Image Credit: Senor Anderson

This morning Jake (my VP of Accounts), Rachel (my Head Financial Coach) and I drove out to the University of Rhode Island for a meeting with Dr. Jing Xiao, a professor of family finance at the university. The meeting was fantastic: Dr. Xiao is a leading expert in consumer financial behavior, and he had a lot of insight into ways in which we can strengthen our Randomized Control Trial (learn more about it here) and find more research into the efficacy of Financial Coaching programs.  We also talked about the possibility of him, or a colleague of his, serving as an External Evaluator for the study, something we’ll need as we look to publish our findings in a peer-reviewed journal in early 2016.

Image credit: Mattrobs

“Write, damnit.  Write.” This what the skywriter—that thorn in the poet’s side—has demanded of me, the ephemeral letters splattered across my mental sky.  I am seated in my office.  It is a lazy Friday; a long weekend is but hours from beginning.  For the first time in weeks, my calendar is nearly empty, my inbox dealt with.  I should be happy, relieved, relaxed…and yet I’m not.  The monitor mocks me; the cool breeze outside tempts me.  And as those grammatical clouds dissipate and disappear, a starker question is chiseled into the very folds of my brain: am I doing enough?

Let me back up.  Around the age of 15 I was introduced to Romantic poetry and philosophy, that exuberant, excessive, rebellious and moody brand of living that holds so much appeal for a restless and idealistic young man.  As the years progressed and the ideals of beauty, justice, truth and authenticity permeated my neurons and infiltrated my veins, a profound frustration began to emerge: all those around me cautioned that, with age, the ideals would lose their appeal, as though they were a tasty treat, now digested, relegated to a fate of excretion.  What’s more, I was told that they would be replaced with “realism,” “pragmatism,” “cynicism” and other “isms,” save for the pleasurable ones: “orgasm,” “mysticism,” and so on.

Photo credit: kowitz

My favorite movie, The Dark Knight, starts off with a riveting bank heist.  The Joker leads a group of robbers who, thanks to the Joker’s machinations, kill each other, one-by-one, as the job progresses.  By the time the scene is done all involved, with the exception of the Joker, are dead, and the groundwork for the film’s moral battle between the Batman and the Joker is laid.

I have watched The Dark Knight, from start to finish, multiple times. I love everything about it: the dialogue, the dark, moody lighting, the plot, the acting.  And perhaps because of my familiarity with the movie, something occurred to me the last time I sat down to enjoy it: never do we see blood spilled from those that are shot or beaten to death.  Each murder is strangely antiseptic, cleaner than murder ought to be, or is.

Note: I am a Brown Alumnus (A.M. ‘09)

What Happened

Last week New York Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Raymond Kelly was invited to give a talk at Brown University titled “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City.” Kelly is an ardent believer in, and overseer of, the largely unpopular and controversial ‘Stop and Frisk’ policy in New York (Learn more about Stop and Frisk).  Stop and Frisk allows a police officer to stop, question and frisk people, provided that there is a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.  In practice, however, the policy systemically targets and harasses people and communities of color.

So when the Brown University student body, as well as the community at large, heard that Commissioner Kelly would be giving a talk on campus, there was considerable outrage and plans to protest.  And sure enough, when the time came for the talk the protests were there to greet him: Kelly was shouted down and, after 20 minutes of being prevented to speak, left the stage.  Responses to the incident consisted of predictable pablum: on the one side, protesters claiming that the implementer of a racist policy should not be given the opportunity to speak, and on the other side people, such as Brown President Christina Paxson, arguing that “The conduct of disruptive members of the audience [is] an affront both to civil democratic society and to the university’s core values of dialogue and the free exchange of views.”

Here are are the lessons I’ve learned after 5 years of running a non-profit, illustrated in a simple formula:

X(scale + innovation + implementation + luck) = social change, where X = money

Here are those lessons put another way: the math of social change should be algebraic but rather resembles a calculus problem

Why So Hard?

Let’s consider the non-profit paradigm.  Non-profit begs for money from individuals, foundations, corporations and government.  Money dribbles in.  Money is predominantly spent on programs, because funders don’t like their donations to go toward “overhead” (read that: infrastructure, personnel, marketing, etc.).  Programs result in some good stories that touch the hearstrings of funders.  Money dribbles in again.  Rinse and repeat.

Notice that scale and social impact were left out of that equation.

A recent NPR story (‘If A Tech Company Had Built the Federal Health Care Website‘) on the disastrous rollout of the online health exchanges for Obamacare brought up an assumption that has become deeply ingrained in this country: namely, that the private sector can do things more effectively, efficiently and quickly than the government.  In particular, the report talked about how companies like Facebook know how to roll out web-based services on a massive scale, whereas the government does not (ironically, Facebook has been having some technical issues today).  The belief that if a Facebook or a Google were in charge of Healthcare.gov these glitches wouldn’t exist isn’t merely one shared by conservative Republicans; it’s something that many Americans have come to take for granted.  Obviously the wizards of Silicon Valley can do it better!

So guess who actually built HealthCare.gov?  Here’s a hint: it’s not Uncle Sam, but rather a private contractor, the global technology conglomerate CGI, that, according an article in The Guardian, is responsible for “the bulk of [the website’s] execution.” Wait a minute!  What’s going on here?  It turns out that the government has been increasingly outsourcing work to private contractors.  In fact, according to the same article in The Guardian, titled ‘Obamacare website woes: another sign of out-of-control private contractors,’ “Government outsourcing to private contractors has exploded in the past few decades.  Taxpayers funnels hundreds of billions of dollars a year into the chosen companies’ pockets, about $80bn of which goes to tech companies.”

Note: this post represents my own personal views and should not interpreted as the stance or opinion of the Capital Good Fund

The Reasons For My Opposition

I’m going to come right out and say it: I think that bombing Syria is a stupid solution, akin to soaking an apple in poison to kill a worm.  Allow me to enumerate the reason for my opposition and then describe what I think is a better approach.

A Tomahawk Cruise Missile Being Fired From a US Warship

I am going to preface this post by noting that I am incredibly lucky, and I’m going to list the reasons:

– My parents are absolutely wonderful, supportive and loving

– I don’t have to worry about money

– I have fantastic friends and a beautiful, intelligent, passionate, kind-hearted girlfriend

– I get to go to work every day and love every minute of it

– I am healthy

– There are plenty more reasons, but you get the idea

Okay, so time for the kvetching.  Last Sunday, I went on what was supposed to be a 50 mile bike ride and, 8 miles in, my rear tubular tire went flat; that was the end of that ride.  This morning, I planned to bike 72 miles to Connecticut for a Capital Good Fund staff retreat.  3 miles into the ride I realized that I had forgotten by clothes at home, so back I go.  Now I’m back on the road and, after a few miles,I hit a pothole.  As a result, a bolt comes loose on my rear fender, leaving the fender rubbing on the rear wheel to the point that it barely spins.  I spend 30 minutes trying to get the wheel off so that I can fix the fender but the skewer won’t come off.  That’s the end of that ride.

Words cannot describe how hard I’ve been working of late and how much I was looking forward to this ride.  Last night I bought a bike rack for my car and a special headlight to ensure that cars would see me at dusk.  I got up at 4 AM and was on the bike at 4:45.  But instead of being on my bike on a beautiful day feeling the power of my legs and the joy of riding a bicycle, I am furious and angry and frustrated.

Now I need to remember how I started this post: I am so lucky.  This is minor and it’s time for me to let it go.  I’ll fix the bike and ride another day.

It’s 1 AM and, 15 hours after I started my work day, I am finally settling into bed.  Now, I’m not unaccustomed to long days at the office–in fact, given how much I love what I do, work doesn’t usually feel like work–but today was brutal.  I am exhausted, drained, frustrated.  And the source?  A Federal grant!  If you please, imagine this: at least 80 hours of work spread out between three employees (myself, Libby and Jake) to apply for $30,000 in funding. The instructions alone comprise 80 pages.  25 pages of narratives.  Countless instances of the same question asked the same way in three different locations.  Opaque and difficult to understand requirements that are often contradictory.  And did I mention that all this was for $30,000?

Here’s the problem: When contractors seek contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, or when big banks receive bailout funds from the United States Treasury, there are all-too-often minimal requirements, minimal oversight and minimal follow-up. Big money, easy money.  But when I seek a couple thousand dollars to provide free tax preparation to the poor, or when the poor seek food stamps, or when schools try to expand after school programs, they are put through the ringer.

Let me be clear:  I have no problem whatsoever with being asked difficult and probing questions to evaluate the efficacy of a grant application. I get it.  What frustrates me, what I find unjust, is the yawning chasm between what we ask of those serving the average person and what we ask of those in power. What I want is the same standard, broadly applied: you want taxpayer money?  Prove your efficacy, whether you want money for tax preparation or reconstruction projects in Iraq.  What I don’t want is us pitching pennies on the one hand and throwing away millions of dollars with the other.

In his iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech,’ Martin Luther King spoke of the fierce urgency of now–the moral imperative to address injustice in the present as opposed to in some vague, ill-defined future.  Further, in his masterpiece ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ he wrote that “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity.  This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see…that ‘justice too long delayed in justice denied.’”

As the Executive Director of a small, rapidly growing non-profit, I often find myself trying to balance the imperative to solve problems today with the need to think strategically and build the infrastructure needed for scale and growth tomorrow.  My obsession with the ‘fierce urgency of now,’ however, had until recently always been rooted in a firm belief that when we put off doing the right thing, we are in many ways creating excuses for denying justice.  But recently I’ve been thinking more carefully about why the urgency of now is so ferocious, and I’ve come to a new conclusion: every day that goes by without us solving a problem, the harder that problem becomes to solve.  To borrow the parlance of climate change mitigation we are, in effect, ‘locking in’ injustice for years, decades and centuries to come.