The Hell-Raiser's Blog: Reducing Homelessness

By Bit Boy (Flickr: The Elephant in the Room)
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The Themes For Today's Post:

People-Who-Live-In-Glass-Houses ... Penny-Wise-And-Pound-Foolish ... Can't-See-the-Forest-for-the-Trees ... Blaming-the-Victim, and  The-Elephant-in-the-Room

A Proposal to Eliminate Proposals to Eliminate 

Funding for Nonprofit Homeless Services

Some folks in Seattle think that local homelessness is getting worse and that service providers are inefficient and should lose their funding. 

Addressing homelessness with funding cuts to, and demands of greater accountability from, "inefficient" nonprofits is like a case worker telling an under-nourished person on SNAP/food stamps that she is not spending her per-meal allotment of $1.33 efficiently, so to eliminate waste and abuse, no more SNAP.

A partial list of why this proposal would be a great example of what not to do in a Logic 101 text:

1. Maybe the great majority of any identified nonprofit inefficiencies are the result of TOO LITTLE FUNDING and more cuts will only mean MORE INEFFICIENCY. (Having worked in the nonprofit sector for 25 years, I can tell you, this is the case.)

2. Demanding more accountability via increased record-keeping will likely mean less staff time for service provision, with no guarantee of a change in the types or quality of services provided. Why do I say this? Because as a fundraiser, I would estimate that the percentage of funders who actually fund the very data collection and record-keeping that they demand is 0.0000001 (maybe a slight exaggeration, but only slight). The result is less staff-time to help homeless folks.

(Instead: How about MORE money to provide the training and capacity-building that most nonprofits cannot otherwise afford? Why not hire enough (more) nonprofit staff to do the work that needs to be done? Why not pay nonprofit staff a LIVING WAGE? (You wanna talk inefficiency? Let's talk about nonprofit turnover and the associated costs. Let's talk about the number of nonprofit workers who can't afford to have kids or retire or save for college, and leave the profession before age 40, taking their experience with them.)

3. Cut funding for homeless service providers, and homeless service providers, who are probably already understaffed, will cut staff. 

4. Whatever reduction in homelessness results from making nonprofits more efficient is probably 1% of the reduction that could be achieved by reducing income inequality.

What about demanding some accountability from the we-will-create-jobs-in-exchange-for-tax-breaks corporations? What about more, or more aggressive, policies that promote affordable housing? Or policies that promote a living wage?

But cutting funding to service providers for the homeless? Talk about an inefficient use of time, energy, and resources ... yeesh.

3 Things I Have Learned from Seattle Fast Food Strikers ...

... are summarized in this article that I wrote for yesterday's edition of Crosscut: 3 organizing lessons from Seattle's fast food strike.

Check it out!

Street Cred

It seems to me that at least some folks still associate Occupy Wall Street (OWS) with anarchists, and anarchists with bad guys who break storefront windows; the resulting conclusion is that Occupy members are bad guys. Others dismiss Occupy activists' in-the-streets protesting as a phase they'll hopefully grow out of. I think this is a costly mistake:


First, whatever you may think of window-breaking, anarchy, and the relationship between the two, is irrelevant to Occupy. No social change effort as large as OWS can ensure that each and every participant stick to the same plan. 


Second, to discount Occupy is to ignore the contributions it has made, such as:

• Changing the national dialogue from austerity to income inequality;

• Exposing corporate abuses related to taxes, the outsourcing of jobs, and buying corporate-friendly laws;

• Creating and increasing awareness that protest is not only our right, it is our responsibility; and

• Developing the leadership skills of activists and the mobilizing capacity of communities nationwide.

Third, to those who dismiss nonviolent, in-the-street protest as unseemly;  spectacles organized by “kids”; and distractions from the “real” work (such as lobbying elected officials or  meeting with a member of the daily paper’s editorial board), I say this:


In my experience as a community organizer, low-income and other marginalized communities do not necessarily have access to these kinds of “real” social change activities – at least not until their “spectacles” become too hard for public officials and other decision makers to ignore.


Delegitimizing OWS discourages us from more thoughtfully assessing, and learning from, its successes and failures. We cannot afford to ignore what Occupy can teach us – not when there is so much work left to do.