Blog Entry #3

While looking over the statistics of the breakdown of social service organizations (O’Neill 76) I was reminded of a categorization system that I was introduced to in a public policy legislation class I took last term. Helen Ingram and Ann Schneider (authors of Policy Design for Democracy) developed a social construction of the target populations of public policy based on their public image and political power. This broke down individuals into four characteristics: Advantaged, Dependents, Contenders, and Deviants. This same system can be broken down more simply into those that the majority of society deems “deserving” and “undeserving”. With such a range of focuses within the social services, you can see within Table 4.1 in Nonprofit Nation how this type of social image impacts the number of organizations addressing certain aspects of need. Child and youth services (combined with child day-care services) make up the highest number of firms, which fall under the category of “dependents”. This category illustrates a sector of society that holds high public image and a felt responsibility from the general public to protect due to their lack of political standing or capacity for self-assistance. Services for the elderly and disabled fill a high base for nonprofit aid, falling under the “advantaged” category of society because their strife has not come about by faults of their own and, as functioning adults in society, they can create political attention to their needs, which in turn can influence the nonprofit sector to shift attentions towards their causes. Similarly, in the online reading online reading we read about the Low-Income House Energy Assistance Program, and its affects on the individuals in Louisiana. The $10.5 million helps low-income individuals pay their utility bills, demonstrating a focus on certain sector of society. Home-owning low-income families fill a special section of the societal psyche, demonstrating a simultaneous immediate need while still upholding a respectable image in societal norms. This demonstrates again the increased aid observed for programs that focus on individuals who hold personal respectability within the social eye despite their need.

The counterpart to this distinction is those need bases that fall under the “undeserving” spectrum. This trend often involves the connotation and misconception that most public individuals hold of the causes of the required need. This often occurs in public assistance directed towards the homeless community and drug rehabilitation. The greatest misconception of the homeless class is a stereotype of ‘laziness’ or ‘mendacity’ that has suppressed public service to this sector, despite the fact that a survey done by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that 13% of homeless single adults or unaccompanied teenage youth and 17.4% of homeless adults in families were employed. The disparity that these working people are enduring is the conflict between the imbalance of the shortage of affordable rental housing and simultaneous increase in poverty, but this reality is overlooked due to the “untouchable” status that this sector of society has unfortunately adopted. Drug rehabilitation has also fallen between the cracks. In relation to public policy legislation and government action, treatment is seven times more cost-effective than domestic law enforcement, ten times more effective than interdiction, and twenty-three times more effective than attacking drugs at their source. And yet within political action and the spectrum of social service action, drug rehabilitation is limited. Speculation can deduce that again this is due to the connation of a drug abuser’s discord, and their self-created demise. It becomes a moral conflict for many, feeling that aid should not be given to those who had an essential part in the creation of their problem while still needing to address the presence of need.

I do not mean to condemn the social services, as the nonprofit sector is truly the little work addressed at rectifying the bias that we see in governmental public policy legislation and saving these citizens. I only attempt to bring attention to the kind of bias that we hold within us in all aspects of life, even in times of selfless aid, and possibly help create a more balanced palate of assistance. 

Blog Entry #2

 It is all well and good to have the heart to work on a cause for the bettering of our society, but the interaction and contention between philanthropy, the economy of money, the structure of our government, and the psychology of American culture and the human mind leaves the true nature of the work seeming like one of the toughest fields to truly enter yourself into. The very nature of charity work and the structure of volunteering is a concept that counteracts the inherent values of our capitalist country, that all of our actions must in turn connect to a future success. Time is money, money is money, and we are all working towards this illustrious higher society. This idea with how the basic structure of modern business is conducted has lead the general society to hold a sense of skepticism when it comes to the workings of our nonprofit sector.

As someone who has worked on a number of varying programs, I felt myself quite savvy in the workings of a basic nonprofit in America. But as Professor Choquette began to go into the mechanics of a running charity, and how only a portion of our donations (around 60% even) go towards the cause directly it sparked my curiosity of the greater picture dynamics of this type of work, and my self-awareness of what we cannot truly understand by simply observing. I played the pawn of a principal volunteer, an essential role in the workings of such a structure but given the task to simply complete the menial work of following the directions, often without question, the needs of the higher components. I worked as part of a press release team that spent hours stapling posters across my hometown but nothing of the action lead me to consider the costs connected to this project, the costs of pressing etc that would indubitably come out of the 10% of income allotted to use on attracted more revenue. I feel in this same sense, the general public is far too ignorant to push judgment on the ‘efficiency’ of the nonprofit sector, and this is a source of contention that loses a lot of needed support.

This ignorance comes out most intrinsically in the reading “Our Ineffectiveness at Measuring Effectiveness” by Dan Pallotta (ironically an analysis on the attempt to bridge such ignorance). He points out the basic flaws of our attempt to find a shortcut to the ‘giving-back’ process, most importantly our lack of scale and tools to do such a thing. This article seemed in my eyes to be the American nature coming into interference with the will of the Third Sector, a sector that lays the farthest out of this cultural mindset. We as a nation have adapted to a mindset of ‘simpler-means-better’ that has lead the general undertaking of our society to cut corners where they can. Such an example is the effort to create a judging system that allows the public a shortcut out of truly developing the passion or knowledge of the programs around them. This of course is coming to no loss from the public, because the medium in which they entrust this task must work under nearly non-existent funds.

Another facet of Pallotta’s writing is these companies “focus on the wrong thing”, a portrayal of the nation’s more greater misconception of the workings of the system at large. Going back to my own personal ignorance while still closely working with the sector, American people have idealized the non-profit sector to a point of inaccessibility. We often have a habit of looking towards these programs as the solutions to the evils of our working economic, governmental, and basic human structure, and have learned to expect only greatness from them. The very term, “non-profit” may be a contributing factor to this misconception. Our modern interpretation of the Third Sector has disconnected our inferences so far from the profit mongering structure of the business world that the prospect that these programs must still work as a business structure (paying employees, funding advertisement, etc) has fallen away. If we are to look only at the dollar-to-result definition of effectiveness, the level of quality within this work will slowly dissolve to reduce costs, and will overtime result in a need for more aid to supplement this below-par treatment.

Blog Entry #1

Greetings to the wide world of blogging that I have somehow seemed to have overlooked; I feel as if I am entering a whole new era, even if I am clearly behind my times in this technological world. My name is Grace Stengle and I am a freshman at University of Oregon. I was lucky enough to come into the realm of academics with a fairly clear direction of interest, and look to these sorts of courses as an opportunity to fill in my very limited knowledge of what the career world actually has to offer. The world of politics has excited and inspired me from an early age, and it’s a path I was attracted to ever since I can remember, but my place in this huge spectrum of opportunities and outlets baffles me. Getting into this course has actually been a goal of mine since I was introduced to the course description at introDUCKtion (the best pun U of O could apparently come up with...) when I was discussing my dedication to volunteer work that I have demonstrated in the past.

I actually left my high school years with a total of 3,302 hours of community service, collected through a myriad of local organizations and charities. In the same sense that I am attracted to the introduction that this course will have on my understanding of the breadth of this overarching sector of society, I worked my best on finding a full range of sources to add my time to, so I have gotten to experience a number of different aspects of nonprofit responsibility, from basic manual labor to managerial positions. I have always felt that I had a duty to my society to create as much good for my fellow humanity as I possibly can in the years that I have, but stand simply overwhelmed as to where I want to filter these good intentions. My hope for this term is to gain the knowledge I need about such jobs and really find a sector within such a vast area (1.8 million recognized programs?!) to really dedicate my life towards.

I found the second chapter of the Nonprofit Nation particularly interesting in its analysis of the reasoning behind such a large scale of society’s business that is so disconnected from the seeming American ideal of a lust for money. It is part of our nature as a nation, and the structure of our country, that we have developed this theory of a “right to the unlimited acquisition of wealth” but a nation cannot truly thrive under this doctrine of individual prosperity when statistics show that travesties in the living conditions of our society are reality such that over 7% of our country’s population has been homeless at one point in their life. I felt the underlying pattern between the many interpretations of how this sector came about came together to point out the nonprofit sector as a reactionary infrastructure addressing a basic humanitarian need that has stayed present in humanity’s existence throughout time. Despite the concepts of natural selection and the need for the best to pull out ahead, we all have a basic moral obligation to the people that we are surrounded by, and the developed Nonprofit Sector that American culture has harbored today is a successful way to translate that necessary good nature.