Invisible People

Since July, Mark Horvath has been traveling the United States meeting with unhoused individuals and families, documenting their stories, and putting them online at invisiblepeople.tv.  Mark's work differs greatly from mine at Idealistics, where I focus on the technical aspect of social services, quantifying social impact and evaluating community needs with a macro lens.

Mark's work is decidedly micro, capturing the stories and pain experienced by homeless Americans across the country.  The stories are powerful.  The stories are important.

I've argued before, and continue to do so, that we in the social service sector need to be more technical, more focused on the bottom line of materially improving the lives of the poor.  But what Mark does is the necessary counterbalance to the work we do in the social service sector.  No other individual or organization does a better job of explaining the plight of the homeless to the general public.

Mark's work is like a persistent marketing campaign on behalf of every agency working toward ending homelessness.  As a sector we owe Mark our considerable gratitude.  In order for Mark to be able to continue his work, we owe him our financial support.

Please join us at Idealistics in making a donation to invisiblepeople.tv so Mark can continue making those who are invisible in society, those who you and I in the sector do see, ever more visible to a wider audience.

Freeing non-profit budgets

The Boston Foundation recently announced it would shift its focus to providing unrestricted funds to its grantees. As Dan Pallotta notes on his Harvard Business blog, this is significant in that it is a sizable foundation (over a $700 million dollar endowment) taking the initiative in radically changing the donation paradigm that has dominated foundation thinking for decades.

In the for-profit sector, investors invest in ideas and leadership teams they have faith in, period. There are no categorical restrictions, earmarks, etc. Restricting how non-profits use donated monies has never made sense to me. If you can't trust an executive team to use your money effectively, why would you donate to them in the first place?

If an agency is incompetent, earmarking monies doesn't make them less so. If an agency is competent, earmarking monies only ties their hands so they can't maximize the impact of donated dollars.

The Boston Foundation deserves a lot of credit for being a first mover in what needs to be an industry transition to an unrestricted funding philosophy. My hope is the Boston Foundation outcomes evaluation team will be able to do an effective pre/post analysis of grantee outcomes. I anticipate that over time it will quantitatively bear out that unrestricting funds will allow high impact, innovative non-profits to achieve greater success, and that poorly managed, underachieving organizations will be more easily identified and defunded.

Mapping services in Claremont

In partnership with the City of Claremont, we recently launched www.claremontconnect.com, a website to connect service seekers to local social services programs in and around Claremont, CA. The Claremont Connect site is built on our Community Resources technology. As part of all our Community Resources contracts, we include GIS mapping of the distribution of services and needs expressed by users of the system.

We just compiled out first report for the Claremont Connect system and were pleased to discover the distribution of services in the city are evenly spread throughout the community, and logically situated near targeted demographic populations.