Social investment, not services, key to aiding neighbors

We are working with the wrong words when we talk about dealing with our neighbors’ big problems.

We call our efforts “social services.”

But that concept plays it wrong on both sides.

We should instead be talking about “social investment.”

That, after all, is the new standard of practice pushed in large part by a fresh generation of nonprofit organizations.

That also is why we should hope The Nonprofit Center, which closed last week, becomes a phoenix. We are better and more efficient because of the standards of accountability, innovation and collaboration the center helped establish in Pierce County.

We must continue the culture it helped create.

It’s tougher these days for do-gooders to get away with making themselves feel better by spending our donations on what they think are good deeds, but which, in fact, don’t help in the long run.

The Nonprofit Center taught its members how to measure results in terms of the progress its clients made. It shared strategies for identifying not just the symptoms but the causes of problems, and addressing both.

It helped its members make the leap from social services to social investment.

The concept of social services is a few steps beyond alms, but stuck in the broken policies of the last half of the last century.

Alms were the profession, by default, of the afflicted. On-the-street, person-to-person generosity kept unfortunates fed, though not decently housed. My family’s lore has my grandmother always having something to share with the people who came to her back door during the Great Depression. Yours, no doubt, has the same kind of practical generosity in it. We’ve proved through our common history that we want to do right by our brothers and sisters.

That goes both ways. During the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Project Administration, among other national initiatives, gave people willing and able to work the chance to improve the nation’s infrastructure in return for a home on the job and modest wages.

Their legacy includes the great irrigation and electrification projects that created jobs in what had been wastelands. They built bridges, roads and lodges in our national parks, job creators all. In programs designed, in part, to help them, these workers served the nation. Some of their work still does.

In the 1960s, the government tried to eliminate generational poverty by providing subsistence housing and food. It was a slow-motion disaster, one step above alms. In large part that was because it was a social “service” that allowed recipients to make a career of receiving checks when they should have been achieving independence.

National, state and individual nonprofit policies are doing away with that, though it can be a delicate operation.

How do you hold parents accountable without punishing their children? In a letter to the editor published Thursday, Megan Hunter of Tacoma put it perfectly: “If the parents are inept mouth-breathers who shouldn’t have kids in the first place, which some are, why should the kids suffer by not being fed?”

How do you design in leeway for people who, because of mental illness or disabilities, will always need some kind of support? Evaluations of housing programs shows there are plenty of them out there, failing over and over, and costing us plenty each time they do.

We are fixing this piece by piece, area by area.

Limiting abusive emergency-department use by capping unnecessary visits is a reasonable start. No taxpayer should be a back-door source of opiates for an addict. It’s better, and cheaper, to get that person into rehab until it takes.

Rounding up government and nonprofit resources to run full-service schools with after-class programs for kids who need them is a healthy collaboration. It may reduce the outrageous costs stemming from gang crime.

Funding programs that combine resources, from volunteer drivers to paid chore service and in-home caregivers, allows seniors and some disabled people to remain in their homes, and off government long-term care budgets.

Providing subsidized housing residents with education, job training and life-skills coaching puts them on the path to paying their own rent, or owning their own home.

This is the new standard, the one The Nonprofit Center helped establish. These are social investments, not services.

Let’s call them that.

Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677 kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com