Community Action Agency Board Members
Toolkit in a Nutshell
This Toolkit for CAA Board Members focuses on a few topics:
·
Community Assessment
·
Results Oriented Management and
Accountability
·
Planning
·
Basic Choices
·
History and future of community action
·
Organization and responsibilities of a board
·
Program monitoring and evaluation
·
Quizzes to help solidify knowledge
·
Resources and hotlinks
· An Introductory Overview for new Board
Members is available in a separate publication from the Minnesota CSBG office:
please see EOGBoardTrainingBook.pdf
Table
of Contents
CHAPTER ONE. Planning Overview
A. Background
B. The Planning Committee and the Planning Cycle
C. Board Roles in Planning
D. The Complete Planning Cycle
E 1. Steps in a Typical CAA Planning Process
2. What Types of Strategies do CAAs Use?
3. Strategy Development
4. More Anti-Poverty Strategies Needed
5. Thinking about Social Change in American Society
End-of-Chapter Quiz
CHAPTER TWO. The Twelve Big Problems in Community Assessment
The Sources of Most Social Change in a Society.
CHAPTER THREE. Introduction and Overview of Community Assessment
Community Assessment and Planning.
Step 1. Review Background Issues in Assessment and Planning.
Issue #1. What is Poverty?
Issue #2. Is the glass half-empty or half-full?
Issue #3. Framework.
Issue #4. Root causes of poverty.
Issue #5. Isolating how our economy operates.
Issue #6. Understanding how the economy works.
Issue #7. Structuring Discussions.
Issue #8. The Political Environment and Political Trends.
End of Chapter Quiz.
CHAPTER FOUR: Community Assessment and Planning
Community Assessment and Planning.
The Six Steps in Community Assessment
A. The Six Steps in Community Assessment
The Changing Face of California.
End-of-Chapter Quiz.
CHAPTER FIVE. What is ROMA?
A. What is ROMA?
B. THE SIX ROMA GOALS
C. OUTCOMES AND INDICATORS
D. REPORTING
E. APPROACHES to IMPLEMENTATION
Specific Tools: Scales, Ladders and Surveys
F. MEASURING YOUR PROGRESS TOWARD ROMA IMPLEMENTATION
G. ROMA. What is an outcome and how do I develop one?
End-of-Chapter Quiz.
CHAPTER SIX. BASIC CHOICES for Board Members
End-of-Chapter Six Quiz
CHAPTER SEVEN. History and Future of Community Action
A. A short history of anti-poverty programs in the U.S.
B. Evolution of CAA Management Frameworks Over Time and Horizon Issues.
Horizon Issues
End of Chapter Quiz
CHAPTER EIGHT: Preparing for the Next Phase of Anti-Poverty
Work
1. People who work must earn a living wage
2. We need new types of work that produce income
3. Creating Social Capital
4. Creating Financial Assets
5. Expanding unique approaches to Human Development
6. We need to better understand the causes of poverty
7. Reduce public expenditures for charitable functions
End of Chapter Eight Quiz
CHAPTER NINE. Organization and Responsibilities of a Board
A. Basic CAA Board Functions
B. Tripartite Composition of the Board
C. Reasons for the composition requirements
D. Types of CAA Boards
E. Articles of Incorporation and By-Laws
F. Sources of Authority of a Board
G. Basic Decisions of a Board
H. Legal Responsibilities of Individual Board Members
I. Community Problem Solving
End of Chapter Nine Quiz
CHAPTER TEN: Board Recruitment and Retention
a. Build a positive image of your CAA in their mind
b. Recruitment strategies: building your image
c. Retention strategies
d. Additional approaches or steps in board recruitment
e. Board Orientation
End of Chapter Ten Quiz
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Board Development: Preparing an Individual Development Plan for a Board Member
Board Member Individual Development Plan (Draft format)
End of Chapter Eleven Quiz
CHAPTER TWELVE: Reducing Busywork, Focusing More Board Activity on Community Issues. 93
End of Chapter Twelve Quiz
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: CAA Board and Staff Relations
Summary: The Successful Board/Executive Director
Relationship
End of Chapter Thirteen Quiz
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Evaluation of the Executive Director, Funder Relationships and of the Agency Itself
A. Executive Director
B. Board and Funding Agency Relationships
C. Self Assessment of a Community Action Agency
End of Chapter Fourteen Quiz
Additional Resources
Acronyms and Definitions
A. Background
Systematic
planning is one method for identifying the strategies and programs that will
have an impact on poverty. Every
CAA should have a planning process and produce an anti-poverty plan.
B.
The Planning Committee and the Planning Cycle
Planning is a
continuing cycle of program implementation, evaluation and refinement.
Planning consists of:
- Studying the community to decide which
of the causes of poverty are most important and can be affected by the CAA.
- Deciding which problems and
opportunities are the most important and will receive greater emphasis by
the CAA.
- Deciding on the strategy that the CAA
will attempt to eliminate the causes of the poverty problems.
- Deciding on goals for definite time
periods, for example; six months, one year, five years.
- Deciding the resources (money,
volunteer time, from other agencies) that are needed.
- Deciding the ways that achievement of
the goals and progress toward the goals will be measured by the Board, e.g.
how you will measure outcomes and results.
- Communicate these decisions to the CAA
Executive Director; and giving the Executive Director sufficient authority
to carry out the Board's decisions.
- Maintain an active Board role, exerting
community leadership by pursuing some of your objectives yourselves, instead
of simply assigning all tasks to the staff.
The
primary responsibility for making sure that planning takes place rests with the
CAA Board. One of the major reasons
that plans do not get completed or implemented is because Board members do
not have a very compelling reason for doing planning.
Here are a few; which apply to you?
What other reasons do you have for planning?
- Clarity of purpose -- with more
specific goals, strategies and objectives, the agency will be able to better
see where it is -- and where it wants to go.
- More effective strategies -- with more
careful selection of strategies, the CAA can more effectively change the
causes of the problems in their communities.
- Focuses the Board's attention -- A plan
focuses the energy and attention of both Board and staff in a systematic
way. The plan is results-oriented.
The
Complete Planning Cycle has four generic stages:
- Plan for Planning.
- The Planning Process.
- Implementation of the
Plan (e.g. Program Operations).
- Evaluation for feedback
to future planning.
- The
Plan for Planning.
This
describes the planning PROCESS. It
includes the steps to be taken, the calendar, the assignments.
- The
Planning Process Itself.
There
are many types of planning systems.
The
big issue is not which planning system you use.
There are three big issues for CAA’s.
(1) Whether you use any formal, long-range planning system -- or
you just run day-to-day. (2)
Whether you run a community-based planning process with lots of involvement --
or a pro-forma, staff-written job that is rubber-stamped by the Board.
(3) Whether you adapt the
generic planning process you select to the mission of the CAA -- or just try to
use it in a lockstep fashion.
This
is your “instant conversion kit” to adapt one of the generic planning
systems so it will work in your CAA. This
CONVERSION KIT is based on a simple but very
powerful analytic concept that is used in many CAA’s.
That concept is to take each poverty problem identified during the
planning process and to separate the elements of the problem into two components
(1) the problem CONDITION and (2) the CAUSES of the problem.
Most CAA’s will do this during their community assessment.
1)
The CONDITION of poverty is the result of the causes.
The CAA sets a GOAL to change
the CONDITION. The GOAL is phrased
in terms of a change in the condition.
2)
The CAUSES are the dynamic factors, the underlying social values, beliefs
and behavior of specific individuals or groups of people that produce the
condition.
By
adopting STRATEGIES that modify or eliminate the CAUSES of the poverty
condition, you will achieve your goal. The
strategy is phrased in terms of a change in the cause.
This
workbook has two approaches to planning. The
succinct version is found in the planning workbook that John Ochoa, CSD, wrote
and it is here in MS Word format.
The second and longer, more comprehensive approach to planning follows.
E
1. Steps in a Typical CAA Planning
Process
You
do not have to do them in sequential order.
Take a building block approach and add elements as you have time to
create them.
- CREATE YOUR VISION for
the future.
- REVIEW the MISSION.
- NEEDS and OPPORTUNITIES
ASSESSMENT.
- PROBLEM RANKING.
After they have identified the problems, the Board can RANK the
poverty problems in terms of their magnitude and severity.
-
RESOURCE ANALYSIS
- PRIORITY SETTING.
- GOAL SETTING.
- This is where most
CAA’s also develop RESULTS MEASURES
- STRATEGY SELECTION.
- OBJECTIVES.
- ACTIVITIES.
CAA Board members may emphasize a particular strategy, or they may create
combinations of strategies.
Some strategies do NOT need any funds.
They require only the energy of the Board members to implement.
These strategies may focus on changing existing laws, programs,
procedures, or attitudes so that a poor person could receive the equal
opportunities or public benefits to which he or she is entitled. It is crucial
that the Board separate those elements of the strategy that the board can do
best from those which the staff should do.
If the Board delegate everything, they are chopping off a major force for
change -- their own effort.
- INSTITUTIONAL
CHANGE. These strategies
include promoting changes in other social, economic and political
institutions.
- COMMUNITY
ORGANIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT. This
approach helps low-income people act on their own behalf.
-
PROGRAM COORDINATION. This is
an area with as many definitions as there are practitioners, but the basic
concept is that all monies within a community being spent for a particular
purpose should be coordinated to (1) prevent duplication of effort, and (2)
to promote synergy between programs.
- RESOURCE
MOBILIZATION. In addition to
coordination of existing resources, the idea here is to expand the total
amount of resources available to help low-income people.
- OUTREACH
AND INFORMATION AND REFERRAL. The
strategy is to reach-out, and bring the person who could benefit into the
other program. This can be as
simple as passing out a brochure. Or
it may involve referring people to another agency.
It can include performing the intake, assessment and placement in
another program.
- FAMILY
DEVELOPMENT AND CASE MANAGEMENT. A
case management system provides the ongoing contact to enhance personal
growth in individuals and families. Utilizing
Case Management techniques (drawn from the social work profession), the CAAs
try to obtain or provide all the services necessary to make a person more
functional, regardless of where these services are located.
- OTHER
DIRECT SOCIAL SERVICES
. Some county and state
government agencies prefer to contract out their service responsibilities.
Most CAAs now provide direct service
with public money from many funding sources.
In addition, on a nationwide basis, many CAA’s now use most of
their CSBG funds to provide direct service.
- SELF-EMPLOYMENT.
These activities help people earn money by being self-employed, often
in a home-based business.
- SOCIAL
ENTERPRISE. The CAA runs the enterprise to provide work for people.
So these are some of the strategies used by
CAA’s. Do you have others?
3.
Strategy Development
In the community assessment exercises we completed earlier, we have
prepared an overview of our community with a description of the problems and
assets, with the causes of these problems.
The causes are often found in (a) how the economy operates, (b) social
value choices as translated into public policy, and (c) decisions by individual
or families, and just plain (bad) luck. Fortunately,
strategies can be developed to address all of these types of causes.
A
strategy:
a.
Eliminates or reduces the cause/s of a problem.
b.
Describes a course of action (method, means to be pursued).
c.
Indicates who will be involved in implementing the strategy.
One challenge issue for board in writing strategies is that Board members
bring assumptions, often unconscious assumptions, about how the world works into
the strategy development process. Based
on their experience and personality, people have very definite ideas about how
long we should wait for a strategy to produce results, about how difficult a
strategy is to implement, and about how much a strategy might cost relative to
the number it will help. It is VERY
useful to bring these assumptions to the surface before you get into developing
a specific strategy. The following
link will take you to the exercise that will help you do that.
Link
to Strategy Preferences
Exercise
4.
More
Anti-Poverty Strategies Needed
One challenge in creating new anti-poverty strategies is that we are in
serious trouble in terms of anti-poverty theory.
I have been working on a book review of Poverty
Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S.
History written by Professor Alice O=Connor.
She traces the theories-in-use from the end of the Civil War to the
present. This is a powerful book
for us and offers much insight and guidance.
I urge everybody to read it.
There are more than dozen ways that change occurs.
Change is driven by:
i.
economy,
scientific
breakthroughs (ability to measure nicotine, tar, ozone, pesticides, etc)
technological development (microcomputers),
globalization of industries
ii.
changing social values,
media attention,
increases in general educational levels,
a crisis of some kind,
national leadership, Congress “takes off” on it,
international
events that are perceived as economically or politically important, e.g. oil
embargo, war.
directed
social change =
a group of people decide to make it happen.
iii.
demographic change
All of these types of change can be supported, or worked against, or used in a
“piggy back” fashion to produce some other change.
This brings us to the key concept for people who want to create change in
human services policy and programs.
1.
Most directed change in human services occurs because a group of
volunteers decide they want to produce a change and just keep grinding away
2.
Ten times as much change occurs in America
as a result of demographic, economic, technological and social value shifts than
occurs because of governmental action. That
is why it is so important to keep track of those trends.
In many respects, the Congress is just a mirror that reflects compromises
between social values and groups that have already “cut their deal” years
before Congress gets into the Act (pun intended).
3.
It was the shifts in social values in and the economy in the l960s that
both prompted and made possible the passage not just of the Economic Opportunity
Act, but the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act, the Medicaid Act, the Food Stamp Act.
4.
All the purposes and themes of the EOA had been debated in American
society for twenty to fifty years prior to passage of the EOA; the EOA was
another step in an ongoing and much bigger debate (as was the case with the
creation of the CSBG in 1981).
5.
The Executive Branch is one other place where change occurs in this
country.
6.
In America, there are many, many opportunities and mechanisms by which
desired change can and do occur if a group of people decide they want to make it
happen. Alex de Tocqueville, the
French sociologist, said over one hundred years ago that America is one of the
few societies in the world that empowers a group of people to get together in
their community to IDENTIFY or define or that a problem exists, and where people
can DECIDE what is desirable social policy for their community -- and then can
ACT on it. The premise is that people on a CAA Board and people who work in a
CAA are people who want to make change happen.
So the tasks to help our CAA board operate
in the future are (a) to identify and unravel the major social and political
trends, and (b) to identify local concerns, problems or issues, and what we want
to do in our community, e.g. do we want to ignore, stop or support the trends,
(d) how we as individuals can influence them, and (e) how our CAA can influence
them.
Questions
to stimulate thinking and to identify a few of the key points made in this
chapter.
1. Who has the primary responsibility for making sure that a CAA
plans?
2. List at least one reason why YOUR CAA should engage in
long-range planning activity. (List
as many as you can, or brainstorm answers among board members)
3. Why is it useful to have a plan-for planning?
What is at least one benefit of having a plan for planning?
4.
What is “the conversion kit” for changing any generic planning system
in an anti-poverty planning system?
5.
What are some of the typical steps in a CAA Planning Process?
Which of these has your CAA already completed, and which remain to be
done?
6.
Do all CAA’s use the same strategies?
What are some of the types of strategies that CAA’s use?
Answers
to Chapter One Quiz
1.
The board.
2.
List the purposes most important to your board.
3.
A plan-for-planning should include a timetable, and a description of the
assignments who is responsible for completing different parts of the plan.
4.
The ‘conversion kit” involves sorting any ‘problem’ into the
conditions of the problem and the causes of the problem.
A goal is then developed that describes a change in the condition; and a
strategy is developed to attack one or more of the causes of the condition.
5.
The first few steps of the planning process include creating the agency
vision, values, mission and goals.
6.
No. CAA’s use a wide
variety of strategies depending on what needs to be done and what other
organizations are doing.
CHAPTER TWO.
The Twelve
Big Problems in Community Assessment
There is no agreement about these issues in America, in a state, or in most
communities. You have to find a
compromise that works for your community.
- What is poverty -- and
what is not poverty? The
poverty index is hopelessly out of date.
- What is bottom-line
responsibility of the individual? Of
the family? Of neighbors? Of
religious or other organizations? Of government?
Who is supposed to do what and why?
- Which do we select as
our unit of analysis -- the nation or the individual.
When we start with the nation and the demographic/economic and social
trends, it leads us into public policy.
When we start with the individual, it leads us into what that
individual should do or we can do to help that individual.
- For most human
development and community development strategies, the difficulty of
establishing a cause-effect relationship between action and results is
somewhere between extremely challenging and impossible.
- We use rhetoric that is
too imprecise. There are about
ten times as many programs that are labeled anti-poverty programs than there
are programs that in fact significantly reduce or eliminate poverty.
Most of them are human development programs (Head Start, basic
education, training immigrants about American culture) or anti-destitution
programs (food, homeless shelter).
- Most people think that
anti-destitution programs (to create a minimum quality of life) are
anti-poverty programs. But
there is a difference between a strategy that helps create a minimum quality
of life and an anti-poverty program.
- Part of the confusion
is that many people perceive that Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs sets
up a ladder that you must go up, starting at the bottom, satisfying the
needs of security and food first then moving upward to self-actualization.
I think people can enter and exit his or her hierarchy at any level.
- Another challenge in
developing anti-poverty strategies is that about 5% to 10% of the people you
serve never get better.
- Even if you do
high-level community assessments, by the time you get down to the funded
program level, all they really want an analysis of the numbers of people who
meet their specific eligibility requirements.
- The purpose of planning
is for the power figures to reach agreements with each other about the
nature of the world and what you are collectively going to do about it.
- The attitudes of Board
members vary, just like the rest of America. Some people think that American Society is just fine--
and it the responsibility of the individual to find their way in it.
Others think that major changes are needed in the socio-economic
structure -- and until we make them millions of people will continue to
fail. There is probably some
truth in both of these ideas, the challenge is to find an agreement.
- We have probably gone
about as far as we can go in extending the concept of entitlements and
“rights” e.g. the “right” to housing, or the “right” to a decent
income. Instead of being
seen as absolute rights, these are now seen as temporary support systems,
and are available only to those who are first in line, or available only for
a limited amount of time.
The Sources of Most Social Change in a Society
These
elements act separately or in linkage with each other to explain most social
change.
Some
people show public policy as a 4th circle.
I don’t because most public policy is a function of what has happened
in the three domains shown above.
Chapter
2 Quiz
1. What are some of the problem areas in community assessment?
2. Which of these have been ‘issues’ in your CAA?
3. What is at least one major source of change in American
Society? Think of how one of these
has affected low-income people in your area.
Answers to Chapter 2 Quiz
1.
See the list.
2.
For the issues that have been a problem in your CAA, discuss
these openly and work out agreements about how to address them.
Perhaps an ad-hoc committee or a task force can help grapple with them.
3. Three of the powerful sources of change are the economy,
demographics and social values.
CHAPTER THREE. Introduction
and Overview of Community Assessment
There are two basic ways to do community assessment.
The first way is that you start with the people and what they tell you or
staff through individual conversations, group discussion, meetings, or surveys.
Then, you try to add up what they have said.
Although individual action is crucial to avoiding poverty or to getting
out of poverty, it is only part of the picture.
The other basic way to do community assessment is to start big, and work your
way down. You look at the patterns
in the economy and in society, and see how they affect the individuals and
families in your community. The
patterns in the economy create the opportunity structure -- the types and
numbers of opportunities for people to earn income.
The patterns in social beliefs and values describe what the public thinks
about the responsibility of the individual, the state, of religious
organizations, or of nonprofit organizations.
The age-old debate about whether poverty is “caused” by the individual or
caused by the economic and social system was resolved in 1988 by Mary Lou Evert,
one of President Reagan’s appointees in H.H.S. said:
“It is now generally recognized by conservatives and liberals alike
that there are both individual causes and societal causes of poverty.”
What is poverty and
what are the causes of poverty?
In doing the community assessment and planning there will be much discussion
about what is poverty, what are the causes of poverty, and what can be done
about the causes of poverty. This
is exactly the discussion that should take place. Several areas where there is
substantial confusion are listed next, then expanded after that.
1.
What is poverty, anyhow? And, what is “not poverty?”
2.
There is no agreement about the “model” of society.
We present one here that will be useful.
3.
What are the causes of poverty?
4.
We have to un-bundle the elements of society
5.
Most people do not understand how capitalism works.
6.
The assessment of the political environment and political trends are
time-consuming.
So what is poverty and what is a condition
of “not poverty?”
Regardless of the combination of factors
that you might select to define poverty, this workbook assumes that (1)
household income (the amount of disposable income) is important, (2) that work
is the primary way most people get income, and (3) there are many ways income
and benefits arrive in a household and we should be reviewing and counting all
of them, and (4) income poverty alone does not capture all the elements and
dynamics of poverty.
Discussion.
In 1963, the poverty rate was about 1/2 of the median income for a family
of four. In 1999, the poverty rate
was down to about 1/3 the median income. ALL
of the alternative methods of measuring poverty will increase the percentage and
numbers of people who are poor. We
should open up the discussion of the poverty rate. We should agree to include the benefits (Medicaid, food
stamps, etc), and we will still come out with a higher rate. This will TAKE AWAY the argument that government benefits
offset the effects of poverty.
The “living wage” discussions are useful in that they help identify the
actual costs of living in an area. Depending
on the area this can range anywhere from $12 an hour to $20 an hour.
The downside of the “living wage” approach is that nobody has even a
hint of a plan that would enable most people to achieve a living wage.
A few states and CAA’s are now considering development of a “plan to
end poverty” for their area.
Most community analysis now is shifting
away from a focus on needs and toward a focus on strength.
The latest trend is based largely on the theories of Northwestern
University Professors John (Jody) Kretzman and John McKnight.
You need a framework into which you put the
information; a framework that illustrates and explains how America works.
Those elements would include:
1. The
population (demographics; the characteristics of the people).
2.
Social
values (What people believe,
especially about: who is responsible for what, who deserves what, the individual
versus the society, fairness, and equity).
3. The
economy (includes science and technology).
The interaction of these three dynamic
elements then results in
4.
Public policy.
Public policy typically lags behind changes in the three key building
blocks anywhere from years to decades.
|
I would argue that in the U.S.
the sources or ultimate causes of poverty can be traced to:
|
Personal choices
10% People sometimes
do/choose stupid or self-destructive things.
Happenstance
10% Example 1: Bad luck. Example 2: The length of
time it took for a hospital to forward medical records to a Medicare
recipient (to send to SSA for a payee name change) actually cost him
opportunities.
Social values
30% We just don’t care
that some people are poor, or we can’t quite translate a social value to
help the ‘deserving poor’ into action.
The economy
30% Jobs
disappear for a variety of reasons, sending those without family support
or other assets into poverty. This
is the way economic systems work -- the issue is what do we do about it.
Public
policy
20% Much of the poverty in
the U.S. is a collective decision about who should be poor, or a decision
that we will not help certain people become un-poor.
The root causes of poverty are
difficult to unravel in part because they are usually found in the dynamic
interaction of two or more elements of the society, such as:
·
the structure of the economy and
especially in the rapidity of technological change,
·
the social attitudes, particularly
about who-is-responsible for what, and about race and gender.
The social values are then translated into:
·
public policy – especially around
the rules governing the economy, about civil rights, and human development
including education, job training, child care and health care.
Capitalism as an economic system can be
analysis as a thing unto itself and can be shaped and adjusted with no threat to
our democratic values or our civil liberties. We already have a mass of rules regulating the economy.
Capitalism is an open market system in
which people exchange goods and services. Demand
and supply set most prices. About
2/3 of all economic activity is consumption, of food, clothing, cars, and the
other ‘stuff’ and services of everyday life.
About 1/3 is capital investment.
Economic growth occurs primarily because of (a)
population expansion, e.g. more people either domestically or internationally
buying goods and services, (b) changes in fashion and fads that prompt people to
buy different versions of the same thing (clothes, cosmetics)
(c) competition, in which one supplier puts out a version with better
features, (d) investment, people spend money because they think it will produce
a future benefit, and (e) advances in science and technology that are adopted by
the makers of goods and services.
There is an enormous “churning” of people in
and out of jobs. Think of it as a
gigantic game of musical chairs.
A fourth feature of any economic system is unemployment.
A 2% unemployment rate is called “frictional” unemployment and occurs
because of deaths, retirements and other job departures.
The tolerance for unemployment varies significantly across societies and
over time. In the U.S. in the
1960's a 4% rate was considered too high. Today,
people seem willing to tolerate 6%.
George Will is quoted as saying that capitalism produces the rough justice of
the market; it is the job of government to take the edges off the roughness.
So we turn to the social system, and the cultural beliefs and social
values translate into government policy that shape the operations of the
economy.
There are many, many rules created through public policy about how the economic
system should operate. These are
tools for shaping the economic system by regulating how the enterprises
(corporations and other types of businesses) operate.
Yet, too many assessments just take the economy as a “given,” and
assume it is unchangeable. Wrong!
How do we structure a discussion to focus on the causes of poverty and on
how to increase household incomes? Using
earned income – how people get money from their job – as a focal point for
discussion, we can look at (a) the operation of the economy, (b) compensatory
programs to give people money or services because they do not earn enough, and
(c) other quality of life programs.
1.
We can adjust
the rules about how the economy operates (on the demand side)
2.
We can strengthen the programs needed to develop our human resources (the
supply side)
3.
We
can work to change the social values that affect the operation of the economy
B.
COMPENSATORY PROGRAMS
These compensate people for the fact that they do not earn enough money
from their j-o-b to pay for desired or needed goods and services using only
their income So as a society we
provide:
Child care
C.
QUALITY OF LIFE PROGRAMS
For people who are not earning income due to age or
health, as a society we want to provide a certain minimum standard of quality of
life.
Senior centers.
Independent living.
Issue #8.
The Political Environment and Political Trends
I left this until last because it is all
that some people want to talk about and therefore they never get around to
talking about the economy. As we
survey the current “state of the world and nation” and what is affecting us
now, in the year 2005 we would have to list:
1.
Terrorism at home and abroad.
2.
The Patriot Act with its dramatic expansion of the powers of the Federal
police.
3.
War in Iraq and Afghanistan.
4.
Deficits at the Federal and State levels.
5.
A philosophy about the role of the Federal government in which it divests
many of its 20th century responsibilities either to state governments
or to faith-based organizations.
One significant
consequence of these political realities is the enormous amount of clock-time
they consume.
1. What are the causes of poverty in America?
In your community?
2. Why are people afraid to talk about our capitalist economy?
What are some of the areas in which we can structure our discussion about
how the economy operates?
3. Name one important way that a discussion of politics hinders
rather than helps us develop approaches to poverty?
Answers
to Chapter 3 Quiz
1. These are several types of causes of poverty.
2. Our economy has produced more wealth for more people than any
other form of economic organization.
There are masses of laws and regulations that shape and structure the
operation of our economy, yet any discussion of any type of change whatsoever
raises a hue-and-cry that it will wreck the whole system.
We can structure our discussions around (a) adjusting
the rules) (b) strengthening our human resources, and (c) changing social
values.
3. “Talking politics” (a) takes up a huge amount of time,
(b) generates very strong feelings, and (c) is only one way that we make
progress in America.
CHAPTER FOUR: Community Assessment and Planning
This section
includes an outline and methods for developing a CAA
strategic plan for reducing poverty.
Some elements of this chapter are hyperlinked.
If there is http or www at the start of the underlined
item, clicking on it will take you to a website for additional information.
If the underlined item does not have a www, then clicking on it will jump
you to another document in this workbook (which may be on a CD or on the
Cal-Neva web site).
To start, read through this chapter to get the general idea of the structure and
contents, then go back to the top and start clicking away. Feel free to modify
any of these materials for your own use. You
can do some or all of these pieces, and you can do them in any order.
1.
Learn about the economy and how it operates.
2.
Map the social values that shape our society and your community.
3.
Describe the composition of the population and the trends (demographics).
4.
Describe the physical environment.
5.
Assess political realities and trends.
6.
Review the assessments done by other organizations
The Six Steps in Strategic Planning
7.
Identify problems and opportunities – the existing conditions.
8.
Identify existing and potential community resources.
9.
Develop goals.
10.
Develop outcome measures.
11.
Set priorities.
12.
Create strategies that really affect the causes of poverty.
These steps always appear on paper as linear, sequential activities.
The reality is that you will skip around.
Clicking on a hyperlinked item takes you to background information and exercises
that are on this CD ROM, or in the longer version of this Toolkit that is on the
Cal-Neva website. (Currently at www.cencomfut.com.toolkit.htm
)
Step
1) Learn about the economy and how
it operates.
a. Basic principles of
capitalism.
b. Unbundling the
economic opportunity structure from the rest of our society.
Step
2) Map the social values that shape
our society.
What people believe,
especially about fairness rights, civil rights, equality, who should do what for
whom.
a. Demographic trends
and discussion of possible implications
b.
Key issues:
Immigration, migration and social mobility.
Step
4. Describe the physical
environment.
Step
5. Assess political realities
and trends.
Step
6. Review the Assessments Done by
Other Agencies
Review the community assessments and other people’s plans. Don’t re-invent the wheel.
Then
– moving into the six steps of anti-poverty planning.
Step
7. Identify problems and
opportunities.
Step
8. Resources in the community.
Who is already doing what?
Step
9. Set Goals.
Step
10. Develop Outcome Measures.
Step
11. Develop criteria for
priority setting.
Step
12. Strategy Development.
------------------------------------
Demographic information is available from the
excellent U.S. Census Bureau website at www.census.gov.
Use the American Factfinder.
For
California, the Public Policy Institute of California has two excellent reports.
They are found at:
http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=478
and
http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=153
You
can find the same data elements for your county or city through your regional
council of government or the State Data Center.
------------------------------------------
1. Name at least one of the steps in Community Assessment.
2. Name at least one of the steps in Strategic Planning.
3. Where can we get information on demographic trends in the
U.S. or in California?
4. Is immigration an important issue in community planning?
Why?
Answers
to Chapter 4 Quiz
1. See the list of 6 steps of community assessment.
2. See the list of 6 steps in strategic planning.
3. The U.S. Census Bureau, and the Public Policy Institute of
California.
4. Yes. The voters
have tried to reduce or eliminate services to immigrants who do not have legal
authorization to be here.
1. What
does “ROMA” stand for?
ROMA stands for Results
Oriented Management and Accountability.
2. What is the purpose of ROMA?
ROMA is a set of principles and tools to
guide CAA program planning, operations and reporting.
The intent of ROMA is to help CAA’s to produce clearer and stronger
results and to provide ways of measuring those results and reporting on them.
3.
Is ROMA a new way to address poverty in our communities?
No.
ROMA is not an anti-poverty strategy in and of itself, but is a new way
of measuring the results of our anti-poverty work by measuring the changes that
occur as a result of the services we provide. ROMA is a set of management
principles and tools to measure results or “outcomes” for individuals,
families and communities. Community Action Agencies (CAA’s) must still figure
out the causes and conditions of poverty and how to eliminate or reduce those
causes and conditions in their local communities.
4. Why do we have to use ROMA?
In 1993 Congress
required all Federal agencies and programs to produce strategic plans and ways
to measure results. In 1998,
Congress amended the Community Services Block Grant legislation (CSBG) to
mandate ROMA or some comparable system for CAA’s.
The Federal Office of Community Services (OCS) administers the CSBG
program. There is no “comparable
system,” therefore ROMA is the OCS required system for complying with the
Federal law.
5. Who developed ROMA?
In 1995, the Office
of Community Services (OCS) set up the Monitoring and Assessment Task Force (MATF). It is made up of 50 representatives of the Community Action
Agency (CAA) network from around the country.
MATF was charged with developing ways for CAA’s to change the focus of
their work from delivering services to ending poverty and to develop
methods for measuring the results of this work.
6. Will ROMA last, or is it just
another passing fad?
ROMA is the system
for the foreseeable future. ROMA
has been endorsed or adopted by all of the national organizations that work with
the CAA network including the National Community Action Foundation (NCAF), the
national Community Action Partnership, the National Association of State
Community Services Programs (NASCSP) and by the HHS Office of Community
Services.
7.
What
are the national goals for use by CAA’s?
There are six ROMA goals developed by the
MATF and adopted by OCS for use by all CSBG “eligible entities,” most of
which are CAA’s. They are:
The Six ROMA Goals
Goal
1.
Low-income
people become more self-sufficient.
Goal
2.
The
conditions under which low-income people live are improved.
Goal
3.
Low-income
people own a stake in their community.
Goal
4.
Partnerships
among supporters and providers of service to low-income people are
achieved.
Goal
5.
Agencies
increase their capacity to achieve results.
Goal
6.
Low-income
people, especially vulnerable populations, achieve their potential by
strengthening family and other supportive systems.
These
are agency-wide goals. Under these, each CAA lays out its specific goals for
programs or strategies.
8.
CAA’s
are all very different, so how can we all use the same goals?
The six ROMA goals cover MOST – but not all - of the work done by
CAA’s nationwide. The design
standard was to capture at least 90% of what CAA’s do nationwide.
Every CAA is unique and makes local decisions about programs and services
based on local needs. However, the
MATF felt that a CAA must be able to report some activity under at
least one of the six ROMA goals in order to be called a CAA.
10. How can we organize
all of our programs and services under the ROMA goals?
You do not
have to reorganize your agency’s operations to use ROMA.
Most of our programs and services fit under at least one of the ROMA
goals. Goal #1 covers most of the services we provide directly to
low-income people to help them become more self-sufficient. Goals #2 and #3
address the work we do to help low-income people improve their communities and
to become “stakeholders” in their communities.
Goals # 4 and #5 address the work that CAA’s and other eligible
entities do to build community partnerships and strengthen their internal
operations so that they can be more effective in ending poverty. Goal #6 covers other human development programs (Head Start)
and quality of life services (food distribution).
11.
How
do we plan for Results?
Under ROMA, results are often called “Outcomes”. An outcome is the change that happens as a
result of what we do. Instead of counting the number of services we provide (our
“output”) ROMA asks us to measure the impact of the service we provide (the
“outcome”). At first, these
terms may be confusing. One way of
looking at this change is -- if we can measure it by watching our staff as they
work, it is probably a program “output”.
But, if we have to observe the service recipient, their family or the
community, or ask them about it, then it is probably an “outcome”. Outcomes are of course measured after the strategy or
program has been operating.
12. What is an Indicator?
An Indicator is a measurement that helps you determine whether or not an
outcome has been achieved, or whether or not you are making progress toward the
outcome. An Indicator is some show
of evidence or proof that your program is working.
For example, one outcome measure could be “increase the assets of a
family” and one indicator could be “increase in dollar value of savings
account.”
14.
Where can I go for help in developing or measuring outcomes or results?
There are now many successful ROMA
projects around the nation. The
most successful examples are in those states (PA, WA, NY, IL, MO, MS,) where the
CAA’s have decided to work together through their state CAA association and in
collaboration with their state CSBG office, creating task forces that work
collaboratively in developing measures that all CAA’s can use. For example, in
Missouri the CAA’s produced a set of outcome measures for Goal #1 (the
self-sufficiency goal) that all Missouri CAA’s now use.
This is a long process and it is not unusual for it to take 2 to 3 years
to complete.
In addition most State Associations, including Cal-Neva, are building their
training capacity by having people from CAA’s become certified ROMA trainers
through the “Virtual Outcomes College,” a Pennsylvania group which is funded
by the OCS.
The National Association of State Community Services Programs (NASCSP) operates
a clearinghouse of ideas on ROMA. See the ROMA website at www.roma1.org
for almost everything in print about ROMA.
15.
Is ROMA just a new way of reporting the services we provide?
No.
ROMA is a new way of reporting on the results
of the services we provide. ROMA requires us to report on the changes
in individuals, families, and communities and/or changes in our agencies that
have come about as a result of our work. We
are no longer just counting the number of services we provide.
We are also measuring the results we have achieved from those services.
This is difficult work and often requires us to re-examine our strategies to
ensure that we can obtain, measure and report on the results we seek to obtain.
16.
Does this mean we can no longer deliver or report on emergency services?
No.
CAA’s may continue to deliver and report on the emergency services they
provide in their communities. Some CAA’s integrate emergency services into
self-sufficiency programs and family development efforts, and report those under
Goal #1. Generally, however,
emergency services are reported under Goal #6.
17.
We find some of the data we have collected in the past to be very useful.
Do we have to abandon the data collection we already do?
No. ROMA is not the only information
your organization may collect or find useful. Each organization should collect
the data that is most useful to them in fulfilling their mission.
A.
Agency-wide management
framework: two approaches
a)
The Virtual Outcomes College is using the Drucker Foundation’s Self
Assessment Tool in their ROMA Peer-to-Peer training course. The Virtual Outcomes
College (with funding from OCS) has adapted the Drucker Self Assessment Tool for
use by CAA’s. It is a
comprehensive framework of vision setting, mission review, goal setting and
reporting.
b)
The Rensselearville Institute in New York has developed a planning and
management system for use by CAA’s that has been adopted by CAA’s in about a
dozen states. The state or national CAA Association can provide contact
information on both of these systems.
Using
Logic Models for a Program, Strategy or Goal
A
logic model lays out the purpose, goals, activities, results desired, and
measurements for an entire strategy or program. Typically these are laid out on
one page in adjacent columns. It is
a useful way to visually see the relationships between activities and outcomes.
The logic model, developed to improve the ability to evaluate the results
of program, went into widespread use in human services in the 1980’s. The OCS
Demonstration Partnership Program required development of a logic model for each
of the 100 projects they funded. Examples of logic models for family
development, minority male, micro-business and other programs are included in
the evaluation reports on those projects that are available from OCS.
The Early Head Start Program also requires development of a logic model.
Scales
and ladders are a way of measuring incremental change in individuals, families,
communities or agencies. One familiar ROMA scale and ladder system currently in
use measures a participant/client, agency or community as they progress from
“In Crisis”, to “At Risk”, then “Stable” and then, hopefully, to
“Safe” and then to “Thriving”. For
example, a family may be “in crisis” because they are homeless.
They get a temporary job and move into an over-crowded or unsafe
apartment, so they are no longer homeless but still “at risk.” Over time, with assistance from the CAA, their income
increases and they obtain a more appropriate apartment - so they are now
“stable.” As the family moves from up the scale or up the ladder from “in
crisis” to “at risk” to “stable,” the CAA records the families
progress and the CAA’s efforts to help the family make this progress - and
reports each step under a ROMA goal. Another useful measuring tool is a survey,
a series of questions that provides feedback from a group of respondents. Like
the customer satisfaction surveys used in restaurants or hotels, the survey ask
a series of questions about what happened to you and how you feel about it. The results of the survey
provide useful management information.
19. How can we assess our progress and
ensure we are moving in the right direction toward full use of ROMA?
The change to ROMA will take most agencies several years to complete.
There are four basic ways to measure your progress.
They include:
(a)
Comparing where you were last year with where you are today (Are we
making progress?)
(b)
Comparing your methods and progress with those of other CAA’s
(benchmarking with our peers).
(c)
Talking with people who have ideas about results measurement, and
(d)
Comparing your progress with the national expectations and norms as
described by
OCS
in their Information Memorandum #49, dated February 21, 2001 Responsibilities
and Strategies – FY 2001-2003.
On page six, OCS describes expectations for all entities eligible for
CSBG funds with regard to ROMA as follows:
1. The
entity and its board complete regular assessments of the entity’s overall
mission, desired impact(s) and program structure, taking into account: 1) the
needs of the community and its residents; 2) the relationship, or context of the
activities supported by the entity to other anti-poverty, community developments
services in the community; 3) the extent to which the entity’s activities
contribute to the accomplishment of one or more of the six ROMA national goals;
2.
Based upon the periodic assessments described above, the entity and its
board has identified yearly (or multi-annually) specific improvements, or
results, it plans to help achieve in the lives of individuals, families, and/or
the community as a whole;
3.
The entity organizes and operates all its programs, services and
activities toward accomplishing these improvements, or outcomes, including
linking with other agencies in the community when services beyond the scope of
the entity are required. All staff
are helped by the entity to understand the direct or indirect relationship of
their efforts to achieving specific client or community outcomes; and
4.
The entity provides reports to the State that describe client and
community outcomes and that capture the contribution of all entity programs,
services, and activities to the achievement of the outcomes.
G. ROMA.
What is an outcome and how do I develop one?
Outcomes and results:
·
help to explain and illustrate the
multi-year goals.
·
are statements of the kinds of
conditions that should exist when the goal has been satisfactorily achieved.
·
clarify the goal, and provide
additional direction in developing objectives.
Generally,
outcomes can:
·
be measured.
·
usually be quantified.
·
describe the desired condition/s
that will exist and how that is different from the existing condition/s.
|
“I
will be able to show that this goal has been achieved when . . .”
|
Generally, to identify an outcome
you have to look outside the agency to the program participants and the
community. If you can measure it by
watching the staff, it is probably an output.
This sections discusses:
- Conceptual approaches
to developing outcomes
- Sources of outcomes
- Group process
approaches to developing outcomes
- Some local sources of
help; local government
- Local colleges as
helpers; the state of social science
- Traps to avoid in
developing outcomes
- Outcomes linked to
fiscal operations
1.
Conceptual approaches to developing of the CONTENT of outcome measures.
What are the types of outcomes?
Because of the way G.P.R.A. and ROMA and
Congressional mandated outcomes are coming at you, the selection of specific
measures to be used for reporting at the local level or within a state is often
presented as the starting point for discussion. At first glance, that appears to be the challenge.
This probably makes the implementation process more difficult, because
the discussion assumes the rest of existing program operations are a given and
that only one thing – reporting measures – must be developed or changed.
Wrong and wrong again.
Whether you are looking at an agency or a program, changes in any one
part of the system are going to precipitate changes in other parts of the
system. If we change the measures,
then everything above them (e.g. goals, objectives, strategies, activities) is
going to be affected as well. The
outcome measures selected become both crucial descriptor of but also drivers of
program strategy, because in order to produce the desired result you have to use
a specific strategy that affects that measure.
Put another way, Julie Jakopic -- formerly of NASCSP -- says that
“Because we end up doing what we measure, we need to choose carefully how we
measure what we do.”
So we must consciously broaden the discussion about implementation of the
new reporting system to also look at the conditions in the community, to include
our theories about why the society works the way it works, and to include a
review of the strategies we use to change it.
I know that this expansion of awareness takes time and many people resist
doing it, because helped I peel this onion over about a three year period with
USDA rural development programs. Any
expansion of discussion to this broad range of topics immediately provokes
resistance, especially from the defenders of the status quo.
To them, an effort at large scale change implies that what we have been
doing is somehow wrong, that we are guilty of not doing what we were supposed to
be doing, and so on. One element of
change management is to ELIMINATE RESIDUAL GUILT about changing something. This is done by the leaders who say things like:
“What
we did was not wrong, it just was what we were doing. We did the best we knew how to do at the time, now we are
looking for something else to try. Don’t
feel bad about the past – feel good that we learned from it.
Now, it is time to move on."
There are several ways to go about developing new measures of results and
outcomes. You may use more than one
approach, but it is useful to unravel them and look at the different assumptions
on which they are based. And, no matter which way you start, you are probably going to
wind up moving to a review of most of your program strategies.
A.
Inductive approach from existing program operations.
Start with what you’ve got, usually program outputs, and see how far
you can stretch toward a description of outcomes.
In working with the U.S.D.A. Rural Development mission areas, John
Johnston and I assisted several working groups (housing, business, utilities) in
development of results measures. We
found that we could construct usable outcome measures (1) by starting with the
programs existing activities, milestones and output measure(s), and (2) working
outward very slowly and carefully toward the family and community, and (3)
tracing every step, (4) to make sure there was a powerful link between every
step. This was an inductive
strategy -- to build what the evaluators call a logic model -- that starts with
the program and moves outward by inches. And,
it inevitably takes you into questions about basic program strategy.
B.
Deductive approach from a plan. Start
with community conditions and a vision mission and goals.
This is the approach used by The Rensselearville Institute. Construct a far-reaching plan, identify your goals, and then
figure out how to determine if the goal is achieved. Ask yourself: “How would I know if this goal had been
achieved? How would I measure
it?”
C.
Use a deductive approach that starts with social indicators and tries
to bring it down to connect with a program.
In recent years, approaches such as the Oregon Compact have used social
indicators (the Oregon Benchmarks) as a way to focus attention on a subject
area. A large-scale citizen
planning effort led to the selection of the 259 measures, which were then boiled
down into a set of about 20 high-priority measures.
They are used to focus attention on a topic, e.g. “Let’s all do what
we can to reduce teen pregnancy.” But
they are not used as a way of measuring performance of individual
programs – they are used as signals that this is an important topic and people
should be working on the issue. This
also seems to be the approach being used by some of the Empowerment Zones and
Enterprise Communities (EZ/EC initiative), but some EZ/EC’s appear to have
confounded both social indicators and benchmarks.
It is hard to figure out how changes in the small populations covered by
the zones are going to show up in social indicators.
Remember, in the 1970's both the United Way and the H.H.S. (then HEW)
made a serious effort to use social indicators to measure progress in the social
programs they funded – and they abandoned it.
It did not work because most social indicators are the consequence of
dozens or hundreds of factors that are working together to produce that result.
The unemployment rate, for example, is impacted by interest rates in
Thailand, high-school graduation rates in Japan, migration patterns in Mexico,
technology patents in Germany, and on and on.
Conclusion. DO NOT adopt
social indicators (unemployment rate, crime rate) as outcome measures for any of
your efforts.
The H.H.S./O.C.S. Monitoring and Assessment Task Force (M.A.T.F.) is
suggesting you use social indicators only as descriptors of the CONTEXT of your
work, i.e., the unemployment rate in the community may influence your ability to
place people in jobs, but you should not assume responsibility for tying to
change the unemployment rate per-se.
D.
Customer satisfaction measurement.
You can make a pretty good argument that our focus on program outputs is
mis-focused because it gives too much credence to what we as program managers
think the service “is”, and that in a service business the only thing that
really matters is what the customer thinks has happened.
Most service businesses –airlines,
hotels, restaurants, banks, doctors, accountants – ask their customers what
they think and give them ways to give them systematic feedback through mail-in
or drop-in-the-box survey forms. Most
Federal agencies now do the same thing, including the Social Security
Administration and the DOL employment and training programs.
Most cities and school districts also measure customer satisfaction. (The author is highly opinionated on this subject and
in the interest of full disclosure should report that he develops and conducts customer
satisfaction surveys for Head Start programs.)
E.
Expert Observations. Use
professional opinion of the school counselor, teacher, psychologist, or social
worker. You are in effect relying on the credibility and authority of this
expert to validate the measurement. One
Head Start Director in Virginia asks all the school counselors “Do you see any
difference between the Head Start children and the others.”
And they say “Yes.” And he says “Would you write me a letter on
your letterhead stating that.” And
they do, and so he has a stack of letters validating the program that he carries
in his briefcase to show to people. Clever!
F.
Combine Customer Observation with Expert Observation.
Develop scales and ladders to connect what you do with the results
produced. One of the useful tools
adapted for use in ROMA are scales and ladders.
These rely on the combined judgment of the participant and the staff
person (the expert). They are a
good tool to use to measure incremental change over time.
There are several examples on the ROMA web site, at www.roma1.org
You can use the scale and ladder approach to measure just about anything.
Put the worst case scenario at the bottom, the best case at the top. Create intermediate steps that show progress from the worst
to the best. Eureka – a
scale and ladder!
1. What is ROMA? What
do the letters ROMA stand for?
2. How many ROMA goals are there?
How are the ROMA goal useful to a CAA?
3. What is an “outcome?”
4. Does ROMA report only on the services we provide?
5. What is one way that we can tell if we are moving in the
right direction on ROMA? What is
the source of guidance form the Federal government for CAA’s?
6. What are at least 2 ways to develop outcome measures?
Answers to Chapter Five Quiz
1. Results Oriented Management and Accountability.
2. There are six agency
goals. They can be used to organize
your thinking about what the agency will do.
3. An “outcome” is the
result of what you will do for individuals, families, and the community.
It describes the result your agency produces.
4.
No, ROMA reporting also involves describing the results you produce.
5.
You can always ask the State Funding Office (CSD) if you are moving in
the right direction. And, you can look at the Federal guidance in the form of OCS
Information Memorandum # 49.
6. One way is to “ask your customers” or program
participants about changes that your CAA has helped them make.
Another way is to ask other agencies what they are doing, and then adapt
them for your own use.
CAA
Board members, individually and collectively, have many of choices to make.
a.
Some are personal choices. You
should know where you stand and how other board members feel about issues.
b.
Other choices are the types of roles you want your CAA to perform.
c.
Others are types of strategies you want your CAA to use in the community.
d.
Other choices are the types of problems you will work on or the
opportunities you want to pursue.
e.
Other choices are the characteristics of
people you will seek to help.
f. Other choices are your relationship to the other human systems and
constituencies, to other forces for change in America, and how you will relate
to those forces. Will you support,
oppose, try to modify, or piggyback on the other changes that are taking place?
Your answers to these sets of choices,
individually and collectively, will help define the type of CAA that will exist
in your community. Some of the more
important are:
- Whether
you as a Board Member want to be a participant in the ongoing struggle for
social justice and economic opportunity.
Another way of asking this is whether you want to work for change at
the federal government level, or if you want it to happen at the state,
county and community levels.
- Whether
you want to leave the responsibility for change to other people, or if you
accept personal responsibility.
- Whether
you see your role as consoling those who do not now have enough of what
America offers, i.e. as ameliorating the conditions of poverty, or as
eliminating the causes of poverty.
- Whether
you will focus on the long-term (3 to 5 years) or want quick results, i.e.
less than one year.
- Whether
you will focus on individuals who are already low-income at this time, or on
the economic and social systems that might be improved to help large numbers
of people over time. Will you
focus on the people, the social systems, or both?
- Whether
you see yourself as an agent of social change in your community, or as a
monitor of the compliance of your agency with funding agency regulations.
- The
degree to which you are willing to take risks. Some investments are successful, some are not.
Some program approaches work, some don't.
Some positions on issues are popular, others are not.
To what extent will you risk being criticized?
This workbook is about “how to row.” About
how to create improvements in a community using your own smarts, energy and
resources. About how to persist,
and grind it out.
“Rowing” may not be as dramatic as a Presidential Speech.
An issue of concern to us today may never be as visible on the federal
agenda as when LBJ was at the helm. But
rowing will get you -- and others -- across the river, and that is where we want
to go.
The way you work out these answers to these
kinds of questions is through personal reflection, asking yourself what YOU are
all about, and by discussing these kinds of issues with other board members.
1. What are some of the ‘basic choices’ for board members?
2. How will you arrive at decisions around these basic choices?
Answer to Chapter Six Quiz
1)
Some of the basic choices are:
·
what you want to work on themselves
as individuals,
·
what types of problems you want
their agency to work on,
·
which groups of people you want
their agency to help, and
·
which types of strategies you think
the agency should use.
2.
Some of the answers to these questions come from self-reflection and
discussion with other board members.
A.
A short history of anti-poverty programs in the U.S.
After the 1890 census, the
settlement house movement analyzed the living patterns of poor people in
Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The
“survey movement” as it was called prompted a young professor named W.E.B.
DuBois to write a book (cite) in which he identified four main causes of poverty
in the U.S.
- Slavery
and its negative effects on black family life, education, motivation, etc.
- Migration
of people into America and within America (into cities) causing disruption
of typical communal living patterns and social networks
- Industrialization
and its churning of the economy, with constant innovation and built-in
obsolescence always resulting in workers being left behind, and
- A
peculiar affliction of white people that persisted after slavery ended –
racism – that denied opportunities to blacks in most areas of the economy,
and denied access to the vehicles through which most people might improve
their lives (education, job training).
From its early appearance in the settlement house movement in the 1880's until
the 1930's, the social work profession was heavily into “street work.”
In the 1930's it split into two pieces, and a new profession was created
that focused more on theory and research rather than on practice.
The new profession, sociology, selected two of Du Bois four ideas as
their main tenants to explain poverty life in America.
2. Migration of people into
America -- mostly into cities
3. Industrialization and its
churning of the economy.
Race was left behind, for two reasons.
(1) The field of sociology was itself segregated, like most of the rest
of America, and (2) it was at the height of the great depression and even white
people’s ability to earn a living was severely challenged, so race as a topic
of study receded into the background.
During the Depression, national attention was focused on creation of the new
social insurance programs. The idea
that the Federal government should not regulate the economy was swept into
history. The “New Deal” created Social Security, passed new laws
to regulate the economy (banking laws, SEC) on protecting the rights of workers
(right to organize unions, creating a minimum wage, unemployment insurance.)
The WPA, CCC and NYA
provided work for millions.
In the 1930's the sociologists focused on youth access to the opportunity
structure and work, and decided that what was needed was a “program of
community action” wherein all elements of the community would get together to
(a) try to offset the social disorganization created by migration and
industrialization and (b) create new social structures and pathways for youth to
enter mainstream society. This theory was put into operation in Chicago.
It was called the “Program of Community Action.”
Alice O’Connor describes this in her book Poverty
Knowledge, published in 2001 by Princeton University Press. The initial approach was the all elements of the community
– business, government, churches, labor, nonprofits – to get together to
coordinate and collaborate on building new method for social control of youth
and to develop new pathways into mainstream society.
An important offshoot of this method was
developed by one of the sociology graduate students working in this Program of
Community Action. Mr. Saul Alinsky
decided that a more community-based and confrontational style of organizing was
needed in order to convince “the power structure” (variously defined) to
allocate the work opportunities, a fair share of municipal services and other
forms of social justice to low income people.
In 1954, the 40-year effort of the NAACP (lead by lawyer Thurgood Marshall) paid
off with the Supreme Court decision on Brown versus Board of Education, which
rules that “separate is NOT equal.” This
thrust race back into the national spotlight, and more people started saying
“If segregation is wrong in schools, it is probably wrong in housing,
busses, lunch counters and elsewhere.”
Also
during the 1950's in several cities the work on juvenile delinquency had
continued to grow, with numerous program strategies being supported by
Foundations. The Ford Foundation
funded “gray areas” projects, two of the most notable became the
“models” for community action agencies.
The first was in New Haven where all elements of the community were
brought together – elected officials, churches, nonprofits, the business
community, labor – to work
collaboratively. The other was the
Mobilization for Youth on the lower East side of New York City.
In
1963 the Council of Economic Advisors had recommended a program to end poverty
that was based primarily on expanding the economy – to lift all boats.
This approach was heavily favored by most Republicans, and by President
Johnson’s Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz (who wanted to do job training new
workers).
But Johnson wanted more. The
American public seemed willing. Times
were good and the public perceived that there was enough for everybody, and that
exclusion of people from the mainstream based on their race should stop.
The Economic Opportunity Act passed on
August 20, 1964. It established the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, which
managed the community action program and began funding local entities which were
called Community Action Agencies.
There
have been six eras of program structures and reporting systems for CAA’s that
were permitted or required by the Federal Government.
ROMA is the most recent system.
Now that we have gleaned a few lessons from previous management systems,
we continue to look at how ROMA was created.
- 1993--present.
The Development of and Shift to the New Approach.
In 1993, Congress passed the Government
Performance and Results Act or GPRA (pronounced “Jip-ra” or “Gip-ra”)
requiring all Federal agencies to: develop strategic plans by the year 1997;
to report on the results and outcomes of each program; and to begin
requesting funds from Congress using those strategic plans and outcomes by
the year 2002 (now extended into 2003 and 2004).
This represents a fundamental shift in how the Federal government
administers programs. It was
fairly clear how this would work in programs operated by the Federal
government, e.g. the Army Corps of Engineers and the Social Security
Administration. It was much
less clear how this was to work for block grants.
At this same time, several state governments and state CSBG offices
were also grappling with the results and outcome issues, encouraged by
political leaders or a citizenry who want them to “re-invent” government
and make it more effective and responsible.
The H.H.S./OCS responded by creating the Monitoring and Assessment Task Force,
and inviting it to develop goals and results measures for the CSBG.
The membership was drawn from all the stakeholder groups in the CSBG
network. This is a very important
point -- the membership of the MATF was designed to represent all the
institutional interests in the network -- the individual CAA’s, NASCSP, NACAA,
NCAF, and OCS. This is as good a
partnership team between Federal, state and CAA as this author has seen in 37
years in community action. The OCS,
under the leadership of Don Sykes, Peg Washnitzer and Mae Brooks, deserves high
praise for creating a highly participatory process and for taking the time
needed to shape a consensus.
Through a sustained process, the MATF designed the six goals and identified
possible measures. The MATF created
the Results Oriented Management and Accountability (ROMA) principles and systems
as a workable and best available approach to provide a foundation for CAA’s to
use in their anti-poverty work for the next decade.
As is the case in any gathering of community action folk, there were substantive
and strong disagreements among the participants about the causes of poverty,
about what strategies work to reduce poverty, and what CSBG should be used for,
and about what CAA’s should be doing. Most
CAA’s employ people or have board members who have very different belief
systems. This has been true since
the original Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 pulled in people who believed in
very different theories, strategies and program approaches.
We have a big tent that has always incorporated strategies that assumed
that the problem and the “fix” for poverty rested with: (a) the economy
(wages and access to work), (b) changing social values such as racism or
offsetting them through legal action, (c) the adult individuals and families
(engage in family development and enhance motivation), and (4) children and
youth development. These strategies
are based on different assumptions about how our society works.
These conflicts have persisted within public policy and within the CAA network
to this day. At the MATF meetings,
one person would argue that all change begins at the individual level, and only
work with individuals is valid. Another
would argue that only change at the national level make a big impact, and our
effort should be focused on public policy.
Others argue that the new approaches in community building and community
development were “where it’s at.” And
others argued that our primary role was in providing for basic needs of food,
shelter and clothing for those who do not have enough.
There were also healthy disagreements about whether our work should be
focused at the national, regional, state or local levels.
The MATF works mostly by consensus.
Why do I repeat that? Because
the six goals and sample measures developed by the MATF represent a CONSENSUS
among both the institutional interests and the individuals who have the
different theories of poverty and anti-poverty work.
The six goals span and provide a place for the various theories of
poverty that have existed since the inception of CAA’s.
Goal
1. Low-income people become more
self-sufficient.
This is for the folks who think that solving poverty one person at a
time is what we should be doing (self sufficiency for individuals and
families). The focus here in on
increasing household income.
Goal
2. The conditions under which
low-income people live are improved.
This covers changes in social or economic systems or at the community
level, and includes strategies such as community
building and community development.
Goal
3. Low-income people own a stake
in their community.
This covers empowerment and civic participation, and includes
strategies such as the Dialogues on Poverty.
Goal
4. Partnerships among
supporters and providers of service to low-income people are achieved.
This seeks to build the partnerships and network capacity.
Goal
5 . Agencies increase their
capacity to achieve results.
This seeks to build our individual agencies.
Goal
6. Low-income people, especially
vulnerable populations, achieve their potential by strengthening family and
other supportive systems.
This covers human development (e.g., Head Start).
It also provides a place for those who want to focus on child and
family development, working with senior citizens, or on basic needs by giving
people stuff.
Conclusions.
A lot of work and compromise went into the six goals.
They provide a “home” from the diverse and often conflicting theories
about poverty. The goals themselves
do not favor any one approach over any other.
The six goals are the best framework for you to use to move forward in
developing outcome measures. The
selection or development of measures is in its infancy.
Eventually a few standardized measures should be adopted for each goal at
the state and national levels, and all CAA’s should report on those
standardized issues even if their answer is “zero.”
There should always be the option of a CAA using additional local
measures.
There are five “horizon
issues.” These are trends or
issues that are just revealing themselves but have the potential to have a big
impact on our future. (1) PART, (2)
the shift to identify some mandatory measures, (3) the effort to significantly
reduce the number of measures, (4) the poverty index is obsolete and needs to be
changed, and (5) there is a flood of new books and information on poverty.
1.
P.A.R.T. The Bush
Administration has developed a Presidents Management Agenda being managed by the
Office of Management and Budget. It
lays out several principles and tools, including the Program
Assessment Rating Tool, or PART. The
PART builds off of the GPRA.
OMB
does PART assessments of program and uses them to make its recommendations for
budget. It was in the PART
reviews that both Head Start and CAA’s came under criticism.
You should look at the Presidents Management Agenda, www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2002/mgmt.pdf
You can look at the mechanics of the PART system
at:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budintegration/part_assessing2004.html
The PART report for FY 2003 is at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/pdf/PMA.pdf
The Weatherization program is on page 106.
The HHS section begins on page 109.
Head Start is on page 123. (The printed page numbers are about 3 below
what the page counter on your Internet Explorer because Explorer adds in the
table of contents, e.g. Head Start is page 123 in the actual document but
shows as page 126 on your screen counter.)
Head Start will be reviewed again in FY 2004.
2.
The second shift to toward having some mandatory measures, on which all
CAA’s would report even if the number being reported on any given measure from
any given agency is “zero.” This
is a shift we should make, as we have to be able to talk about what CAA’s and
the CSBG is doing nationwide. The
efforts of the NASCSP to come up with 2 or 3 measures for each of the 6 ROMA
goals is a step in this direction, and in my opinion this is a step in the right
direction – as long as you can
continue to use other measures selected locally.
3.
The third issue is that OMB is pressing all agencies to dramatically
reduce the number of performance measures used to measures results and
outcomes. Whereas the approach
taken by the MATF and OCS for CSBG was to identify a lot of possible measures
and to allow states and CAA’s to add their own measures to those, the pressure
is on from OMB to have only a very small number of measures (e.g. 2 to 6) for an
entire program. And, CSBG is a
funding stream – it is not a program like WX or LIHEAP.
4. The current methods of measuring poverty are obsolete. They do not deal
with the dynamics of poverty today. There
are numerous alternatives being discussed that include the actual cost of
housing and health care, and that also add in the benefits that some people
receive. These are excellent
discussions and hopefully will produce a big change in how we describe what it
means to be poor.
5.
There is an enormous outpouring of new
books, articles and web sites on poverty. I
have seen about 20 new books in the past two years that focus on poverty.
We have seen this kind of flood of publications before, in the 1930’s
and in the 1960’s. The academics
are raising public consciousness, coming up with new theories of poverty, and
dealing themselves back into the public policy discussions.
And,
of course there are many big issues under debate during the reauthorization and
appropriation. Stay involved in
these discussions!
1.
Where did the theory of “community action” come from?
2.
When did the Federal government first take action on a large scale to
address issues of poverty?
3.
What was the Supreme Court Decision in 1954 that had a major impact on
race relations in America?
4.
When was the “War on Poverty” created by Congress?
5.
What is the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA)?
Why is it important to CAA’s?
6.
Identify at least one ‘horizon issue’ or major challenge of
importance to all CAA’s.
7.
Identify any unique challenges to your CAA that should be dealt with over
the next few years.
Answers
to Chapter 7 Quiz
1.
During the Depression. The
“New Deal” was born.
2.
According to historian Alice O’Connor, it was developed by Sociologists
at the University of Chicago in the 1930’s as a social control strategy and as
a social integration strategy to reduce delinquency and to integrate youth into
the workforce.
3.
The Supreme Court decision on Brown versus Board of Education ruled that
separate school facilities for white and black children did not constitute equal
treatment, i.e. separate is inherently unequal no matter what the physical
facilities may be.
4.
The Economic Opportunity Act passed on August 20, 1964. It established
the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, which managed the community action
program and began funding local entities which were called Community Action
Agencies.
5.
The GPRA requires all Federal agencies (and by extension all entities
funded by Federal agencies) to report on the results and outcomes that they
produce.
Virtually every
governmental and nonprofit agency in the United States that receives money from
the Federal government must develop ways to report on its results and outcomes.
6.
See the list of national issues.
7.
You may have local issues as well that your board should discuss and act
upon.
The
community action network has almost 40 years of experience in developing and
implementing successful anti-poverty strategies.
In the 1960's, the use of civil rights and community organizing
strategies removed barriers and opened up created hundreds of new strategies and
programs. Human development (Head Start and family development) and
public charity to create a minimal quality of life (commodity food and money)
became legitimate areas of Federal expenditure.
In the 1970's, individual entitlements expanded, such as Social Security,
LIHEAP, Food Stamps, and SSI. In
the 1980's there was a shift in social values and limits were put on how long a
person could receive entitlements and recipients were asked to “earn” or
“work off” those benefits. Over
the past 40 years, we have had some successes and some partial successes.
We have learned much.
Poverty today has some new causes. The
economy is dramatically different from what it was in the 1960's.
In the 1960’s, one income in a household at the minimum wage moved a
family out of poverty. Now, this is
no longer enough for a family or even an individual to live a decent life.
Some of the approaches that used to be effective in increasing household
income (i.e., get a G.E.D.) are not very powerful any more.
(See chart in Appendix A)
For the next phase of the War on Poverty, I challenge CAA’s to develop
strategies focused on (1) creating a living wage for work, (2) developing new
types of socially useful work; (3) creating social capital; (4) creating
financial assets; (5) expanding unique approaches to human development; (6)
learning more about the dynamics of poverty, and (7) moving away from using tax
dollars for charity activity. Each of these is explored below.
(A)
Our society now has a social value that all people must work, but our
society does not have a social value that all who work will receive a living
wage. For too many people, this
makes work a cruel hoax. We
need to tie these social values together, and to expand the concept of “a
living wage for a fair day’s work..” This
can be accomplished by raising the minimum wage and/or by expanding the Earned
Income Tax Credit (EITC).
(B)
We can also increase household income by expanding other benefits that are
available to people who do work, including unemployment insurance and child
care, and by providing part of the cost of health care.
(C)
Everybody must have high-school level skills to make it at a minimal
level in the economy and to function as a citizen.
Drugs may result in spiritual suicide, but dropping out of high school
is economic suicide. A youth may
change the type of school they attend, but there is no dropping out! Many other countries exceed the U.S. on high school
graduation rates and basic literacy.
(D)
However, everybody is not going to go to college B and the economy has no need
for them if they did. Education is good for its own sake, but not all of the
existing level of educational attainment is needed to run the economy.
America should create school-to-work systems that move ALL youth from
school into productive, well paying work. Several
European countries have done this, and so should we.
(E)
In the globalized industries (e.g., manufacturing, natural resources,
agriculture) the international regulatory bodies such as the World Trade
Organization and international agreements set the rules about child labor,
health and safety, the right to organize, and environmental protection. The
jobs move to countries with low standards.
These agreements now shape the numbers and quality of jobs in most
countries of the world B including the U.S.!
Our understanding of economics can not stop at the border, and our
policy advocacy must include global issues.
For the foreseeable future, primarily due to globalization and technological
change, there will not be enough good-paying jobs in the private sector to
provide a job for everybody who wants one.
CAA’s should develop new ways for people to earn money that include the
traditional approach of securing employment in the private sector economy, but
that go beyond it. One strategy
that has worked on a large scale is public-service employment that produces
socially useful benefits even if they are not economically self-sustaining.
Improvements of the environment and childcare are examples.
Another strategy is to help some people become self-employed.
Another strategy is to operate for-profit ventures B social enterprises B
that provide employment.
We must strengthen
communities through approaches that have labels like community building,
creating intentional communities, creating civic capital, and strengthening
civil society. These require techniques that go beyond the classic approach
of community organizing. The
Dialogue on Poverty for 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012
is a good strategy and can be expanded.
Our working to persuade people to adopt new social values and to agree to
other institutional changes also produces social capital.
We need to rethink the nature of “family.”
Our classic idea of a “nuclear family” has de-constructed to where
only one adult must be present. There
may be benefits to this idea (e.g. individual liberty), but it is not a viable
construct for households with children in the American economy. For households
with children, I suggest that we try to build families that have at least two
income-producing adults. They can
be married or not, straight or gay, the same generation or multi-generational,
lovers or friends, but we need a new social value that every household with a
child should have at least two income-producing adults.
The new approaches to improving inter-ethnic relations and reducing racism and
the other “isms” may have names like diversity, multi-cultural programming,
and dispute resolution.
We
can promote and assist social movements (e.g., the Million Man March).
Other areas where we should work for changes in social values include moving
some crimes to another domain. For example, we should move all “status crimes” from
criminal justice system to social services and health.
In the 1980's Surgeon General Everett Koop defined AIDS as being a health
issue, not a moral issue or a criminal issue. This would include moving most
casual and individual drug use from criminal activity to health/education.
We should treat all addictive drugs the same (alcohol, marijuana,
nicotine, etc).
We should get the Federal, state and local governments out of games of chance.
If individuals want to gamble that is their right, but the state should
not run it or promote it.
In recent years, there have several new approaches to helping people
create assets that can be used as a cushion to carry them through a job loss or
an illness. The Individual
Development Accounts, first-time-homebuyer programs, and financial literacy
program can all help people develop savings and investments.
As Professor Michael Sherraden says, you do not consume your way out of
poverty, to get out of poverty and to stay out of poverty you have to save your
way out of poverty. Too many
low-income families have no net worth or a negative net worth. They indeed are “one paycheck away from poverty.”
CAAs have good capacity in family development and case management
services, especially for families with young children.
However, CAAs must define how their approach is different from similar
methods used in Family Preservation, TANF and community mental health.
“Me too!” is not a brand name.
Head Start is the single most successful human development program for
low-income people, and it will increasingly be the locus for family development.
Public support for programs for children age zero to five is expanding. I predict that within 20 years there will be universal
preschool in America, as there now is in several other countries.
Either Head Start is going to do zero to five B or somebody else is.
Head Start does face a risk, because it is a
strong horse on the track, that it will get loaded down with other theories or
“needs,” e.g. self sufficiency, youth development, substance abuse,
education of parents. How much can
this strong horse carry?
Learning and development are profoundly social experiences, not just training
the brain. We should increase
our impact on educational systems and processes.
We should move curriculum from the current ratio of 80% cognitive
development and 20% social development to more like 50-50.
Put Head Start into the classrooms!
Put parents back in the loop, in the classroom and in charge of their
child’s education. The next big
advances in a child’s performance in school will come from interventions in
family dynamics, not from instructional technology.
(A)
A new Unified Field Theory of Poverty is needed.
It is generally agreed that there are many causes of poverty, ranging
from the way our economy produces poor people even in the best of times, to
social causes (family dynamics) to individual causes (a few people really ARE
“just lazy”). You would think
we would have sorted out all the factors that cause poverty and developed
powerful strategies focused on each, but in this regard we are not much better
off than we were 40 years ago. We
do not even have very good descriptions of the ideologies that people use, in
the absence of facts, to project their fantasies about poverty.
(B)
Social dynamics are poorly understood.
Movement in an out of poverty is far more pronounced that is evident by
our “snapshots” of poverty, e.g. last year the poverty rate is x% and this
year it is y%. About half
of people who are poor today will not be poor in two years, and most of them
do not get un-poor because they participate in government programs.
In other words, there is a massive churning of people in and out of
poverty, somewhat parallel to the churning of people in and out of low-wage
jobs. We really do not understand the dynamics of this.
The Institute for Social Research has operated a Panel Study in Income
Dynamics (PSID) for decades, but its findings are written in researchese and
are not widely distributed. Their
work is one starting point for learning more.
(C)
Myths about governments creating social mobility and opportunity mask reality.
Social mobility up and down the five income quintiles (from the bottom
20% of earners up to the top 20%of earners) is poorly understood. Boston-based sociologist Peter Berger has done some important
work comparing social mobility around the world. He finds that it is the stage of industrialization in a
country and adoption of technology that drives social mobility, and not the
form of government. Taiwan,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, the U.S., France, Russia, Germany and other
industrialized nations have about the same rates of social mobility, with
about 25% of workers moving up at least one quintile each year and 15% of
workers moving down at least one quintile.
His work receives no attention among policy makers, because it
contradicts the social myth that democracy and our form of government create
social mobility. But B if we
focused on the actual drivers -- science and technology -- we could more
precisely develop policies to harness their benefits and counteract their
negative effects.
(D)
The connections between the community action movement and academia are largely
non-existent. Practitioners and university professors live in different
solar systems. Most academics
have wandered off into arcane corners of their disciplines.
Alice O’Connor in her new book “Poverty Knowledge” (Princeton
University Press, 2001) has traced the pattern of what is essentially the
departure, over the past one hundred years, of academics from the public
policy arena. The NACAA/CAP has
an important new initiative to forge links with universities.
(E)
Some new research has been done looking at income distribution among social
classes; as correlated with educational attainment; and even as correlated
with raw intelligence. All of
these should be reviewed.
(F)
There is still much to figure out in terms of use or abuse of the world’s
resources and the impact of humans on the environment.
With over half of the world=s population living on less than $2 a day,
the distribution of resources and the creation of sustainable development
policies offer challenges in all disciplines, including politics, development,
economics, ethics and theology. If
the rest of the world lived like North America, it would require the resources
of three Earths.
Help other groups be
charities that give for benevolent reasons.
(A)
The goal is for every person must be self-sufficient is not realistic
and it is not achievable. Some
people will always need services. We
must have a place for them in our communities as well and provide a humane
standard of living, but we have no agreement in this society about what that
standard is. Until a national
consensus emerges, I would argue that this is best worked out on a community
by community basis, using primarily non-public funds.
Most publicly funded human development programs should be based on a
principle of reciprocity B “We will help you do X if you will do Y.”
(B)
We have profound confusion in America about role of the individual
versus the role of society in terms of meeting basic needs.
Who is responsible for what? In
terms of gifts of free food, money and other stuff, individuals generally want
more than society is willing to give, and “Society” resents what it does
give. The public and most service providers are confused about charity
functions (gifts of free stuff) that are subsidized by public funds.
I used to believe that every bit of food and clothing somehow was part
of our human development effort. I
do not believe that any more. The
best case is that this “stuff” gets the recipient up to zero.
They still have to develop the capacity or resources to get out of
poverty and stay out of poverty. I
now also agree B reluctantly B with those who say that publicly funded
agencies may be creating false impressions and expectations among too many
recipients of such aid. For some
people, it does reduce their incentive to help themselves.
when
we compare the results produced by for example a job training program and a
family development program and an educational program and an IDA program with
giving away free food, the other strategies produce better results than giving
away free food. And, the other strategies have more support from the general
public than the public charity functions.
CAA’s
should, over time, de-emphasize and phase out of the role of public charity.
CAA’s should help other organizations, including faith-based
organizations, to develop their capacity to provide gifts of charity. Publicly-funded agencies can clarify their purpose and focus
on activities that bring about larger changes in social values and economic
opportunity and that focus on human development if they will GIVE BACK the
charity functions to churches, civic groups, families, and neighbors.
The
next page contains a comparison of antipoverty strategies that worked then and
why they do not work now.
|
THEN
|
NOW
|
|
Economy
|
Strong
manufacturing economy.
High
school education got you a good job.
|
Only
a college diploma assures non-poverty level work
|
|
Willingness
to work was the key variable; strong back and hands got you a job.
|
Mental
capacity and middle class social skills are more important.
|
|
Get
Dad any job on the assembly line and the family was out of poverty.
|
Not
enough dads, not enough jobs, no assembly lines.
There is no modern day counterpart to the manufacturing jobs of the
past. These jobs are now done
overseas or by robots.
|
|
Education
needed
|
A
high school diploma assured a job above poverty line
|
Only
a college diploma assures non poverty level work
|
|
Remove
on barrier
|
Made
a big difference
Got
a good ‘bounce’
|
Does
not make much difference
|
|
Social
Values:
|
|
Racism
|
Federal
action needed to end this major problem
|
This
problem is solved. Do as little as possible.
|
|
Gender
role
|
Women
should be able to work too
|
Women
must work
|
|
Government
role
|
Government
should lead to promote change, end discrimination
|
Government
reducing its role
|
|
Social
values
|
Enough
for all, let’s share for all of those who need it. Federal action needed
|
“End
welfare as we know it.”
Punish them for having babies.
|
|
Attitude
about Economy
|
America
must open up. Reallocate resources. Anyone who wants to work should be
able to “make it.”
|
America
is just fine. Give the money back to those who earned it. It’s your
fault if you don’t make it.
|
|
Attitude
about Entitlements
|
Our
system has problems. Join together to end discrimination, change America.
|
No
free lunch.
|
In this chapter, the
author identifies some “challenge issues” for future anti poverty work.
1.
What is the first issue the author identifies?
What is your opinion on this matter?
2.
Do you think there are enough “good jobs” that pay an “adequate
wage” for people in your area?
3.
What are the three types of capital that the author recommends that are
needed to avoid poverty to escape poverty quickly?
4.
What are some of the challenges of the public charity functions?
5.
What is one major reason that some of our strategies seem to be less
effective now than they were in the past?
Answers
to Chapter 8 Quiz
1.
People who work full time should earn enough money to live on. The minimum wage has not kept up with inflation or the cost
of living increases.
2.
This is an opinion, or is based in research conducted by your agency or
by the county government, or by organizations such as the workforce investment
board.
3.
Social capital, financial capital and human capital.
4.
There is no agreement in American about constitutes a minimum quality of
life. The public charity functions
are seen as (a) in competition with private charities, or (b) creating
dependence, (c) being something for nothing type of programs in that they do not
require the recipients to ‘give back’ to society or to do anything to hello
themselves.
5.
Many of our past strategies were based on the manufacturing economy and
on getting people jobs in factories on assembly lines.
These kinds of jobs are increasingly done overseas or by robots.
(Includes
Anita Lichtblau’s
comments)
A.
Basic CAA Board Functions. What
it is doing, why it exists.
B. Composition of the Board.
C. Reasons for the composition
D. Types of Boards - governing and
administering.
E. Articles of incorporation and
bylaws.
F. Sources of authority.
G. Decisions areas for a board
H. Individual member legal
responsibilities.
I. Community Problem Solving.
Know what your board does.
The Board of Directors manages the affairs of the agency consistent with the
Articles of Incorporation and By-laws. The
basic functions of the Board include their fulfilling their roles in:
1.
Defining the vision and the mission of the agency.
For CAA’s, this is a vision of an alternative future for low- their
community as a whole and for low-income people in particular. This is the
vision toward which board members will work.
It is the “ends” the Board will seek.
2.
Setting the goals and selecting the
strategies that will enable them to achieve the desired future.
This involves selecting approaches that the CAA will use to accomplish
its ends.
3.
Mobilizing resources, including their
own energy. There is a fiduciary
obligation to acquire, handle and disperse assets in a responsible manner.
4.
Managing the relationship of the Board
to several key constituencies, including: low-income people, elected
officials, other human services systems, other community and stakeholder
groups, and funding agencies.
5.
Engaging in community problem-solving
activity.
6.
Monitoring and evaluating the Executive
Director, to insure that s/he installs and manages systems in the CAA for:
a.
Planning,
b.
Community participation, organization and development.
c.
Program implementation, information systems, evaluation.
d.
Personnel management,
e.
Fiscal management,
f.
Public relations,
g.
Staff and Board Development, Training and Technical Assistance.
h.
Compliance with applicable laws and regulations.
The CAA is a “Person”.
The board of any corporation is considered by law to be one single
“person.” The corporation does
business and has a life apart from the individual lives of its members, and the
corporation can act only as a result of collective actions by its members.
A key
element of every CAA is the unique composition or structure of its Board.
The Community Services Block Grant
Act of 1981, as amended, requires that one third of the Board shall consist
of elected public officials or their representatives; at least
one-third of the members must be democratically selected representatives of the
poor residents of the area being served; and the remainder must be members or
officials of business, industry, labor, religion, law enforcement, education or
other major groups and interests in the community.
You should also check your state CSBG statutes or regulations for
additional requirements.
It is not
required by Federal law, but it is considered to be good practice to have all
committees of the Board reflect the tri-partite composition.
1. Selection of Public
Officials
The CAA shall select the elected public officials to serve on the Board (Sec. 676B(a)(2)).
If there are not enough elected public officials reasonably available and
willing to serve on the Board, the CAA may select appointed public officials to
serve on the Board. Whether elected
or appointed, these officials should currently hold office at the time they are
selected. (Sec 676B(a)(2)(A).
Although it is not part of the CSBG Act,
either by historical practice or by state regulations, in most CAA's the
requirement is that the elected officials should have either general
governmental responsibilities or other responsibilities which require them to
deal with poverty-related issues.
2.
Representation of the Poor
Representatives
of the poor shall be chosen by any democratic selection method which ensures
that they represent the poor in the area served by the CAA.
They need not be poor themselves, but they must represent the poor.
The methods include, but are not limited to:
a. To
represent a specific area or neighborhood.
b.
At large, to represent the entire area served by the CAA.
c.
To represent a particular organization whose membership is composed
predominately of poor persons.
3.
Representation of the Private Sector
For
community action to achieve its maximum potential, the entire community must be
involved. The entire community must
also be represented on the CAA Board by the three sectors.
Public officials must be there because they formally represent both the
general public and the local government. Low-income
people must be there because they know the problems of poverty. The balance of the community must be there because the CAA
can succeed only through support and partnerships with other service agencies,
private employers, churches, law enforcement, unions, etc.
CAA’s were created to eliminate poverty by eliminating
root causes of poverty. The Board
has been given responsibility to carry out this mission. The Board's greatest single resource is people.
This statement is true of the Board's own membership.
Each member of the Board has vital talents, experience, contacts and
resources to offer.
Be able to explain what kind of board you have.
There are two basic types of Community Action Agency (CAA) Boards:
governing boards and administering boards.
You need to know if you are a governing board or an
administering board, and if you are an administering board how much authority
you have been given by the local elected officials.
The types and amounts of authority that local elected officials retain
for themselves and the types and amounts that they allow the administering board
to exercise varies dramatically from county to county.
From 1964 to 1968, a CAA was any entity that OEO said was
a CAA. OEO decided which group or
organization was a CAA and which was not. OEO
funded almost 1,800 CAA’s. Some
cities had several CAA’s. Some
rural counties with very small populations (e.g. a few thousand people) had a
CAA.
Prior to 1968, some CAA’s were membership organizations,
with hundreds or thousands of low-income and other people having membership
cards in the organization -- and the members elected the Directors.
In l968, the CAA’s that were membership organizations were converted
(in response to OEO policy) so that the membership of the organization and the
membership of the Board of Directors are the same, i.e. there are no members
other than the board members.
In 1967, Congress decided to give elected officials more
power over community action programs. The
mechanism they selected was to give elected officials authority to pick the
agency that would administer the community action programs funded by OEO and
other agencies. The Green Amendment
to the EOA (for Congresswoman Edyth Green from Portland, Oregon) gave the
elected officials the authority to designate any entity they wanted.
They could designate an existing CAA, another private nonprofit
corporation, a public agency or even themselves -- as the CAA.
If the designation was done properly, then OEO would recognize the CAA.
Most CAA designations were done by Local Elected Officials (LEO’s) but
Congress decided to get all public officials (not just LEO’s) involved with
CAA’s in three ways.
First, it added the public sector board requirement,
requiring one-third of a CAA’s board to be public officials or their
representatives. (“One-third of the members of the board are public officials,
including the chief elected official or officials, or their representatives,
unless the number of such officials reasonably available or willing to serve is
less than one-third of the membership of the board.”) Second, it gave states and political subdivisions the
authority to designate CAA’s. The
1967 amendments refer to CAA’s as being designated by a state or political
subdivision/s of a state having elected or duly appointed governing officials. OEO still had to recognize the designation whether it was
done by LEO’s or other elected officials.
Third, OEO could itself designate CAA’s under certain circumstances:
such as: (1) if the CAA selected by the state/political subdivision/s failed to
submit or carry out a satisfactory plan to achieve objectives specified in the
EOA; and (2) where neither the state nor political subdivisions were willing to
be designated as a CAA or to designate a CAA for their community.
In the rare situation where the elected officials failed to act at all or
failed to follow through, the Federal OEO would do the designation.
In
l968, about 95% of the existing private nonprofit CAA’s were designated by the
LEO’s. (At the same time, OEO was
consolidating the number of CAA’s and reduced the total number to about
1,000). All of the private
nonprofit corporations that were designated and recognized by OEO have Governing
Boards. The Governing Board
exercises the full range of corporate responsibilities for operating the CAA.
The Governing Board “owns” the CAA in the sense of “owning” the
purpose, mission and public trust given to the organization.
In 1968, during the implementation of the Green Amendment
of the EOA, in about 5% of counties and cities, the local elected officials
designated themselves or some other public agency as the CAA. The public CAA’s
are often referred to as “Green CAPs” (although
you could probably argue that technically all the CAA’s of that era are
“Green CAPS.”) Those
designated as public CAA’s included most of the big cities.
About half of all the CAA’s in California were designated as public
agencies.
States often apply a generic label to the boards established by a
political subdivision, and refer to all types of them as Administering Boards or
as Advisory Boards. Within this
label, however, there are two distinct types of entities.
Where the subdivision has reserved much of the authority over the program
for itself the Board is often called an Advisory Board because its primary role
is to advise the political subdivision or elected officials on how it should run
the program. Please note that although some public CAA’s may still use
the term “Advisory Board,” the 1998 amendments to the CSBG Act strengthen
the role of public CAA Boards, requiring either a tripartite board whose
low-income members of the board “are able to participate actively in the
development, planning, implementation, and evaluation of CSBG programs,” or
“another mechanism specified by the State to assure decision making and
participation by low-income individuals” in those functions.
Perhaps most significantly, the CSBG Act requires the public CAA Board to
“administer” (not just advise) the CSBG program. See Section 676B(b). So
this is a situation where there is a large gray area of practice and where
states and local jurisdictions do not necessarily have a clear cut idea about
the limits of the authority of the administering board.
Some political subdivisions delegate substantial powers to
the Administering Board, including authority over personnel, fiscal and program
policies. In California, for
example, in communities where the subdivision has delegated substantial or
almost all operating authority to the Board, it is called an Administering
Board. For all practical purposes
the Administering Board itself is operating the program since the “Governing
Board” of the elected officials themselves rarely or never overrides the
actions of the Administering Board. In this case, the LEO’s typically accept whatever
recommendations are made by the Administering Board.
So, 1968 was a big year in the structuring of CAA’s.
The Green Amendment required designation of CAA’s by elected officials.
The Quie Amendment required creation of the tri-partite board in every
CAA. The Office of Economic
Opportunity also adopted a policy that those CAA’s that were membership
organizations had to be converted so that only the Board were members, and OEO
forced the consolidation of many smaller rural CAA’s into multi-county
CAA’s, and the consolidation of multiple overlapping CAA’s in cities so that
there was only one CAA serving the city. As
a result of this, about 1,000 CAA’s were created, covering about 2,700 of the
nation’s 3,200 counties. This
historic pool of CAA’s is pretty much the pool of CAA’s that exist today,
although about 100 of the original pool have either gone out of business or been
converted to public agencies. And,
about 100 new CAA’s have also been created by the states, raising the number
of counties covered by CAA’s from about 2,700 to about 2,900.
When the Community Services Block Grant was formed in 1981, it
provided that 90% of the CSBG funds were to be passed through to the CAA’s
that were in existence as of October 1, 1981.
At the same time, the Congress also repealed the statutes and regulations
that provided for LEO’s to designate (or to de-designate) CAA’s.
This created a one-time pool of historically designated CAA’s -- which
explains why the national organizations work so hard to keep them in existence.
The designation means something. The
states now have this authority, subject to HHS review of terminations and
reductions in funding.
As is the case in every other type of human service delivery
network, in the CSBG a handful of local operators are having problems on
management issues. Most of these
are repaired and operations continue. But,
from 1981 to 1998, when a CAA closed the CAA that was created as
successor-in-interest to a historically designated CAA was almost always created
as a public CAA -- with a board that had narrower purposes than the previous
private nonprofit CAA. During this period, the percentage of all CAA’s that were
public agencies grew so that now about 15% of all CAA's are public agencies. The
1998 amendments to the CSBG are supposed to preclude the designation of new
public CAA’s, except as a last resort. See
676A.
E. Articles of Incorporation and By-Laws
The key requirement for being a nonprofit corporation is
that none of the net proceeds from operations or assets can “inure to the
benefit of an individual member of the Board or staff.”
If you have net operating surplus (yes, even profits) in any given time
period they can not be distributed to the Board members in the form of a
dividend as might happen a for-profit corporation.
These revenues must be used in support of your nonprofit purpose.
If you stop operating, the remaining assets must be given to another
nonprofit.
Being a nonprofit corporation does not automatically make
it tax exempt. Your tax-exempt
status is determined by the U.S. Internal Revenue
Service using Section 501-c of the Internal Revenue Code.
This requires a separate filing with the IRS.
The basic benefit is that it makes you eligible to receive grants from
organizations (e.g., foundations) that only give to tax-exempt corporations, and
secondly individuals who make contributions to you may claim that as a deduction
on their income taxes.
If you are a public CAA, instead of having Articles of
Incorporation, you will have as your “document of creation” an official
action by the elected officials, which may be a resolution, statute, etc.
In addition to the formal and official source of your authority, CAA’s derive
authority or power from others sources, too.
F. Sources of Authority of a Board.
1.
Formal Sources of Authority
- State corporation law.
- Statutory authority,
e.g., Community Services Block Grant, state law, etc.
- Any official
delegation of power to you by Governmental units.
2.
Informal Sources of Authority
- Powers informally
given you by governmental units.
- That accorded you by
people based on their perception of your competence.
- That accorded you by
people based on their perception of your ability to influence others.
- The accuracy of
information you provide about upcoming trends or other issues.
- Your consistency... a
lack of arbitrariness.
- The extent to which
you are perceived as having “clout” with other possible funding sources.
- The extent to which
you are perceived as having “clout” in your community.
- Your honesty.
- Your self-confidence.
- Your tact...
interpersonal skills... ability to get points across, things done.
- The extent to which
you deliver what you promise.
- Your role in
regulating the flow of information.
3.
Limits on Authority
Self Imposed:
- Your knowledge,
skills, and attitudes.
- Your perception of
your authority.
Externally imposed:
- Community perceptions
about the nature and extent of your authority.
- Limits threatened
and/or imposed by power-brokers and decision-makers at various levels.
G. Basic Decisions of a Board
1.
Governance Decisions.
*
How it will organize itself, operate and relate to staff.
*
How it will plan and evaluate itself and agency operations.
2. Planning Decisions -- short and long
range.
* Develop a vision.
* Define your mission.
* Select the ends or results the organization will seek.
* Set goals.
* Identify strategies.
* Establish short-term objectives to accomplish the goals.
* Create an evaluation process.
* The people whom the organization serves.
* Broad
descriptions of how the organization will serve them.
* The
framework for the organization's operation.
* Setting
priorities.
4.
Resource Acquisition and Allocation Decisions -- govern effective use of
people, time, money, materials, and facilities, as they relate to:
* Program operations.
* Program implementation.
* Budget considerations.
5.
Advocacy Decisions -- identify and seek to implement the opinion of the
Board on issues pertaining to the mission of the organization.
* Select issues.
* Identify approaches to be used.
* Make assignments for Board members.
H.
Legal Responsibilities of Individual Board Members
The legal obligations of board members were defined in 1986
by The United Way of America: “TO
AVOID INDIVIDUAL LIABILITY you must operate in accordance with the principle
that you act as a reasonably prudent person, an use the principle of good
faith.”
1.
The REASONABLY PRUDENT PERSON avoids:
MISMANAGEMENT.
This is defined as being a failure to follow fundamental management
principles, e.g., failure to ensure that planning occurs; failure to act on
problems.
NON-MANAGEMENT.
This is defined as being a failure to use existing opportunities for good
management, e.g., failure to use available control systems.
So -- periodically check to make sure that existing fiscal, personnel and
other systems are being used.
SELF-DEALING.
This is defined as board members voting on decisions from which they
might realize personal gain. So let
the record show you abstained from voting on anything that might benefit you or
a relative.
II.
The PRINCIPLE OF GOOD FAITH states that Board members should:
*
Have a thorough knowledge of the organization's articles and bylaws.
*
Heed corporate affairs and keep informed of general organizational activities.
*
Ensure that minimum legal/technical requirements are met.
*
Record personal conduct and register dissents officially.
Say, “I object to that and please enter my objections in the
minutes.”
*
Avoid any semblance of self-dealing.
*
Make no financial profit except as provided for in bylaws.
I.
Community Problem Solving
One important purpose of CAA’s is to
eliminate the causes and conditions of poverty. CAA’s must be community problem solvers.
This often requires working with different groups of people who have
strikingly different opinions about the nature of the problem and what is to be
done about it. Problem solving can
be messy and controversial -- and it can build community agreement and unity.
Problem solving efforts can fail -- and they can succeed and be very
satisfying. CAA’s must be
mediators, negotiators, and organizers.
Steps for solving social problems:
 |
Discussion. |
|
Planning, analysis. |
|
Commitment. |
|
Action.
|
|
Bringing people together -- and watching them fly apart. |
|
More action.
|
|
Monitoring. |
|
Refinement. |
|
Rededication. |
A
sample process:
1.
Meet with other community organizations and with people who are
experiencing the problem.
2.
Identify the conditions of the problem, and what the causes of the problem are.
3.
Decide which strategies will affect the causes.
Identify a range of strategies with different assumptions about resources
needed, e.g. from no outside resources to big bucks.
4.
Set specific goals -- so you will know whether you have succeeded or not!
5.
List the specific steps needed to implement the high priority strategies.
6. Put specific individuals in charge of specific tasks.
7.
Reach out to others to build support for your effort.
8.
Identify resources.
9.
Create a schedule, with dates by which tasks are to be accomplished.
10.
Develop your publicity and outreach campaigns.
11. Do it!
1.
What are some of the basic functions of a CAA Board?
2.
Why is a CAA board called a “tripartite” board?
3.
What are the two basic types of CAA Boards?
4
. Why is it important to know which type of board you are on?
5.
If your CAA is a Governing board, where does it get its nonprofit status?
Where does it get its tax-exempt status?
6.
Name two sources of informal authority.
7.
Name two types of limits to your authority.
8.
What are some of the types of decisions that a CAA board typically makes?
9.
What are the two general principles that board members should use to
manage their own behavior?
Answers
to Chapter 9 Quiz
1.
A few of the functions are to define the vision, values, mission and
goals of the CAA.
2.
All
CAA’s have either a Governing Board or an Administering Board.
3.
Every board, whether a governing board or administering board, has three
parts: the representatives of the low income, the representatives of
the public sector, and the representatives of the private sector.
4.
A Governing Board in the final authority for the CAA.
An Administering Board has the authority delegated to it by the local
elected officials. The types and
amounts of authority that local elected officials retain for themselves and the
types and amounts that they allow the administering board to exercise varies
dramatically from county to county.
5.
Nonprofit corporations are created under state law, usually through the
Secretary of State’s office. Tax-exempt
status is granted by the Internal Revenue Service.
6. See the list.
7. There are externally imposed limits and self-imposed limits.
8. There are many types of decisions, including decisions about
governance, planning, policy, resource acquisition and allocation and advocacy.
9. The “reasonably prudent person principle” and the
“principle of good faith.”
CHAPTER
TEN: Board
Recruitment and Retention
You
have to know the CAA’s strengths and weaknesses.
Through discussions of the board, you will identify the “gaps” in
board membership. You will identify
people who can help the CAA carry out its mission.
They may be affiliated with some constituency or organization, or the
person may be an up-and-coming community leader.
In
the process of recruiting new board members, you are trying to persuade them to
affiliate both with you personally and with an organization.
1. Know your CAA – its history, programs, mission and vision.
The CAA is a bundle of ideas, hopes, commitments, and activities that you
are asking them to agree with. (Well,
to agree with most of it, anyhow J).
2. Be able to articulate why you are on the board.
Know your own leadership goals and where you fit in on your board.
3. Understand the possibilities for the candidate.
There has to be something that THEY want to do in the CAA, not just
something that you want them to do.
1.
What tools do you need?
The Annual Report.
2.
Recognize the benefits of membership to the community and to the
candidate personally, and articulate them.
These include benefits to the community or to a specific population group
the candidate may be concerned about.
Boards
sometimes perceive that they have a recruitment problem when in fact they have a
retention problem.
1.
Provide them the opportunity to play the role they want (which may or may
not be their career, i.e. an attorney may want to help out at the Food Bank,
etc.)
2.
Involve them. Make sure every board member has something to do. Recognize
and utilize their values, skills, and experience.
3.
Develop them – provide orientation and training for all members.
They have a variety of needs and interests: skills, leadership
development. Develop individuals and
the group, team building, communication.
4.
Don’t impose staff-type roles on board members.
Board members usually can not become program experts; staff are paid to
know the latest regulations and to keep track of what funders, and what other
programs are doing in terms of “best practices.”
Board members should talk about the results they want to see the programs
produce, about how programs fit with other programs, about the community
perspective, about generating support, and other big picture ideas.
The means, or program details, are the responsibility of staff.
5.
Balance the amount of time that board members spend reviewing historical
actions of staff (e.g. past performance, fiscal reports) and board members doing
their own work. Board members
should have duties beyond just attending board meetings. They should engage in
public relations, meeting with other agencies or elected officials, advocating
on concerns of the low-income people.
You
can “grow” new board members by identifying volunteers or program
participants and getting them into activities that lead to board membership.
You should start “grooming” candidates for the Board three to five
years out
i. Recruitment
Stage
You have to manage the process of orientation to the CAA and its goals.
This is usually done by other board members with assistance from the
Executive Director.
ii. Preliminary Orientation
-- Some Background
Start with informal meetings with key people.
iii.
Orientation and Introduction
Should
occur prior to new member’s first board meeting or at special orientation for
new Board members with the Chair, the Executive Director, and others.
1.
Assignment to specific committee task. Put
them to work!
2.
Orientation to work of specific committee.
Adapted
from several sources, especially by Barbara Barrett Foster.
iv. And remember –
recognition, recognition, recognition.
Public thank you’s. Put
the thank-you in the minutes. Give them a letter, or mail a letter to the
organization(s) they represent. Give
them a plaque, provide a framed photo, etc.
1.
When trying to recruit board members, are you trying to persuade them to
connect (a) with your personally, or (b) with the organization, or (c) both.
2.
You can “grow” new board members.
What are some of the ways you can do this?
3.
What kind of time period should you be using to grow new board members?
4.
What are some of the ways to retain board members?
Answers to Chapter 10 Quiz
1.
The answer is c. Usually, you are trying to do both.
2.
Identify people who can learn how to be a board member.
Cultivate them, help them gain experience and training.
3.
Three to five years is a good time period in which to grow candidates for
the board.
4.
Put them to work immediately. Do
not require them to spend two or three years learning detailed program
regulations before allowing them to act with authority.
This involves a slightly different set of issues than preparing an IDP for a
staff person. Board members are usually recruited because (1) they have
some specific skill (lawyer, housing expert, personnel manager) or because (2)
they are part of a constituency or (3) can represent a community or (4) they can
represent a specific institution. Sometimes,
a person who is committed to your mission or your agency is recruited for the
board and THEN they are helped to obtain the knowledge and skills needed to
perform a board role. So you can
either recruit a person or “grow” a person to do a specific CAA board
function.
There are dozens of generic workbooks for nonprofit boards that describe board
members responsibilities for planning, fundraising and fiscal oversight,
accountability to stakeholders, evaluating the executive director, etc.
There are courses at community colleges, management support centers and
through associations on “how to be a board treasurer” or “parliamentary
procedure.” These offer an
inexpensive way for board members to improve their ability to carry out a
specific role or assignment.
·
Leadership (officers, committee
chairs)
·
Internal structure and operations;
e.g., by-laws
·
Nominating, recruiting new members
·
Planning
·
Personnel
·
Finance
·
Public relations, community
relations
·
Staff and board development
Board
members may want to specialize in one or more of the strategies that CAA’s use
to bring about change in the community:
·
Community organization and
development
·
Program coordination
·
Program
development/implementation/oversight/monitoring
·
Advocacy, influence public policy
·
Solving specific community problems
·
Resource mobilization
·
Outreach, information and referral,
case management
·
Direct social services
All of these are areas where individual performance can be improved through
self-study, participating on other boards, classroom training, or mentoring by
other board members. Finding out what
the individual wants to do is very important.
As volunteers, if they don't enjoy doing it and don't want to do it,
either they won't do it at all or they won't do it for long.
Boards have the ability to work with each other
as a group, as a team. Boards of
small CAA’s almost never receive training in “effective teamwork.”
Instead, “the way we do things around here” and other traditional
modes of operation are passed on from the old board members to the new members,
who are “socialized” into the board's existing approaches.
The new member usually has a difficult time in learning the jargon of the
programs. It takes a year or two
for them to learn the vocabulary and acronyms associated with the programs --
during which time they usually slip unconsciously into the existing social
structure. This may or may not be
desirable.
Where a board already has a long-term vision, is aggressive and enjoys effective
board operations, you want new people to “join the team.”
If the board is stodgy, micro-managing day-to- day operations, or
dominated by one or two people then it may be desirable to change the way the
board operates. This can almost
never be done simply by sending one or two board members off to a training
session. Large changes have to be
done with the entire board in the room.
What can be accomplished by training one or two board members off site is to
show them “there is a better way.” They
will then have to convince others that change is needed.
This “vision building” for an individual through their IDP can serve
as a catalyst for change, but it is neither the method nor the sum total of
change. Having one or two board
members get fired up about the need for change is a necessary condition, but it
is not a sufficient condition. This
change has to be carried out with the entire board in the room, going through a
developmental process. The typical
reasons why boards get hung up are described in Chapter 7, as are some of the
methods that can be used to initiate corrective action.
The “deductive” approach would be to build a list of all possible tasks and
capacities for a board then check off which ones that individual will focus on
and how you will help them improve. The
“inductive approach” would start with the individual and their interests and
list the specifics. An example of
the latter type of a Board Member Individual Development Plan is given here.
==============================================================
BOARD
MEMBER NAME: F. Smith
Date: tomorrow, 200x
FOR
PERIOD: May 1, 200x to April 30, 200y
|
A.
JOB or TASK PERFORMANCE TO BE IMPROVED
|
METHOD
|
DATE
|
|
TASK
|
|
|
|
1.
Learn five new member recruitment methods.
|
United
Way workshop
|
Aug,
200x
|
|
2.
Bring back and implement six new ways we can use to publicize our
CAA success stories
|
CAP
Annual meeting
|
Sep,
200x
|
|
CAA
will pay registration cost and travel for # 1-2.
|
|
|
3.
Learn how different sectors in community and on tri-partite board
can work together
|
Attend
workshop on Diversity and Partnerships at CAA Association Meeting
|
Fall,
200x
|
|
|
|
B.
CAPACITY TO BE ENHANCED
|
METHOD
|
DATE
|
|
4.
Learn more about the history and mission of CAA’s.
|
Attend
workshop at CAP Conference
|
Sep,
200x
|
|
5.
Learn to apply community problem-solving methods
|
Read.
Meet
with staff.
Report
to planning committee, select two problems.
Get
board approval
Initiate
action
|
May,
200x
Jun
Jun
Jul
Sep
|
_______________________________
________________________
Board Member /date
Board Chair/date
________________________________
(Optional) Executive Director/date
1. What are some of the reasons why a person is recruited to be
on your board?
2. Identify at least two areas in which it is possible for a
board member to improve their knowledge or skills.
3. Individual skills can be developed off-site, but for the
board to work better as a team, or to improve the whole board, who should receive the training -- an individual or the whole
board?
4. What is the purpose of an Individual Development Plan?
5. List three things you would like to have in your personal
Individual Development Plan.
Answers
to Chapter 11 Quiz
1.
A few possible reasons are: (1)
they have some specific skill (lawyer, housing expert, personnel manager) or
because (2) they are part of a constituency or (3) can represent a community or
(4) they can represent a specific institution.
There may be others.
2.
Examples include: functions of the board or specific anti-poverty
strategies.
3.
To help the whole board work better or work more effectively as a team,
the whole board should be present to learn how to do this.
4.
An Individual Development Plan describes how one person will acquire
knowledge or skills they need to improve their performance.
5.
Your list!
There are
three interrelated problems experienced by some boards.
Problem
# 1. They spend all their time
focused:
* on the past,
* on what staff have done,
* on the inner workings of the agency.
* on reports and other paperwork.
Problem
# 2. Their primary role is that of
a volunteer compliance officer for funders.
The amount of time they spend on community issues is very small.
Problem
# 3. The board members do nothing
but attend board meetings; staff are expected to do everything else.
Board members are not active in the community as representatives of the
CAA or in helping to implement strategies.
Board members do not act as agents for change.
Here are four tools that can be used to address one or more of these problems.
I.
Take control of the amount of agenda time focused on community issues and
the amount of time focused on internal operational issues.
Does your sponsor or program create social policy in your community?
Are the funded programs tools for you to use to accomplish big goals?
The increasing professionalization of programs and the increasing
bureaucratization by funders who specify all aspects of program operations
leaves Board members with fewer roles to play that was the case twenty or even
ten years ago. But even when programs operated by the Federal rule book,
there were still local issues that you can work on in addition to managing the
grant!
Many board members say that their primary
reason for joining the Board is to work on community issues. Look at your last
few Board meeting Agendas. What is the percentage of time spent focused on
issues OUTSIDE the agency and what is the percentage focused INSIDE.
Most boards are surprised to discover that they spend about 99% of their
time on operational issues INSIDE the agency.
This section provides ideas for issue-oriented
planning.
Adopt a policy that 1/4th or 1/3rd or ½ of
EACH MEETING will be focused on community issues on which the Board Members
themselves will play an active role in implementing the strategy related to that
issue.
II.
Develop an understanding among all parties about what is the Board’s
role and what is the staff role.
Board
Role:
* The Board decides what the
organization will do. It determines
the ENDS that the agency or program is to accomplish in the community.
* The Ends are the Outcomes
that result from Board activity and program operations.
* Select no more than 5-6 major
outcomes.
* The board must be active agents in
achieving the desired outcomes.
Staff
Role:
The Executive staff decides what the staff will do, individually and
collectively. Staff generally
select the:
* Means
* Methods
* Procedures
* Activities of daily work.
HOWEVER, the Board does not just decide
ends then delegate all work to staff. There
are some implementation functions that are far better performed by Board
members. Many of these are related
to management of external relations, including public relations, advocacy for
institutional change and resource mobilization.
Board members have the connections, legitimacy, and personal commitment
and empowerment from their Board to advocate for a better community.
Board members have flexibility to act in all social and political arenas
-- more than staff who are covered by restrictions on public funds.
The Boards should set their own social objectives.
They pick issues or projects in which they have a major role -- and go
for them.
Some funders like for Board members to act as their local volunteer compliance
officers, doing reviews with a microscope of what staff did to determine if
staff are carrying out all the rules in the rule-book programs.
You can't see the big picture through a microscope.
You get bogged down in detail, and lay Board members rarely have the time
or training to become experts on all the technical aspects of the programs. The Board member can't keep up, feels inadequate to the task,
and quits. THE SOLUTION.
Stop micro)
reviews. Create a guideline on the
amount of meeting time that will be devoted to issues that are OUTSIDE the
organization (community issues) and the amount of time that will be spent
focused INSIDE the organization.
E.g., “We now spend 95% of our time on internal operations and reviewing
reports of past activity. We want
to spend no more than 65% of our time on those activities and we want to spend
35% of our time on community issues.”
III.
Limit the amount of time spent on routine approvals of required reports.
The Board can review all existing
information that now flows through them. The
Board decides what it will review and how much time it will spend on each TYPE
of item. You have the opportunity to re-prioritize all items.
1.
Look at your past agendas. List
all, topics, data elements and other items from inside the agency that are now
reviewed by the board.
2.
Sort into these 5 categories.
- Outcome
measure or info needed to determine or understand ENDS or outcome.
(Board review and discussion time for progress on each measure: 5
minutes)
- Whatever
is needed to validate a management system (fiscal, personnel) is in place
and is working. May need
onsite review by Board member or by hired expert, e.g., auditor, CPA, etc. The REPORT is limited to "the system is in place,
or system is not in place and should or must be put into place."
This is fundamentally different from trying to judge the merits of
transactions that occur in a system.
Time ?? Minutes
- Consent
Agenda. This includes most
items required by funders. (Like
your local Zoning Board, batch process these items by the dozen.
The assumption is that everything will e approved unless a board
member asks that the items be removed from the consent agenda in order to
receive additional attention).
Approval time: one
minute.
- Drop
from review all MEANS, which belong to staff.
FIGHT OFF temptation to review means.
Some staff like Board to approve means because then they are off
the hook for results. "I
did it like you said..." Board
should not micro-review activities at the individual staff person level.
This is the supervisor’s role.
The rule-book procedures are very relevant to the staff role, not
as relevant to the Board. Time:
No minutes.
- There
is always the exception to the rule.
There may be an "X" factor issue that the Board does want
to consider. Time: ?? Minutes
IV.
Focus more Board attention on community issues by using the following six
steps for Board-driven social change.
- Formulate social policy
statement on issue/s. Your
vision....
- Identify
specific outcome measures on each issue.
How will you know you are making progress or have succeeded?
- Formulate
action plan. What do you want
different groups or individuals to KNOW?
|
Desired
Outcomes in Community
|
|
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
|
Stakeholder
Group 1
|
BMN*
|
BMN*
|
BMN
|
|
Stakeholder
Group 2
|
BMN
|
BMN
|
BMN
|
|
Stakeholder
Group 3
|
BMN
|
BMN
|
BMN
|
|
Stakeholder
Group 4
|
BMN
|
BMN
|
BMN
|
Put a BMN (board
member name) in each box. Maybe
two or three people are involved in the activity, but one person must be the
lead person who makes sure it happens.
4.
Identify specific institutional changes needed.
·
What do you want different groups
or individuals to DO?
·
This is the (small p) political
coalition building.
|
Institutional
Changes
|
|
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
|
Group
1
|
BMN
|
BMN
|
BMN |
|
Group
2
|
BMN
|
BMN
|
BMN
|
|
Group
3
|
BMN
|
BMN
|
BMN
|
5.
Resource mobilization. Go
after the resources you need to achieve each vision.
|
Sources
|
|
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
|
Time
|
R/BMN
|
R/BMN
|
Resource
needed/R/BMN
|
|
Money
|
R/BMN
|
R/BMN
|
|
|
Other
|
R/BMN
|
R/BMN
|
|
Board
members must do most of the persuading of other individuals, agencies and groups
to support the desired ENDS.
1.
What are some negative behaviors that boards may slip into?
2.
What are four steps the Board can take to work out of this rut?
Answers to Chapter 12 Quiz
1.
Problem # 1. They spend all their time focused:
* on the past,
* on what staff have done,
* on the inner workings of the agency.
* on reports and other paperwork.
Problem
# 2. Their primary role is that of
a volunteer compliance officer for funders.
The amount of time they spend on community issues is very small.
Problem # 3.
The board members do nothing but attend board meetings; staff are
expected to do everything else.
Are there other issues or problems your board should address?
a. Take control of the
amount of agenda time spent on community issues and the amount of time spent
on internal operational issues.
b. Develop and understanding
among all parties about the board role.
c. Limit the amount of time
spent on routine approvals of required reports.
d. Focus more attention on
community issues. Use the 6-step
approach for
Board-driven social change.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: CAA Board and Staff Relations
This section covers several topics:
a.
Shared roles and responsibilities
b.
Separate roles that complement each other.
c.
Summary of the successful board and Executive Director relationship
d.
“Rights” or expectations of volunteer board members
e.
Evaluating an Executive Director
f.
Board and funding agency relationships
A.
SHARED ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES.
All members of the Board and staff are in general agreement about the
desirability of:
1.
Eliminating the causes and conditions of poverty.
2.
Helping individuals, families and communities become strong and
independent.
They share a commitment to their mission and to carry out the intent of
the Community Services Block Grant Act within their State.
The Board and staff have different roles to play in pursuit of their
common objectives.
B.
SEPARATE ROLES THAT COMPLEMENT EACH OTHER.
The
CAA Board and its Policy-Making Role.
The CAA Board makes policy about the ENDS the CAA should seek, about the
desired results. The MEANS for
accomplishing those ends are largely determined by the CAA Executive Director
and staff. For a CAA to operate
effectively, functions of the Board and staff must fit together -- without
leaving a gap or overlapping. So
there are three major elements. The Board as a whole, the individual board
member, and the executive director (staff) function.
1. The
Board as a Whole.
The
authority of the Board lies in its group action.
No single member (or few members) have authority over the CAA.
Each Board Member has one vote in deciding what the Board as a
whole will do. It is through the
collective action of all members that a binding decision is made.
The Board as a policy-making body is responsible for:
- Identifying
the needs of the community.
- Establishing
goals for the CAA. These are
the ENDS that the CAA will seek.
- Formulating
strategic plans for community action.
- Approving
proposals for financial assistance.
- Making sure the
Executive Director has established and is managing other systems needed by
the CAA (personnel, fiscal, etc). Most
funding agencies hold the Board responsible for abiding by terms of the
grant, so make sure the Executive Director has those systems are in place!
- Assessing the risk and
benefits of profit making activity and social enterprises.
- Other duties as adopted
by it.
2.
The Individual Board Member
Each
board member shares equally in the Board's deliberations and actions.
Each Board member represents a constituency, or group, on the Board.
He or she presents views of that group to the Board, and reports the
Board's actions back to that group. He
or she must:
* know
which group(s) they represent.
* know
that group's interests and concerns.
* communicate
with that group regularly.
* reflect
the group's interests at Board meetings.
* be
authorized to represent that group.
In
carrying out their roles as the representative of the group they represent, each
individual Board member also has the right to:
- Bring any concern of
theirs or of the groups they represent about CAA activities to the attention
of the whole Board.
-
Initiate any relevant new business for the Board's consideration at Board
or committee meetings.
- Express opinions about
issues or proposed items of business before a vote is taken.
- Request additional
information on any subject under consideration -- and question anyone
testifying before the Board -- before a vote is called.
- Organize support for or
against any issue brought before the Board for a vote, either before or
during a meeting.
- Obtain a complete and
current list of Board members, and have their voting records compiled.
- Question or recommend
any other matter necessary to effective organization of the Board or conduct
of its business.
- Ask the Chairperson to
clarify the way in which a meeting is being conducted at any time.
- Request that a vote be
taken in a particular way.
- Request a summary of
internal policies and procedures.
- Request changes in
minutes before they are approved to make them more accurately reflect
events.
-
Request that their opposition to an item passed by majority be recorded.
- Discuss what has
happened or is expected to happen with other Board members, the Executive
Director or other CAA staff, neighborhood residents or any other interested
party.
- Marshall forces, within
or outside of the Board, to oppose or support a measure scheduled for
consideration. However, once
the Board votes, then every individual member has an obligation to carry out
that policy. They should not
criticize the policy except in board meetings.
- Seek reconsideration
for any measure previously passed.
-
Ask for appointment to a committee.
- Board members are
expected to bring relevant proposals and ideas to the Board.
These should be developed in advance and presented in a
straightforward manner to the Board. They
should also be followed up once the Board has approved them.
- The Board also has
roles to play in accomplishing their own ENDS. The Board does not simply adopt ENDS and completely turn
them over to staff. In most
cases the successful accomplishment of ENDS requires that many other
elements of the community be involved.
In most cases, board members will be more effective at lining up that
support than will staff. Further,
the organizational maintenance functions of "staying in touch"
with elected officials, the press and other key constituencies is best
performed by board members.
3.
The Executive Director
A CAA
Executive Director is the chief executive officer and top manager of the CAA.
The Executive Director guides staff activity to accomplish the ENDS that
have been adopted by the Board. The
Director uses their management skills, staff and programs as the MEANS to
accomplish the ENDS adopted by the Board.
The
authority of the Executive Director begins where the authority of the Board
leaves off. He or she is the chief
administrator. It is his or her
function to implement, or execute, policies established by the Board.
The
Executive Director is an employee of the Board of Directors.
He or she is hired, paid and fired by the Board.
The performance of the Executive Director is evaluated by the Board.
While it is his or her job to carry out
policy of the Board, he or she is not expected to be in total agreement with his
or her employer at all times. They
should, however, be open and honest about their disagreements.
He
or she also must run the programs and operations of the CAA and keep the staff
motivated.
The
Executive Director receives his or her authority from the Board.
He or she:
- Is
responsible to the Board for proper administration of the CAA.
- Prepares, at least
annually, and submits to the Board a complete report on finances and
administrative activities for the past year.
- Provides the Board with
information which is necessary or helpful to the Board in making policy.
- Recommends that the
Board adopt policies and programs which the Executive Director feels are
necessary to effectively conduct the antipoverty program and improve
administrative practices.
- Attends all board
meetings, unless excused, and takes part in discussion of all matters coming
before the Board.
- Develops and supervises
systems for personnel, fiscal, purchasing and other functions to insure
integrity of handling of funds and the best use of funds.
- Administers programs is
in accordance with Federal, State and local laws.
- Monitors ongoing Board
projects and delegate agency programs, and reports findings to the Board.
- Actively manages the
CAA, including:
a)
Hiring, firing, and supervising of the staff.
b)
Planning how projects will operate.
c)
Scheduling of activities.
d)
Delineating staff responsibilities.
e)
Evaluating staff performance.
f)
Monitoring all projects.
g)
Evaluating program effectiveness and outcomes.
The
staff, under the direction of the Executive Director, is responsible for
day‑to‑day implementation of policies established by the Board.
The staff members answer to the Executive Director.
This does not mean, however, that there is no communication between the
staff and the Board. There should
be ground rules for staff and board communication.
The staff members should not:
·
Respond to direct communication
from the Board unless it was approved by, or came through, the Executive
Director
·
Follow instructions from the Board
concerning operations unless approved by the Executive Director.
·
Report directly to a board member
concerning project operations unless approval is given by the Executive
Director.
An effective CAA is a partnership between the Board, the Executive Director and
the staff. In the same spirit, the
staff offers opinions and recommendations to guide the Board.
Also, the staff helps keep the Board informed of problems, progress and
status of activities in the CAA, and in the community.
By working together, the board and executive director can turn their CAA
into a powerful engine for social change.
Characteristic -- Ways to achieve it:
Role Clarity
· Written job descriptions:
general Board member, committees, chair, other officers.
·
Board development training
that addresses roles.
·
Written policies and
procedures.
·
Written annual goals and
objectives for Executive Director (agency)
Good Communication
·
Regular meetings with
Director and President
·
No Surprises
·
Timely written reports from
Director.
·
Well-run Board and committee
meetings.
·
Bring up possible problems
before they grow.
Trust
·
Follow-through on
commitments.
·
Regular communication
·
Follow established lines of
communication.
·
Direct communication.
·
Meeting procedures which
promote respectful discussion and problem solving.
Mutual Support
·
Back up each other's
decisions.
·
Pitch in on tasks
·
Recognize achievements
·
Share the glory and
the problems
Respect
·
Recognize that people have
different experiences and perspectives, and accept them
·
Recognize unique
contributions and validate them.
·
Share honest opinions,
confront conflicts in a constructive fashion.
·
Allow for human error!
Accept apologies!
1. What is one of the commitments or topics on which all board
members and the Executive Director should (hopefully) share?
2. Discuss the difference between the board acting as a whole --
and role of the individual members.
3. Identify two expectations that are reasonable for individual
board members to have.
4. Who is generally responsible for defining the ENDS the CAA
will seek?
5. Who is generally responsible for selecting the MEANS that the
CAA will use to achieve its ENDS?
6. What are some characteristics of a good relationship between
a board and an Executive Director?
Answers
to Chapter 13 Quiz
1.
The board and Executive Director should share a commitment to ending the
causes and conditions of poverty.
2.
The board is a single unit; board members express individual opinions
until after a vote is taken, then that collective action becomes the policy that
binds all members of the board.
3.
See the list.
4.
The board is generally responsible for selecting the ENDS.
5.
The Executive Director is generally responsible for selecting the MEANS
the staff will use to accomplish the organizational ENDS.
6.
Role clarity, good communication, trust, mutual support and respect are
some of the elements that make for a successful board and Executive Director
Relationship.
This chapter reviews ways for the CAA to assess or evaluate
(a) the Executive Director, (b) relationships with funding agencies, and (c) the
CAA as a whole.
A.
Executive Director
Evaluation
elements:
1.
The evaluation should involve people who know the Executive Director's
work in different ways. Ideally,
this would include the Board and Board President, the staff, and key community
contacts.
2. The evaluation should include the Executive Director as a major presenter
and self-evaluator.
3.
The evaluation should include attention to
standard management skills as well as the agency's particular needs and
situation.
4. The evaluation should distinguish between regular, on-going work, and
handling of unusual circumstances.
5.
The evaluation should focus on measurable
results and be related to the job description.
From EVALUATING THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, by Jim Hickman, United Way.
I.
Appraisal should be planned on a regular basis to review agreed-upon
standards of performance, including the results the Executive Director agreed to
produce.
a.
Job Description: Principal
duties. Reviewed and updated annually.
b.
Performance Standards:
Day-to-day duties, expressed in measurable terms, qualitative and
quantitative.
c.
Objectives:
Duties beyond routine. Future
responsibilities and expected achievements.
d.
Assessment
of Results: Degree of progress
achieved.
II. Employee performance-based
appraisal is a four-step process that places the major responsibility on the
Executive Director.
a.
Executive
Director presents the annual performance report to the Board of Directors.
b.
Board of Directors reviews the Executive
Director's presentation. Evaluation
of Executive Director's performance, based upon job description, performance
standards, determination of objectives accomplished, and assessment of
results. Targeting of future
responsibilities and how results will be measured.
c.
The Board conducts a performance review
with the Executive Director privately to discuss the Board's views.
Discuss performance standards and objectives.
Agree on updated job description.
d.
The board and Executive Director agree
on next year's measurement criteria based on the organization's annual plan.
All steps are documented in writing. The
Executive Director may find the same procedure useful in evaluating staff.
Here is another sample of a GUIDE TO EVALUATION OF EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR.
Source: Health and
Community Services Council of Hawaii, Room 602, 200 North Vineyard Boulevard,
Honolulu, Hawaii
1.
Relationship to Board and Committees
·
Does he/she relate well to Board
members?
·
Does he/she communicate his/her
ideas clearly and show leadership?
·
Does he/she listen and help discern
the direction of the Board?
·
Does he/she propose directions,
assist Board and Committee leadership develop agenda and identify critical
issues for decision-making?
·
Does he/she show enthusiasm,
vision, and encouragement in the development of the council?
·
Does he/she see to it that enough
material is provided for Board and Committee decision-making?
·
Does he/she assist the Board in a
strong independent and accountable policy-making body?
2. Relationship to Members and Community Leaders
Does he/she work effectively with:
·
The leadership of the United Way
and other agencies?
·
Leaders in government, especially
in those agencies that relate to human services?
·
The leaders of voluntary
organizations?
·
Leadership in the grassroots
community?
·
Leadership in foundations?
·
Church leadership?
·
Corporate leadership which relate
to the council?
·
What image of the council does
he/she project?
3. Relationship to Staff
·
Does he/she employ staff that can
carry out the work of the council?
·
Does he/she establish a good
working relationship among staff?
·
Does he/she communicate well with
staff, individually and as a group?
·
Does he/she contribute to staff
development?
·
Does he/she encourage creativity
and enthusiasm among staff for the work of the council?
·
Does he/she provide adequate
supervision and evaluation for the staff?
4. Professional and Personal Competencies
·
Does he/she keep up with
changes in policies, practices, and personnel in the neighborhoods,
communities, and institutions as well as on the national level?
·
Does he/she show evidence of
developing his/her knowledge of the local and national scene and his/her
community planning and administrative skills?
·
Does he/she show ability in
carrying out the financial management of the council, including budgeting,
financial reporting and control?
·
Does he/she show flexibility and
creativity in relating the council, including budgeting, financial reporting and
control?
·
Does he/she show flexibility and
creativity in relating the council to the current needs of the community?
·
Does he/she show commitment to the
goals of the council and to the betterment of the community?
The key
concepts are:
RESULTS. Any funding source is
"buying results" from you. They
want their goals and purposes to be accomplished.
ACCOUNTABILITY. They want to insure
that you are accountable to them, and to the other significant publics, for what
you do and how you do it.
INTEGRITY. They want to be sure
that you are honest in your dealings with them and in your handling of their
assets. Every contract is a
partnership where the actions of one reflect upon the reputation of the other.
And nobody likes to feel like they are getting ripped off.
These four factors can be "mixed" very differently.
A.
Foundations. Foundations
tend to emphasize the YOUR SELECTION OF A PROBLEM AREA IN WHICH THEY ARE
CURRENTLY INTERESTED and the present of CORRECT SOCIAL VALUES in the recipient
of funds (i.e. -- you) as a form of results.
They do not give you money to solve your problems.
They give you money to implement the foundation's value structure.
They tend to select and fund people who have similar ideological and
value structures as theirs, and they rely on their personal judgments to
provide that information. Once
they have blessed you, some of them seem to lose interest.
Some foundations will send you a check and thank-you-and-goodbye.
Others want only a final report. Still
others want an audit. Others may
want periodic narrative reports, usually in the form of a letter to them.
Only a few foundations will schedule on-site visits.
These relationships tend to be fairly informal and unstructured.
They are very fluid and can change quickly.
B.
Corporations.
Corporations tend to emphasize the visible results in the community and
their name in association with those results.
Corporations want projects that have some connection with their
corporate purpose. If the right
product is created at the right time, they are usually not too concerned about
how you did it. Since they may
not have "standard procedures" for dealing with entities like yours,
you have to invent the relationship for each project.
Corporations rarely require audits as long as you produce the desired
results.
C. Public
Agencies. The public agencies
tend to focus on accountability as the main issue.
Bad publicity alleging misuse of funds is so damaging to the
legislators that supported a program to the public agency that administers it
and to the careers of the officials who administer them that they are always
extremely focused on accountability. To
protect the program, their agency and themselves they devise and require use
of complex management systems.
These rules and management systems are designed primarily to serve the needs of
the funding agency. The systems may or may not be useful to the agency staff and
Board. There is often considerable
confusion when one party does not understand the purpose of a system and tries
to use it for something other than the purpose it was designed to accomplish.
This
is not necessarily correct, of course, and the trend in the past few years has
been towards "performance-based" contracting wherein you are
responsible primarily for RESULTS and are given more flexibility in terms of how
you produce those results. There is
often great difficulty is specifying exactly what results are to be produced and
in measuring to determine if the agreed upon results were produced.
In
the CSBG, a national monitoring and assessment task force sponsored by
HHS/Office of Community Services has developed a set of six national goals for
the CSBG. For each goal, they
identified examples of results measures under each of those goals.
All CAA=s
should be using those materials and relating their activity to that framework.
You can select your own goals and measures, but there should be some way
to relate them to the national goals.
Public
agencies may emphasize communication as a tool in the accountability process.
Some public agencies deal almost entirely with the Board or Board Chair.
Others with a Committee of the Board and the Executive Director.
Others relate primarily or entirely with the Executive Director or a
program director. Some require both
the Board and the Executive to sign applications or contracts.
Other require the Board to sign. Some
allow the Board's designee to sign (i.e. the Executive Director).
Some send only one letter to the agency.
Other send copies to the Board Chair, or to all Board members.
These practices vary widely from agency to agency and often change.
Virtually
all
public agencies require audits. Most
specify the topics they want covered in the audits.
Fortunately they are also willing to pay for the cost of doing the audits.
There
are basically four types of standards for self-assessment.
1.
You compare yourself with standards that you have imposed on yourself
– your own goals, desired results, etc.
This category would include contractual standards from a funding
organization that you have agreed to meet in order to get their money.
This is the “planned” versus “actual” comparison.
2.
Reviewing
your results over time. Are we
better than we were last year? Are
we getting better over time?
3.
Comparing yourself with peers.
How are we doing in comparison with other CAA’s?
This is difficult because you are often comparing apples and oranges. However, there are evaluations done on various programs both
nationally and in other states. This
includes Head Start, WX, and other programs.
These reports provide one way to compare yourself with how others are
doing.
The United Way has much useful information on
evaluation. Check them out at: http://national.unitedway.org/
The Urban Institute also publishes useful tools.
Look at: http://www.urban.org/
4.
Comparing yourself with “ideal” standards.
These might include statutory standards (and you better meet those J).
The
ideal standards also include the standards created by your peers through the
national associations. The Community Action Code of Ethics creates standards for all
of us. The Code can be found at: www.communityactionpartnership.com/professional/ccap/codeofethics.pdf
The community action Partnership has adopted standards of what constitutes
excellence in a community action agency. Whether
you apply for the award or not, you should be using these standard to assess
your CAA. These can be found on the Partnership web site at:
http://www.communityactionpartnership.com/about/about_partnership/award_for_excellence.asp
Many
interesting and useful new tools are coming out of the ROMA process.
See both the NASCSP website and www.roma1.org
*
* *
1. What are some of the source of the factors that should be
used when evaluating the Executive Director?
2. What are some of the relationships that might be evaluated?
3. Should the same standards or criteria be used to evaluate the
relationships with every funding source?
4. This toolkit named four ways that a CAA can evaluate itself.
Which of these would be most productive or useful for use in your CAA
right now? Why?
Answers
1.
The performance of the CAA Executive Director should be evaluated in
terms of the agreement reached between the Board and the ED about what the ED is
supposed to do – i.e. do not wait to make up the criteria until AFTER the year
has passed. Reach agreement on the
criteria that will be used BEFORE the year begins.
2. The Executive Director is the manager of several sets of
relationships, including the relationships to the board, to staff, to other
agencies, to community leaders, and to funders.
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