These kinds of proposals are happening more and more around the country. But to me, all of these ordinances and policies just redistribute homeless persons. They don’t solve the problem of homelessness. You can’t jail people out of homelessness.
Robert Adelman, a sociologist at the University at Buffalo, in response to Columbia, South Carolina’s new “strategy” for “dealing with the homeless problem”.
For the nonprofit data nerd in all of us, there are many productive ways to slice and dice the data from this year’s survey. The Nonprofit Finance Fund and Bank of America surveyed more than 6000 nonprofits and derived a few key learnings. One that stood out to me:
Under these challenging [financial] conditions, many nonprofits are unable to meet growing need in their communities:
For me, the survey re-highlighted to (the cynic in) me how struggling nonprofits need to humble/smart enough to fold or merge. While I certainly don’t want to see their constituencies’ needs completely unaddressed, I do want to see more collaborative and stable approaches to tackling concerns like jobs and housing. Right now, segmentation is huge, creating a greater-than-necessary competition for resources, which means nobody can do their job and address needs quite as well.
Let’s discuss.
NPR put together these neat graphics and accompanying article showing what America does for work.
One personal point of interest is that the things that MOST Americans are doing aren’t the loudest and most spotlighted. Government jobs, for instance, aren’t generally given the same respect and limelight that financial activities jobs get. I am not attempting to make any deeper point here other than as a country, we may want to widen our public discourse perspective to be inclusive of the background of most of the working population. Democracy style.
Let’s Move: Jimmy Fallon and Michelle Obama
This promotional segment couldn’t be better if it tried. This initiative has phenomenal goals and strategy backed by a leader who practices what she preaches. So awesome.
And I believe it’s very important for the non-governmental movement to gather strength, not only to urge better business practices and a better government, but also to find other ways to step into that gap, to do things faster, cheaper, and better.
Bill Clinton, at the 2011 Fares Lecture at Tufts University
