Bill Shore’s Letters
Letter From 16th Street
Originally published: January 2001
Dear Friend,
16th Street begins at the White House and ends near my house in Silver Spring, Maryland. I drive the length of it twice each day, to and from Share Our Strength. It runs straight as an arrow for five miles and is the address of churches, homes, apartments, private schools, the Washington Ethical Society, the elegant Hay Adams Hotel, the Embassy of the Congo, and other landmarks that distinguish it as a uniquely Washington thoroughfare. Its pavement was also home to Luis Benites and Deborah McCollum, two of the three homeless people found dead during Christmas just steps from La Casa shelter in Northwest Washington.
According to the Washington Post: "The unusual string of deaths revealed a series of deficiencies in services for the homeless, including a system that is now so decentralized that no single provider or agency has ultimate responsibility for tracking unusual incidents.... The two police districts where the three deaths occurred also had no formal procedure for sharing information about the fatalities. Such a procedure might have alerted outreach workers to take more aggressive action during the coldest December in Washington since 1989."
The deaths were from hypothermia, an unintentional lowering of the core body temperature. Infants, elderly, and the homeless or mentally ill, are particularly at risk, especially if drugs or alcohol suppress their shivering response, which is the body's attempt to generate heat through friction. The onset of hypothermia is insidious, beginning with uncontrollable shivering which slows, speech that becomes slurred, and mental confusion which makes the victim appear drunk. Loss of consciousness is gradual.
Often victims can be saved. Search and rescue guidelines advise to "act on the premise that no one is dead until warm and dead. ... All patients at some point should be re-warmed. Resuscitation is a strong possibility."
But the homeless are not always easy to help. Luis Benites had been married and worked as a truck driver until alcoholism cost him his family and job. McCollum had been a waitress, occasionally stayed with her mother, bur preferred the freedom of the streets. Unlike New York, DC police cannot compel the homeless off the streets, even in life-threatening weather. Many decline offers for assistance.
Chuck and I went to Ethiopia last year thinking we could save some lives. We didn't need to travel 8000 miles. A short walk through the District would have sufficed.
In the first days of the new year, General Accounting Office investigators reported devastating failures of the DC agency responsible for protecting abused and neglected children. Child and Family Services repeatedly failed to send social workers to visit the children in its care, failed to investigate reports of neglect or abuse in a timely manner, placed children in unlicensed foster homes, and spent $20 million on an ineffective computerized system that could not track children. Federal courts mandate that foster care not exceed 12 months. Children in the District remain in the system for an average of 3.7 years. The report is 60 pages long but you will run out of tears before you finish reading it.
The homeless get extra attention at Christmas. Abandoned children tug on our heart strings all year long. The less visible but more important challenge is building support for systems and structures that save the lives we don't see. Repairing large bureaucratic institutions is not always as appealing as building something shiny and new, but they could reach many more people in the long run.
There is irony in how beneficiaries of our region's prosperity invest their philanthropic dollars. Most focus on children in need, and have a strong bias towards building the capacity of nonprofits, often through technology. The "venture philanthropy," now so popular, advocates putting expertise as well as money into the most entrepreneurial organizations. But it pays no heed to the public agencies with primary responsibility for protecting the most vulnerable children. If a baseball team tried to build a strong bullpen by investing in relievers and closers but not in its starting rotation, it wouldn't have many victories. Venture philanthropists will eventually face the same issue.
No foundation or venture fund is providing strategic management or capacity building at Child and Family Services. There are reasons: The always appealing lure of the new. Disdain for politics and the Byzantine bureaucracy that characterizes government agencies. The desire to maintain control. But these reflect the philanthropists' needs not the children's.
While nonprofits struggle to get to scale, the government agencies responsible for protecting the most vulnerable, already are at scale. But, like Child and Family Services they are plagued with other problems. Venture philanthropy can do great things, but it can't succeed in a parallel universe, isolated from larger, established institutions. Children, unlike ballgames, are won or lost in the early innings of their lives. To reach all of the children in need, those lending their expertise and sharing their strength with private nonprofits will have to find ways to make our public agencies work again too. This doesn't mean venture philanthropy is flawed. It means its obligation is even greater than previously imagined.
As Martin Luther King, whose life we celebrate today, reminded us: "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.... Life's most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others?"
- Share this:
Reader Comments
No comments yet
Post a comment
All fields are required (your e-mail address will not be displayed)