The Trust Crisis

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The world is experiencing a trust crisis. People don’t trust their national governments nor their local governments – not elected officials and not public sector employees. People don’t trust established media outlets. People are pushing back against science and historical facts being taught in schools. People will believe an unverified viral video or social media post shared by a friend or family member but not an article by a journalist or peer-reviewed academic paper by a scientist.

In addition, in the USA, there has never been a time where there have been as many opportunities to talk directly to elected officials, via council meetings, town halls, open houses, social media, email, surveys and citizens’ advisory committees, yet people are staying away from these. Officials are talking to largely empty auditoriums and rooms and getting low returns for any surveys inviting feedback about projects.

Skepticism can be a healthy thing: it can encourage people asking questions that very much need to be asked and force a project designer to improve a design before anything gets built or launched. Answering questions can make the reason to do something even stronger. But these days, people aren’t even asking questions: they are dismissing outright anything government representatives or academic institutions or news sources say. They are saying civic participation doesn’t really matter.

I grew up in rural Kentucky, in a civically-minded family: one of my great-grandmothers worked for a local county government, one of my grandfathers was a city council member and active member of and volunteer with a variety of civic groups (he even helped rally support for a school tax back in the 1950s), my other grandfather was a minister and outspoken in the community on a variety of issues, my mother was a deputy sheriff and then assistant to the head of the county government for many years, my father was the local head of a political party in Western Kentucky, and both of my parents sometimes attended and often talked about local government and school board meetings they had attended. I always knew who was running in every local election long before I could ever vote. Politics and values – but never facts – were frequently debated at family gatherings. No one was discouraged from working on a political campaign, from writing a letter to the editor of the local paper, from voting, etc. I never once heard It doesn’t matter. It won’t make a difference Why bother? from anyone. My family didn’t always like what local government agencies or public schools did, but they believed it mattered to use official channels to find out what was happening and to let their opinions be known. I also got my undergrad degree in journalism from a university that, at the time, was widely known for its journalism training, worked at a few newspapers, have worked with journalists for decades, and have idolized journalism, when it is at its best, for most of my life. I have always had a paid subscription to a newspaper, even if, now, it’s entirely online.

In the eight years I lived outside the USA, I was often working on initiatives that encouraged civic engagement in other countries, and people – particularly women – seemed hungry to take part, and encouraging their government to be more transparent via its own publications and via its interactions with the media. It was incredibly energizing to encourage the kind of civic participation I had grown up with and to see people from a variety of cultures and economic levels jumping in and doing it their own way. As a result, when I moved back to the USA in 2009, I was inspired to do my best to be a part of local government, as a citizen and resident and maybe as a government employee, if I found the right position. In the first town I lived in Oregon, I joined the local government’s bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee. In the next town I lived, I joined the local government’s public safety advisory committee, the county’s public arts coalition and the local chapter of the League of Women Voters. I also went through the county sheriff’s 12-week citizens’ academy. I attended city council meetings and political candidate forums. And I have, indeed, applied for a few government jobs.

I’ve known where to look for these kinds of opportunities to observe government, and participate in such, because of my background. And I’ve come to it with a trust in the people that staff government, public schools and media outlets, a trust that was long-cultivated. I’ve never thought of them as anything but people, with strengths and weaknesses just like anyone, just like me. But I’ve realized most people my age and younger aren’t like me: they have a built-in distrust of these institutions. They also need more than one post to a Facebook page or one tweet announcing a meeting to be motivated enough to attend. They need more than one notice in their utility bill to be inspired to do anything. They need more than whatever worked 20 years ago to get them to that meeting, that open house, that presentation. Because for every one official message from a government office or school, they have gotten probably a dozen from family and friends about how whatever it is that office is doing isn’t in the public’s best interest, isn’t trustworthy, has nefarious intentions, or just really doesn’t matter.

Governments and public schools: in your outreach planning, you not only need strategies for meeting your legally-mandated public communications requirements and for letting people know about your events and activities, you also need strategies for cultivating, even rebuilding, trust with the community. And this is something you need to hire someone to do – don’t think you can get an intern to manage your social media and make it happen.

Cultivating or rebuilding community trust takes multiple steps and ongoing efforts – not just one public meeting or open house. You have to think not only about how you will invite public comment on activities but also how you will regularly show how public comment has influenced decision-making. You have to have strategies to make yourself aware of misinformation campaigns about your efforts and strategies to address them. How will you leverage speeches, presentations and meetings with civic groups, social media posts, surveys, community meetings and more not only to share information but to also find out what trust gaps exist and to address those gaps? I research and compile recommendations for trust-building on my web site about how to folklore, rumors, urban myths and organized misinformation campaigns interfere with aid and government initiatives, and those recommendations, which come from a variety of organizations, can be adapted to help any agency craft its own strategy for addressing the trust crisis.

Here are my related resources, which aren’t just my own ideas, but ideas from a variety of resources, with an abundance of links to other articles and web sites (and I would welcome suggestions for other resources as well):

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

UN Report on Assembly and Association in the Digital Era

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On 12 June 2019, the United Nations Special Rapporteur Clement Voule issued a report (A/HRC/41/41) on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association in the digital era. The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law has created an unofficial summary of the report here. In its introduction, ICNL notes:

As technology plays an increasingly vital role in the freedom of assembly and association, the Special Rapporteur finds that many governments are not fulfilling their obligations under international law. In fact, government measures restricting online space have become all too common. Furthermore, technology companies act as gatekeepers to people’s ability to exercise these rights, creating new issues. The report addresses these challenges, with a focus on developing guidance to preserve and expand the digital civic space.

In its summary of the Special Rapporteur’s report, ICNL notes the following regarding “digital technology companies,” and I think it’s worth highlighting in particular:

Digital technology companies, particularly social media companies, have become gatekeepers, controlling people’s ability to exercise assembly and association rights online. The role these companies play has created new risks or exacerbated challenges. The Special Rapporteur finds that these platforms’ policies and algorithms may undermine the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, despite some attempts at improvements. The Special Rapporteur is particularly concerned that social media’s content policies seem to affect those with a public profile in a disproportionate manner, placing activists and those calling for mass mobilization at risk of facing arbitrary content removal and account suspension or deactivation. Compounding this problem is social media companies’ increasing use of algorithmic systems to flag content for takedown and determine findability. In the words of the Special Rapporteur: “Algorithmic systems have the power to silence stories and movements, prevent civil society actors from reaching a wider audience, and reinforce echo chambers or reproduce bias and discrimination, to the detriment of democratic development. These measures can also have a disproportionate effect on already marginalized or at-risk groups.”

Read the full UN report (A/HRC/41/41) here.

Read the ICNL summary of the report here.

Poverty porn, survivor porn, inspiration porn

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Sophie Otiende is a program consultant for HAART Kenya, a nonprofit that bills itself as the only organization in Kenya that works exclusively on eradicating human trafficking. In this podcast with The Nonprofit Quarterly, Otiende discusses her anti-trafficking work and why awareness campaigns fail to deter vulnerable women who are already suffering from poverty and abuse in their own homes. She also says donors must do a better job of providing emotional support to frontline staff. And she talks about the ethics around what The Nonprofit Quarterly calls “survivor porn,” which happens when survivors of trauma are asked by a nonprofit to provide an account of their causes, in a video, in an interview with the press, etc., to provide an emotional hook to attract donors to the nonprofit. The podcast asks some hard questions about the power dynamics between survivors and the nonprofits that have helped them.

On a related note is this article from March 2019 from the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism: “Inspiration Porn: How the Media and Society Objectify Disabled People.” This article is about, specifically, someone film or taking photos of a person with a disability in public doing just about anything – eating, getting on and off a bus, going down the street – without that person’s permission, and then uploading it to social media with some sort of inspirational message, making the person with a disability’s experience a “feel good” story. Even journalists are guilty of this. Often, the stories are about someone helping the person with a disability – say, to push their wheelchair over a corner curb that doesn’t have a curb cut – which deflects from what should be the real story: why doesn’t the curb have a curb cut? As one person in the story says, “Inspiration porn makes us feel that everything is going to be OK.”

Both of these are, like “poverty porn”, voyeuristic. As Skye Davey says in this article, “It captures human beings in vulnerable, deeply personal moments, and packages that trauma (and humiliation) for consumption.” All three over-simplify poverty, famine, human rights issues, sex trafficking, accessibility and challenges for people with disabilities, and other complex issues. It promotes a fiction that these issues can be fought with charity and message-promotion on social media, without structural change.

In this opinion piece in The Guardian, Jennifer Lentfer notes:

Poverty, disease, injustice, and conflict are all heartbreaking. But sometimes the work needed to tackle them is not new, innovative, or sexy. It might be citizens demanding fundamental services like improved healthcare or better roads; or governments better managing their budgets; or pressing local agencies to be more responsive to public concerns… We must highlight the grey area between our interventions and the reality of how social change occurs. Trust the public with a little more nuance – they can handle it.

The subhead on this Guardian piece says, “Our job is to tell compelling stories without trivialising people’s lives – and to promote a more nuanced narrative about how to achieve lasting change.” Without poverty porn, survivor porn or inspiration porn. It can sometimes be a difficult balance, but it’s a balance worth pursuing.

There are some good resources regarding ethics and photography in humanitarian work that have advice that can be applied for nonprofits working with vulnerable populations (people who are homeless, people experiencing addiction, people who have experienced domestic violence, foster children, people with disabilities, etc.) in their own countries, including:

I would love to hear from others about how they maintain this balance in their representation of vulnerable populations in public relations and marketing materials.

Also see:

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

How to counter the ongoing drop in volunteer firefighter numbers

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In March 2019, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) published its 2017 U.S. Fire Department Profile report. It’s based on data collected via a national survey of fire departments. The report estimates that there were 682,600 volunteer firefighters in the USA in 2017. That is down significantly from the 814,850 and 729,000 volunteer firefighters that the NFPA estimates were active in the U.S. in 2015 and 2016, respectively. The volunteer firefighter numbers for 2016 and 2017 are the lowest recorded levels since the NFPA began the survey in 1983. 

According to the report, 83,550 of the 132,250 reduction in volunteer firefighters between 2015 and 2017 occurred in fire departments protecting communities with populations of 2,500 or fewer residents. The NFPA estimates an overall decline of 83,900 firefighters (career and volunteer combined) in those communities, a reduction of more than 20 percent over a two-year span. 

In addition to the decline in the number of firefighters serving in the smallest communities, the average age of those firefighters continued to increase in 2017. Fifty-three percent of firefighters serving communities with populations of 2,500 or less were over the age of 40, and 32 percent were over the age of 50 in 2017. This continues an aging trend that has been happening for years among the population of firefighters in small communities.

Number of Firefighters in the U.S., 1983, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015-2017

YearTotalCareerVolunteer
1983*1,111,200226,600884,600
19901,025,650253,000 772,650
20001,064,150286,800777,350
20101,103,300335,150768,150
2015 1,149,300345,600814,850
20161,090,100361,100729,000
20171,056,200373,600682,600

*Note, this is the first year for which firefighter numbers are available from the NFPA.
Source: NFPA Survey of Fire Departments for U.S. Fire Experience

As the National Volunteer Fire Council notes, it is important to note that these numbers are estimates based on responses to a survey of a sample of U.S. fire departments that is designed to be representative of the overall U.S. Fire Service. Approximately 8.7 percent of fire departments surveyed responded to the survey. Any annual differences reflect both actual changes in what is being measured as well as year-on-year statistical and sampling variability.

The NVFC says that, this year, the federal government will award more than $40 million to local fire departments to help pay for volunteer recruitment and retention efforts through the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) grant program, funded out of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And that’s great. But it’s going to take a huge change in the attitude of most local fire departments for this money to make a difference. As I said in my blog why you can’t find/keep volunteer firefighters: There ARE potential volunteer firefighters out there, even in your small town. There are a LOT of people who are hungry to connect, hungry for a deeper, substantial activity that connects them with the community and causes they believe in, one that gives them an immersive, hands-on, intense experience. Volunteer firefighting can have a great deal of appeal to today’s young people. But if you don’t have a welcoming environment, if you aren’t trying to reach them where they are, if you aren’t using social media, and if you are just talking about all the work that has to be done and the obligations to be fulfilled, those young people are going to overlook you and even go elsewhere and numbers will continue to decline.

In short: we will never, ever go back to a time when volunteer firefighters are recruited in the way they were before the 1980s. The recruitment of volunteer firefighters must radically evolve. How volunteer firefighters are engaged must radically evolve. And it’s going to take more than money.

Also see:

All of my blogs regarding volunteer firefighters.

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Teaching youth about poverty – teaching compassion or supremacy?

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I’ve drafted a new resource: Ideas for Teaching Children Compassion & Understanding Instead of Pity With Regard To Poverty. It’s part of the section of my web site to help people that want to volunteer, rather than those that manage volunteers.

It was inspired by so many of the ideas for volunteering for young people that, in my opinion, are dreadful, suggestions that teach supremacy and superiority, that encourage a young person’s introduction to different regions of the world – say, the country’s of Africa – through a lense of poverty instead of first talking about the beautiful culture and rich history and many talents and skills of the people there.

How can adults – parents and teachers – encourage young people to be compassionate for and kind to others while not cultivating pity and feelings of superiority? Here are some ideas. It’s a first draft – suggestions welcomed (post in the comments or contact me directly).

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.

Justifying a position as “volunteer” instead of “paid staff”

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From February 2001 through much of February 2005, I worked at the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) program, managing the UN’s Online Volunteering service (formerly NetAid) and the United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS), an initiative created by then Secretary General Kofi Annan. UNITeS promoted the importance of engaging volunteers in information and communications technologies for development (ICT4D) activities and supported volunteers engaged in ICT4D initiatives. The UNITeS staff worked from the premise that a key to getting communities, government, civil society and individuals in developing countries to leverage computers and the Internet so that they benefit from their use was to involve volunteers in introducing the tech, building people’s capacity to use it, supporting digital literacy, etc.

UNV places and supports thousands of highly-skilled people throughout the world to undertake a variety of highly-skilled work: HIV education, providing medical care, managing schools, training teachers, managing a government office’s communications, being apart of Ebola response, and on and on. When a placement would get approved for a UN volunteer to work on a project that related somehow to computers or the Internet, there was a program manager for a particular region who would come to my office, per my association with the UNITeS initaitive, hand me the Terms of Reference for the volunteer placement and say, “UNI-Tize this.”

What she meant was this: add in required skills and responsibilities that justify this being done by someone under a UN Volunteers contract, rather than another type of UN contract that would require the payment of more money to the person that fills the position and the designation of that person as a consultant or staff member.

I’ve long believed that any organization that recruits volunteers, for whatever reason, must have a written statement that explains explicitly why that organization reserves certain tasks / assignments / roles for volunteers. The thousands of experts that are recruited and placed by UNV all over the world, working at a variety of agencies (mostly UNDP), in a variety of areas, are called UN Volunteers, or UNVs, but often, there’s not much to show that they are volunteers, especially given the generous financial compensation UNVs receive. The vision of UNV – as well as other volunteer-sending organizations like Peace Corps and VSO – is that the people that are volunteers through their programs are NOT necessarily people who are career humanitarians; rather, the volunteers are professionals willing to give up six months to two years of their jobs/careers and the compensation that would come with such and, instead, work as a part of a humanitarian endeavor. But I’m sorry to say that, for many agencies, involving people under UNV contracts is a way to save money, as such contracts are far, far cheaper than hiring someone as an employee or consultant outright.

When that UNV program manager gave me those TOS to “uni-tize,” I went through and added responsibilities regarding

  • building the capacities of local counterparts regarding whatever it was he or she was doing, with an eye to this UNV position becoming unnecessary as local people take over. I treated every UNV placement that was “Uni-Tized” as one that would eventually be taken over by a full-time, paid local person NOT under a UNV contract, and for that to happen, local capacity had to be built.
  • creating at least one, local event that could help build the skills of community members regarding some aspect of computer and Internet use: where to find information about current market prices for agricultural products, where to find reliable maternal health information, how to evaluate the credibility of online information, etc. In this case, “Uni-Tize” meant to evangelize regarding ICTs for various development activities (ICT4D).
  • suggestions to involve local volunteers in their work in some way, reaching out to students at nearby universities, or at home on leave from university, to help them gain experience that would help in their future careers. In this case, “Uni-Tize” meant to get local volunteers invested in the work of UNVs in some way.
  • suggestions to make particular efforts to reach out to women, girls, religious and ethnic minorities and people with disabilities in any of the above aforementioned activities, to take all of the tasks beyond merely getting tasks done.

I have to admit I loved looking up from my desk and seeing her standing there with a printout of a Terms of Reference in her hand, or getting an email from her for help to “Uni-Tize” an assignment. It was always challenging to really think about what would make the assignment worthy of the word volunteer. To me, my additions made those UNV placements fully justified in using the word “volunteer” to describe their work, to show that this was more than just a job that had a UNV contract.

I’ve said it before, I say it again: create a mission statement for your organization’s volunteer engagement that explicitly says WHY your organization or department involves volunteers. Such a statement will guide employees in how they think about volunteers and guide current volunteers in thinking about their role at the organization. It will help your organization avoid the reputation for being just a low-cost staffing solution – something no volunteer really wants to be a part of. Here’s more about my philosophy regarding justifying volunteer engagement and making certain roles volunteer instead of paid.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.

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Nonprofits addressing homelessness or addiction urgently need to improve their public education

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Myths abound about people who are homeless and people who have addiction issues in the USA – and probably other countries too. I see the myths stated as fact on online communities, in posts to social media and in online comments on news articles. What I’m NOT seeing are rebuttals of these myths by local nonprofits and professionals that are trying to provide services for people who are homeless or people who have addiction issues. I can’t find rebuttals for these myths on the web sites of the MOST local organizations addressing these issues – I can find them on a Google search, for a national audience (rather than a city or county audience), but only with a lot of digging. And representatives from organizations addressing issues around homelessness or people with addiction issues don’t make any attempt to enter online conversations and counter the myths.

Because so many nonprofits addressing homelessness and addiction issues are not making it a priority to educate the public – and that includes the press and politicians – about why people are homeless, about what services are available to people who are homeless or have addiction issues, about gaps in availability of service, etc., people are not voting for taxes necessary to fund government services to address either of these issues and many people that could donate are not donating to nonprofits trying to address either of these issues. In addition, the growing hostility by many towards people who are homeless or people experiencing addiction issues is deeply disturbing: I’m seeing and hearing more and more comments about how law enforcement shouldn’t carry NARCAN or EVZIO and shouldn’t offer any assistance to someone overdosing, how people should engage in vigilantism to remove people who are homeless from their towns and neighborhoods, how people who are homeless or have addiction issues should be imprisoned, and worse.

National statistics and facts that should be on any web site by an organization addressing homelessness (these come from Move for Hunger, the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the National Low Income Housing Coalition – and probably others that Move for Hunger didn’t credit) include:

  • The chronically homeless make up only 15% of the entire homeless population on a given day.
  • On any given night, nearly 20% of the homeless population had serious mental illness or conditions related to chronic substance abuse.
  • According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a family with a full-time worker making minimum wage could not afford Fair Market rent for a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the U.S.
  • A renter earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour would need to work 90 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom rental home at the Fair Market Rent and 112 hours per week to afford a two-bedroom.
  • A lack of employment opportunities, combined with a decline in public assistance leaves low-income families just an illness or accident away from being put out on the streets.
  • Many survivors of domestic violence become homeless when leaving an abusive relationship.
  • While families, children, and youth are all affected, most of the people who experience homelessness are single adults.
  • Chronic homelessness is the term given to individuals that experience long-term or repeated bouts of homelessness. The chronically homeless are often the public face of the issue, however, they make up only 15% of the entire homeless population on a given day.
  • Nearly 48,000 or 8.5% of all homeless persons are veterans
  • On a given night, nearly 20% of the homeless population had serious mental illness or conditions related to chronic substance abuse.

This article, Why Are People Homeless?, is published by the National Coalition for the Homeless (July 2009) and offers citations for each fact stated.

Are these stats true for your community? Maybe – but you should have information that adapts this data for your own community and reflects the reality where you are. Perhaps a higher rate of your homeless population are veterans. Perhaps a greater number of your community’s homeless population are teens.

Here are the myths that nonprofits, academic researchers and professionals MUST rebut – on their own web sites, on online communities, on social media, in talks with the community, in meetings with politicians and police and on and on – about people who are homeless and people who have addiction issues.

Myth: People who are homeless have addiction issues, and people who have addiction issues are homeless. If you are an organization that helps the homeless, you need to have information on your web site that clearly shows not everyone who is homeless has addiction issues, and for those that do have such, WHY they have such issues. You need to reiterate this information your social media channels regularly and make sure all of your staff and volunteers understand this as well. Organizations that address issues regarding addiction need to have information on their web site noting that people with addiction issues come from all economic levels, all zip codes, all types of families.

Myth: There are plenty of services for people who are homeless or people who have addiction issues – those peple just won’t seek help. I have heard, anecdotally, that every nonprofit in my community where I live that has programs to help people attain affordable housing has a waiting list of years, and that residential facilities to treat addiction have waiting lists of months, and that if a person doesn’t have health insurance, they have no options for addiction treatment other than maybe some AA meetings – but there’s no web site I can point you to that says any of these things for my community.

Myth: People are homeless because they are lazy or don’t manage their money properly. If they would work and not spend money on things like iPhones, they would have enough money to have housing. Every organization that works to assist the homeless should have a web page that lists the myriad of reasons individuals and families become homeless and the myriad of reasons that affordable housing is out-of-reach for so many, including people with full-time jobs or working more than one job, more than 40 hours a week. You need to reiterate this information your social media channels regularly and make sure all of your staff and volunteers understand this as well.

Myth: People who have addiction issues are weak. They’ve made poor choices and they refuse to make the right ones. They lack will power. All they have to do is make the decision to stop using. Addiction is recognized by the medical communities – doctors, nurses and medical researchers – as a medical condition and a crisis health situation. An addict craves his or her drug because her body is craving it, and many will go through extreme flu-like symptoms for days without taking that drug because they are addicted – given the choice between feeling good or shaking uncontrollably and throwing up for hours, most of us are going to choose to feel good, and for an addict, that choice involves abusing the substance to which they are addicted. Drugs change the brain in ways that make quitting hard, even for those who want to. What Is drug addiction? What happens to the brain when a person takes drugs that can turn them into an addict? Why do some people become addicted to drugs while others don’t? The National Institute on Drug Abuse has an excellent web site with fact-based information answering these questions clearly and succinctly. The information in no way absolves someone with abuse or addiction issues from personal responsibilities or the choices they make or the crimes they may commit, but it does offer realistic information on how to effectively prevent and address addiction (and prevention and treatment is complex and long term). The brain changes related to addiction can be treated and reversed through therapy, medication, exercise and other treatments. And also note: many people enter drug treatment involuntarily (court-ordered, or given a dire choice by their families: go to treatment or leave our home).

Myth: The people who are homeless in our community aren’t from our community – they are from INSERT THE NAME OF A BIG CITY OR ANOTHER STATE. I have heard, anecdotally, that the homeless people here in the community where I live in Oregon are from this city or county, that most of them graduated from the local high school and/or have or had parents that lived here. But this statement cannot be found on the web site of any organization that serves the homeless in my community. The information needs to be there as well as regularly shared on social media.

Myth: People choose to be homeless. They want to be homeless. Debunking other myths proves this myth untrue, for the most part. In addition, some homeless people may choose to sleep outside rather than in a shelter because they fear being assaulted in the shelter, they fear having to leave their pets or possessions outside, or they are addicted and may not take their drugs or alcohol into a shelter. You may hear someone say, “I chose to live on the streets. I prefer to be FREE.” Saying this gives the person a feeling of empowerment, a feeling of self-worth. They also may have mental health issues and are not completely rational. A whole range of different issues come into play when talking about teens who are homeless.

Myth: The way nonprofits want society to treat homeless people and people with addiction issues require us to not be upset about things like people using my front yard as a bathroom, needles in the park, people breaking into my car and taking anything left unlocked on my property, etc. No one has the legal or ethical right to threaten you, your family or your property. No one has a right to steal from you. No one has the legal right to leave trash or human waste on your property or in any public space. Efforts to educate about people who are homeless or people who are addicted are not about telling anyone they must accept destructive, unsanitary or illegal behavior. Efforts to educate are about encouraging actions that will effectively address homelessness and addiction and about discouraging actions and attitudes that may make problems worse, may endanger someone or may be violations of the law.

Myth: Services to help people that are homeless will encourage people to want to be homeless. Services to help people that have addiction issues will encourage people to keep using drugs and alcohol. Again, you may hear someone say, “I chose to live on the streets” but it’s rarely true, and given the opportunity to have a safe, private, simple residence, the vast majority of homeless people will take that opportunity. For someone who is homeless, every day is a struggle for survival. Many people who are homeless are chronically sleep-deprived because there is no safe place for them to get a full sleep cycle: they sleep an hour on a bus or train line, then another hour in a library, then another hour somewhere else, and so on. Homeless people are targets for theft and rape, so they have to stay awake to ward off an assault. They don’t have access to a bathroom with they need it most or to a shower or bath regularly. They have nowhere to store essential documents – birth certificate, social security card, certification of military service, contact information for family, etc. – and therefore often lose these documents, and don’t have the resources to get them replaced, which further deprives them of resources needed for survival. They cannot sit in one place for very long – either the weather, a security guard or police will move them along. Most services for homeless people aren’t just providing charity, giving people toiletries or a meal or one night to sleep somewhere; they connect homeless people with resources and assistance to get them into more permanent housing. And while there are some approaches to treating people addicted to drugs that include providing a clean, safe space to use their drug of choice so that they do not overdose and are not using in public spaces (libraries, parks, bathrooms, public transport, etc.), there is no evidence that this creates more drug users or in any way discourages someone from seeking help with addiction.

Here are some good examples of web sites and online material debunk myths about homelessness or addiction in their respective communities:

Debunking the Myths of Homelessness, a resource about Santa Clara County, California (San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino – Silicon Valley)

FAQs and Myths, by the Coalition for the Homeless, with New York City-specific information

Myths and Questions About Homelessness, from the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, with Canada-specific information

Exploring Myths about Drug Abuse, By Alan I. Leshner, Ph.D., Director, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health – rebuts myths like “Drug addiction is voluntary behavior” and “You have to want drug treatment for it to be effective.”

Myths About Drug Abuse and Addiction, from the Indian Health Service, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services – rebuts myths like “People can’t force someone into treatment; if treatment is forced, it will fail.”

If the local nonprofits that serve the city and county where I live had fact-based rebuttals for these myths on their web site, and localized the information, people could share them, over and over and over, on their social media accounts, and refer people to them when they hear these myths at civic meetings, meetings of communities of faith, family dinners, etc. That information would, in turn, help change peoples minds about who is homeless, who is addicted to drugs and alcohol, what the most urgent needs of people who are homeless are, what works to address homelessness, what works to address addiction, etc.

But we can’t share such information, because the information isn’t there. And so, hostilities against homeless people and people with addiction issues grows and grows, and donations stay flat or even shrink.

It took me two hours to compile the aforementioned information. I reject any excuses an organization would offer for not doing this themselves.

By all means, if you want to share this blog to encourage nonprofits in your area to do a better job of communication, please do so. If you want to share this blog in a grant proposal to get more funding for your outreach efforts, please do so. But if you are a nonprofit organization that addresses homelessness or people who have an addiction and you also don’t want to start from scratch and develop your own information for your own web site, please do NOT link to this blog from your web site as a way to fulfill your education efforts – instead, I would prefer you cut and paste content from this blog and put it on your own web site – you don’t even have to credit me – but then make it a priority in the coming weeks to localize the information, with local statistics from your own organization and government agencies like your county health and human services, profiles of clients, links to local news articles that relate to these subjects, and more. There are volunteers that would LOVE to help you find the information you need – all you have to do is recruit them – local colleges and universities are a great place to start (faculty teaching health, social work or public administration topics would be an excellent source for recruiting students to do this).

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If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.

Easy way to get a video made & posted re: your org

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You don’t have a video on YouTube, with a link on your own web site, that talks about how great your nonprofit is? Or a video that shows what volunteering is like at your organization or celebrating volunteers at your program? SHAME ON YOU! In this era of smart phones, there’s no excuses for not having such a video – or more than one!

Here’s how you can get such a video produced and online QUICKLY, with the help of volunteers.

First: make sure every volunteer, employee and consultant at your organization has signed a photo and video release form – examples of these are easy to find online. You want to have signed permission from all of your staff, always, to take video of photos of them and use them in promotional materials. It’s a good idea to require that any person sign these on their very first day of working at your organization. If you haven’t been doing this, then print several copies out and have volunteers sign them when they sign in for their next shift, when they attend an event, etc., and keep track of everyone who has and hasn’t signed. You will also need to have releases on hand for members of the public or clients to sign if you film them at your facilities. If anyone refuses to sign – and that is their right – you may not film them.

From among your current and previous volunteers, or through whatever volunteer recruitment tools you use (like VolunteerMatch, AllforGood, posts to your web site, posts to Facebook or other social media, etc.), recruit volunteers who will pair up during volunteering activities: one volunteer will do the actual task, as usual (this should be one of your veteran volunteers) and one will record the volunteer for a few moments doing the task with his or her smartphone (always landscape – hold the phone sideways!). Sound isn’t important. Each volunteer should try to get at least a full 60 seconds of footage.

So, for instance, at a nonprofit animal shelter, if you paired up volunteers, you would have raw video footage from various smart phones (they can all be different kinds) of:

  • a volunteer staffing the front desk and interacting with clients
  • volunteers interacting with animals
  • volunteers dealing with inventory
  • volunteers pouring dog food or cat food
  • a volunteer taking photos of new animals for your web site
  • etc.

Recruit a video editing volunteer who will gather all of the videos together in one place online, a place where staff at your organization can always access the raw footage in case this volunteer is unable to complete the task. For instance, all volunteers could be asked to upload their footage to a YouTube account set up specifically for this project, and for footage to be uploaded so that it is not public. If they don’t know how to upload footage, they could get guidance from someone at your organization the next time they are onsite at your organization.

Where to recruit a video editing volunteer? From your current volunteers (and have them ask their family members), previous volunteers, via a post on your web site which you link to from an announcement on your social media channels, via a video production class at the nearest high school, college or university, via employees at a large company where they have an in-house marketing staff, etc. What about asking the faculty of such a class to turn your video needs into a class assignment, with different teams of students each producing a video based on raw footage and then your voting on which you think is the best? Be sure to write a full description of what the volunteer video editor’s duties are, that you will include in all recruitment materials so expectations are clear.

This video editing volunteer will be charged with:

  • editing bits and pieces of the raw video into a 2 or 3 minute video
  • adding in copyright-free music (easy to find such via archive.org)
  • adding in titles and captions that say whatever it is you want to say about your organization and how great it is, perhaps also about why your volunteers are so wonderful and essential

The video editor presents the first draft of his or her work to appropriate staff and, once staff approves, up it goes onto your organization’s YouTube channel.

You could do something similar regarding interviewing clients to talk about how they have benefitted from your services, or talking to volunteers about why they enjoy volunteering, or talking to donors about why they donate money. For videos where people will be interviewed and sound during recordings IS important, recruit your video recording volunteers from a video production class at the nearest high school, college or university, via employees at a large company where they have an in-house marketing staff, etc. Be sure to write a full description of what the volunteer video recorder’s duties are, that you will include in all recruitment materials so expectations are clear. What about asking the faculty of such a class to turn your video needs into a class assignment? And, again, this person or team should put all of the raw video footage in one place online, a place where staff at your organization can always access the raw footage in case this volunteer is unable to complete the task.

For any video where words will be spoken, you will need to recruit a volunteer who will caption the video on YouTube. I have recruited online volunteers to do this for my short video projects for nonprofits via VolunteerMatch – recruitment of such a volunteer has always taken less than three days! Here’s more about recruiting volunteers to caption videos.

There is no excuse whatsoever for NOT having such videos about your organization’s work! And video editing is shockingly easy: I do it myself, self-taught, on my ancient Macintosh computer. Here’s a video I put together for Knowbility, a nonprofit in Austin, Texas, showcasing nonprofits it was working with in its OpenAIR program. I had video footage from various organizations, all remote to me (hundreds, even thousands, of miles from me) – none of the video was what I had shot myself. I also had some slides of information as visuals. I spliced it all together using the free video-editing tool that was on my ancient Mac, then laid in some music – something I’d never, ever done before – using copyright-free music I found on archive.org, and finally transcribing using the free captioning tool on YouTube. My video is not going to win any awards: my transitions between videos and “moments” arent’ very good – but I had just one day to do it, and the video was VERY effective at the event at which it was shown. Imagine what a volunteer who DOES have some video editing experience, with several days, could do for YOUR organization!

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.

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Rethinking ethics of volunteering abroad medical missions

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I am a HUGE fan of m NPR’s Goats & Soda program. This is an excerpt from a recent article:

In 1969, volunteer teams of doctors and nurses from a U.S. charity called Interplast began flying to poor countries to do reconstructive surgery. They operated on children with cleft lips, cleft palates or burn scars so thick their limbs were immobilized. It sounded like a great idea. The team members donated their time, paid for their travel and lodging and sometimes their supplies, and got to do good…

Today, missions are sponsored by churches, universities and charities. There are for-profit missions as well that collect fees from volunteers, mostly students. A 2016 estimate put the annual cost of getting doctors and other health care workers to sites around the world at $3.7 billion, paid for by donors or health personnel themselves.

But today there’s some real soul-searching going on about this kind of fly-in. At conferences and in academic papers, health professionals are asking: Is this really the most effective way to provide health care to the developing world?

This article from NPR’s Goats & Soda program explores the ethics of this volunteering abroad practice. There are growing concerns about what happens when these volunteers leave, and there’s a lot of concern that the care they’re providing may not be culturally appropriate or even wanted by the people on the ground. Sociologist Judith Lasker, author of the 2016 book Hoping to Help, worked with the Catholic Health Association on a study that showed that about half the money spent on medical missions goes for travel costs for the teams. “It doesn’t seem like a very cost-effective strategy,” she says. After she told a local health provider in Haiti the cost of the airfare for bringing in a single American doctor, the Haitian said to Lasker, “Imagine how many antibiotics that could buy.”

Please read the article before commenting!

And if you are not following NPR’s Goats & Soda on Social media, you really, really need to be. I follow @GoadsandSoda on Twitter. It’s terrific for people that work in humanitarian interventions or development abroad, or want to understand them – but it’s also good for anyone involved in nonprofit work in their own countries to read. There are a lot of issues that bring up that are local to any charitable activity locally – not just internationally.

Update: This September 2019 article from the American Medical Association explores ethical implications of international medical volunteering, such as scope of practice, continuity of care, and erosion of local health systems, and offers a personal perspective from a related field.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.

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Does Your Org’s Practices Reflect Its Own Mission?

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I recently joined the board of a brand new nonprofit. I am helping with the content of its first ever web site. I decided to look at the web sites of some other similar organizations to get some ideas.

I found nonprofit associations that have classes on how to prepare an annual report – but they don’t have any of their annual reports posted on their web site. I found foundations that demand copies of the latest 990 from nonprofit applicants, but they don’t have their 990s on Guidestar. I found a nonprofit that has its board of directors listed on its web site, and always has, but has a different board listed on their 990s for those same years on Guidestar.

Why aren’t these organizations walking their talk, doing what they want other organizations to be doing?

And then there is the nonprofit organization that I consider famous, that you have probably heard of. Were I to say its name, which I’m not, and its name would probably bring to mind images of innovation, of bucking the status quo, of direct confrontation, and lots and lots of action. You would think of it as an organization that doesn’t recognize any tradition or rule as absolute. You would think of it as an agency embraces new ideas and experimentation, and works in a flexible, pro-active manner, putting its mission goals before bureaucratic ones. So imagine my astonishment when talking with this organization to receive such a hostile reaction to the idea of employee telecommuting / cloud commuting. The human resources manager sounded as though she couldn’t breathe at the thought of such a radical idea, and once she did find her words, said that this organization’s HR policy absolutely forbids any such practice. When I suggested that it would be a good idea to modernize that policy, another staffer jumped in, reminding me that doing something so “substantial” as changing a policy takes “a lot of time” and “much reflection” and “a great deal of research about legal issues.”

Here’s an organization that prides itself on not playing by the rules, and even sometimes asks its volunteers to violate the law in pursuit of its goals – no kidding! But revise its human resources policies to allow employee telecommuting? Why, that’s crazy talk!

There’s another organization you probably would not have heard of, but you would be familiar with its work: trying to address conditions and practices that lead to global climate change. But while this agency is writing guidelines, holding conferences and lobbying corporations and governments, the overwhelming majority of its staff, even those who live less than half a mile from the organization, are driving to work, despite the outstanding mass transit system available in its city. The organization has no policies regarding recycling its own office waste, and there’s no emphasis on any energy-saving practices within its offices.

Can you imagine if the press, or a group working counter to this organization, identified these practices and detailed them publicly, and the enormous public relations fallout that would occur?

These are real-life examples of organizations promoting practices or an image that isn’t actually reflected in their practices or culture, of organizations not truly “walking their talk.” And there’s more:

  • there are organizations that say they have a commitment to fighting for human rights and inclusion that have web sites and online resources (apps, videos, etc.) that aren’t accessible for people with disabilities – and they balk at the idea of making that commitment to digital inclusion
  • organizations that encourage corporations to allow their employees to volunteer on company time, while not allowing their own employees to do so.
  • organizations that advocate for feminism and women’s rights, but have antiquated dress codes and business practices regarding women that work and volunteer for them.
  • companies holding seminars on innovation and efficiency in the workplace who have antiquated computers, software and other devices that inhibit their staff productivity.
  • initiatives that tout the importance of local control of local activities, local decision-making,  but ignore the feedback of clients, volunteers and frontline staff, even imposing requirements of them with no discussion from them.

Take a look at your organization, particularly your mission statement, and ask yourself, “Is what we promote to others being practiced by ourselves?” Look at the behavior you encourage or talk about in your programs – do you exude that behavior yourself, as an organization? Survey your staff and volunteers, allowing them to anonymously provide feedback on where they see disconnect in the organization’s mission and the organization’s own internal practices.

Not only will you avoid a public relations nightmare, your own practices will become marketing tools for your organization’s mission.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.

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