods to broker truces, transforming prisoners, helping families transition off welfare, and mentoring at-risk children. These armies of compassion are renewing entire sections of cities, building and repairing homes, imparting job skills, adopting foster children, and caring for the sick and dying. Your new White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is a welcome initiative. There are several things your administration can do, and several it should not. My advice comes from several years on the front lines working with faith-based groups throughout the country. My admonitions come from the pain of experience. The most important thing you can do is create a climate
within which these private, faith-based organizations can flourish.
Focus on finding the faith-based groups that have a demonstrable track-record in changing human lives, not just distributing commodities. Empowering people to leave dependency is much more compassionate than perpetuating life-destroying habits. It is also much harder. Be aware that while most groups say their greatest need is money, in fact what many need even more is a solid strategic plan, standards of accountability, and training for personnel to handle the business side of running a non-profit. What leaders of many faith-based groups desperately need is management training, although they don't know this. Be aware that not everyone who says "Lord, Lord"
is actually doing the Lord's work. There are wonderful people of integrity
doing sacrificial work with love and fervor. And out there are also
charlatans, egotists, con artists, and people as dysfunctional as the
population they are trying to serve. We need to be clear-eyed in determining
whose work is legitimate. You can't sort that out from Washington. You can't even sort that out from the state capitols. People on the ground in each city are the only ones with enough information to know what's effective at the grassroots level. They know who has integrity, and who has a proven track record. The groups that write a terrific proposal are not necessarily the ones doing terrific work. Startups are more likely to fail than not. Groups change rapidly, depending on the arrival and departure of personnel, solvency issues, and a host of fluctuating factors. You need information from people with their finger directly on the pulse. Think strategically. What is needed is a city-by-city strategy to identify effective grassroots efforts, and systematically build their capacity and competence. Giving groups direct operating funds may give them a short-lived boost. But a better choice would be to invest in training to make these groups capable of standing as solid, sustainable non-profits. This will empower them to stay, even when administrations change, which inevitably they will. Building the capacity and competence of effective faith-based organizations now could spark a renaissance.
One way to breathe empowerment into this sector is to train its leaders to become social entrepreneurs. A social entrepreneur approaches social problems with the same mind-set as a business entrepreneur. They are innovative, results-driven, cost-effective, and nimble in responding to change. They can utilize the market to be partially self-supported by enterprise. And the best of the faith-based groups can demonstrate the bottom line that counts -- changed human lives. · Don't give them a fish, teach them how to fish. Train leaders of faith-based groups in, for example, the Peter Drucker school of non-profit management. Plug them into existing non-profit training centers in fundraising, so they can learn to support themselves, and media training to learn how to tell their story. · Convene a clearinghouse of ideas, a center for best practices. Invite leaders for training in their areas of ministry - mentoring, or welfare-to-work transition, drug and alcohol rehabilitation - and help them learn from each other what works. · Build partnerships among like-minded organizations
serving the same population. There is a staggering amount of duplication
of services, because people in the faith community are fragmented, and
often work in isolation. Instead of being a body, we are severed limbs.
You can help the body come together. Rally the Private Sector Use the platform of the White House to rally private funding for faith-based groups. Go back to the same people who contributed millions of dollars to the political campaign, and ask them to contribute again, this time to local private funds for empowering the faith-based organizations in their own community. If they believe your message of compassion, this is the opportunity to demonstrate it. (I suggested this to the high-dollar donors to the Republican Party, and their response was less than enthusiastic. If you say it, perhaps they will listen.) Go to the corporations and tell them that it is acceptable to support faith-based efforts in their cities. They have been skittish. Utilize the community foundations to establish a private fund in every city for specifically funding faith-based endeavors locally. Convene a task force in each major city with the key players from the foundations, and ask them to designate a percentage of their annual giving specifically for funding effective faith-based groups. Ask the nation's religious leaders to remind the nation that a tenth of what we earn belongs to God's work. If the people of faith actually gave this of their own free will, it would be far better for the soul of the nation than redistributing taxes. Convene the leaders of local churches, and ask them to pool a portion of their benevolence funds to seek out the grassroots poverty-fighting ministries, and support them together. Faith-based groups are woefully unprepared for the administrative
burden that accompanies growth. Their heart is in serving people, not
crunching numbers. Groups that have received government funding have
discovered that they face an overwhelming administrative burden to keep
books for the non-faith component of their work, which is eligible to
receive government funds, and separately for the faith-based, which
is not. If other faith-based groups enter into this kind of public-private
partnership, they need additional training and personnel. Call Us Together, Mr. President You can rally the country to bring the human resources together, which is even more important than funding. Ask colleges and universities to set up a year of service for undergraduates as interns and new college graduates to serve in a nonprofit, helping to bolster staffs. Newly minted MBA's could put in a time of service, funded by the business community. Corporations could fund a position for an administrator and offer information technology assistance. Retired executives could be matched up with faith-based organizations that need their expertise. The vibrancy of volunteerism in America deeply impressed
Alexis de Tocqueville Seek out the leaders serving the "down-and-outers" and introduce them to the "up-and-outers." They will be astonished to discover that they have the same aches in their heart, the same yearning to be valued, the same moral failures, and the same need for transcendent love. They do not know one another, and will never meet, unless people of compassion and position make that meeting possible.
The realm of faith-based organizations has its own power and its own strength. It is not the government, nor is it the economy. It operates by a different logic, and has the power to transform lives by touching hearts. This realm has atrophied in the past century, and part of America's soul has atrophied with it. We have lost an important part of what made this country personal, warm, and luminescent. And there is nothing in the government sector that can nurture this part of the American soul. We have to do it ourselves, one heart at a time. It is faith that makes faith-based efforts effective.
If you take the faith out, there is no program. This is the one distinctive
that must be preserved, and it is the one that government cannot touch.
Government should not, and may not, fund any activity that inculcates
faith. It is individual people, motivated by their hearts, who can and
should reach out because of their faith to love broken people into wholeness.
Ask your countrymen to do the same.
|
|
||
 |
 |
||
 |
 |