The collapse of the U.S. economy, and subsequent bailout of the financial sector has brought the phrase “too big to fail” into the collective social conscience. The argument goes that the economy should not be so dependent on any one company that without it, everything falls apart. It seems fairly clear in hindsight why making [...]
We have an evaluation problem in the social sector. We want evaluations to be easy more than we want them to be right. Designing good surveys and collecting client data is hard. Rating how we feel about a particular program on a scale from one to five is easy. As a sector, we need to [...]
I hate charity. People get the wrong idea about me, that because I’m in the social service sector somehow I like the idea of helping those less fortunate. I promise, I don’t. Christmas is a lot of things to a lot of people. To some it’s a reminder of how great they have it and [...]
I think about class standing a lot. My lawyer friends think about the law, my academic friends seems to spend their days opining. So I think it only natural that I, someone neck deep in social services, think about poverty. But just as any sociologist would tell you, you can’t take the research subject out [...]
I’ve written extensively on how the social service sector needs to be more data driven, that data and outcomes analysis should drive what we do and how we do it. This argument is not unique, pretty much everyone makes this argument. The real question is how do we determine what is working, and what is [...]
In the criminal justice system, one is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, the same logic is misapplied in the social service sector, where social service initiatives are presumed effective until proven pointless. Part of the problem is that performing social service evaluations is complex and can be costly. Agencies don’t always have the expertise [...]
The recent surge in public attention to poverty and homelessness in America, which has been exasperated by the financial crisis, has exposed the social service industry for what it is: a stagnating industry with a lot of heart, but few good ideas. The issues we in the social service sector have dedicated our lives to [...]
While at Barnes and Nobel this evening, I picked up a book by sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh called Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. The book chronicles Venaketsh’s experience researching a gang operated in a housing project in Chicago. Venkatesh has received a lot of attention for his work in [...]
I, like many in my field, have long thought the social service sector needs better metrics for evaluating agencies’ effectiveness. There are many standardized metrics in business to determine the profitability of a corporate venture. The common goal of profit maximization in most for-profit enterprises makes it easy to evaluate companies within sectors and across [...]
As a social service professional I tend to focus more on the provider side of services rather than on the fundraising side. But money obviously is a big part of the game. In the current economic down turn, social services are finding themselves without the funds they need to continue operations, as was noted by [...]
