Government has many of the same problems nonprofit agencies have. It seldom has much faith, trust and confidence in what it learns from what it does! And it has virtually no incentive to use these lessons, even as the rest of the world turns toward responsbile enterprise ideals which are supposedly based on effective assessments.
For the most part, government views itself as a simple service provider. While various departments might develop or buy and refine various infrastructure elements (such as software systems), the overall mental picture of government of itself and its leaders–particularly by policymakers–is that it is not a smart entrepreneur charting a new course of opportunity.
Unfortunately–or perhaps fortunately!!!!!–the facts actually suggesting that its poor self-concept is undeserved. There are a great number of possible avenues of opportunity (and even new methods of service and operation) that government and its partner the nonprofit sector can travel down if their mission is truly to find pragmatic answers that actually work.
Many years ago I was involved in the early development of a vocational training project that sought to teach formerly mentally ill men (and some women and families) how to learn core job training skills. We decided to do this in Richmond, California, using food service and grounds maintence business ventures. (You can see how well this has worked by visiting Rubicon Programs, where this agency now reflects the succeses of lessons learned over those many years!)
Jump ahead now to the social enterpreneur movement. When the idea works right, it should be able to ferret out these hidden values from the helping sector, in no small part because of the practices and resources of the for-profit sector and mentality. And now there is a growing interest in seeing just what role the government itself might be able to play in making this transformation happen.
Take for example the following ideas presented by Root Causes, a consulting effort that seeks to learn more and teach the world about the concepts underlying both philanthropic and governmental growth into the field of global enterprise:
These Public Innovators have the ability to
-
* Encourage innovation overall
* Create a general environment that favors creativity
* Reward success when it is found, even when found among community providers
* Put in place the elements of an economy of scale that allow progress to be affordable
* Produce and recognize the value of the lessons of learning
At Venture Charities we agree … and encourage even more work of this kind. But we also need to make sure that what has already been learned by the nonprofit sector is appreciated and finds its way to the table where the discussions are being held before everyone forgets where the ideas all started.
Doing so would serve as an exceptional way to demonstrate that socially responsbile govenment is desirable and affordable while boosting the self-esteem of the giving-back community of professionals.
But we still have to translate these great goals into useful tools and approaches that make sense to the average community agency workers who still focus most on very basic needs of customers from neighborhoods in need.
Of course, we now have to wonder whether the current financial services catastrophe will put whatever progress we have made on the back burner ….
