Epilogue

As I wrapped up my volunteer leave at LSS today, I walked out the door feeling a bit melancholy.  I have thoroughly enjoyed my experience in helping to develop a strategic framework for our future advancement efforts.  But I can’t help but feel that it is a job left undone.  Developing strategy is the fun (and relatively easy) part.  Implementing the plan against the realities of a limited resource environment is quite another.  Yet I walked away with a great deal of hope, just like when I came in.  We have a group of dedicated staff, board members, volunteers and donors who all want to see LSS succeed at its mission.  To these constituencies, I have these parting words:

To staff

I’m probably sounding like a broken record, but you are the inspiration for me and many of our volunteers and donors.  Your passion for wanting to make a difference in the lives of those whom we serve keeps me coming back.  Don’t lose that passion or entrepreneurial spirit.  I can’t presume to be able to give you professional advice, because I’m simply not qualified to do that.  However, I can advise you to stay nimble and ask tough questions about what it is you do every day.  Your industry is changing faster than most and you are the eyes and ears of the organization to the outside world.  Stay tuned in to what is going on around you and strive to be the best.  We are well on our way to being one of the most admired social service agencies in the country.

To Boards

You are a loyal and dedicated group of volunteers.  You have a daunting responsibility as guardians of our mission and authors of our strategic plan.  We need your continued advice, community involvement and financial support.  Take the time to think about what part of LSS it is you are really passionate about and get to know that part better than you know it today.  Visit the website! www.LSSNE.org  Engage with the staff who drive the outcomes, and get to know the challenges they are up against.  If we as board members are to be impactful, it is imperative that we find ways to engage around issues that are interesting and important to us.  Once you do that, tell everyone you know why you support this agency.

To volunteers and donors

To simply say thank you is not enough, but I have to at least start there.    Without your support, we could not serve the number of people that we do. It’s that simple.  I had a vague idea about the depth and breadth of our volunteer corps, but was blown away to learn how many volunteers actually support this organization: a whole lot of people, and growing daily.  Our cash donors continue to respond to calls for support.  Expect to continue to hear from us and let us know how you experience LSS as a donor.  We want you to know how your contributions and volunteer activities are impacting peoples’ lives.   If you have a good experience as a volunteer or a donor, tell your friends and neighbors.  That’s not self serving; it’s actually empowering to those around you.  Others will look to you as leaders and want to follow your example.

Inspiration and Volunteerism: Leg 5

As a native Buckeye, I have had a nearly lifelong connection with Ohio State, and particularly its football team.  Notwithstanding the brain cramping that must have caused the actions and ultimate departure of coach  Jim Tressel  earlier this year, I continue to be a big fan.  Given the history of Ohio State’s rivalry with Michigan, it will come as no surprise that I have a “special place” in my heart for Michigan football fans.  Michigan fans, of whom I know many, have a particularly irritating habit of talking about their team…a lot.  Most of that talk is really just their expression of hope.   The hope that, someday, they might return to their glory days, when those teams  actually did challenge Ohio State for bragging rights over which is the better team.  Hope is a good thing.  Hope is necessary.  Hope keeps us all moving forward.

On a more serious and much more relevant note, one of the themes that has been repeated for me time and again while on my volunteer leave is the empowerment that LSS provides to its clients, which in turn leads them to have hope for a better life.  At the end of the day, we all hope for good and productive lives for ourselves, our kids, our friends.  The clients served by LSS want the same things we do.  If our volunteer and monetary contributions to LSS can empower someone to have hope for a better life, what more rewarding gift can we provide?  Consider some empowerment examples:

• The local family with only one car that received a donated pickup truck from Good News Garage. The husband, who is in a professional trade, can now keep his job that required lots of travel, and the wife won’t have to walk two-and-a-half miles each way to her new part time job and will no longer have to rely on neighbors and friends to get their kids to appointments and after school activities.  They now have hope for an independent and economically stable future.
• The woman from The Democratic Republic of Congo whom I observed coming out of a field at New Lands Farm in Sutton, Mass.  She was wearing native garb and carrying a basket of freshly picked produce on her head.  The produce will be consumed by her family or sold at a local market.  She has hope for a future that isn’t entirely different from her past.
• The family who was having difficulty with an adopted son, who in addition to receiving counseling services, was connected to a network of other adoptive parents who had faced similar situations with their kids.  This family now has hope for a successful resolution of their child’s issues with the support of a whole community.
• The African girl who came to the U.S. as a minor, seeking an education and better life, but was coerced by traffickers to work for four years, with no compensation and no ability to attend school.  The traffickers coerced her through fear of deportation and fear that her family in Africa would be killed.  LSS was able to free her to obtain immigration status, improve her English skills, obtain a job and recover lost wages from her traffickers.  She now has hope for a life without fear.

If you are inspired by the idea of restoring hope to people who have lost it due to circumstances beyond their control, consider volunteering for one of these LSS programs:  New Lands Farm, the Post Adoption Resource Center, advocacy for victims of human trafficking; Good News Garage.  Together, we can empower people to regain control of their future!

www.lssne.org/Volunteer, or contributing financially: gifts.lssne.org

Question:  How do you know when your volunteer activities make a real difference in peoples’ lives?

Post-Adoption: leg 4

Every child deserves a loving family.

The more that I interact with LSS staff, the more impressed I become with their underlying career motivations and dedication to making a difference in the lives of people they serve.  The passion for their work is different than what I experience in the for-profit world.  It’s not contrived or shallow, but a real, deep yearning to make a difference.  Very cool.

One attribute that many staff exhibit is an entrepreneurial spirit that I don’t often see elsewhere.  Many times, this spirit is borne out of a need to survive, as program funding can be sporadic.  Creativity in finding other money sources often means the difference between keeping a program alive for another year, or the cold hard reality of having to lay off staff.  But I also see entrepreneurship in employees’ desire to provide cutting edge programs and services.  One such example at LSS is the Post-Adoption Resource Center(“PARC”).

PARC was developed over three years ago, in response to a need to support adoptive parents and their children who were struggling with emotional or behavioral difficulties.  PARC has been in the forefront of a national discussion around the need to support families and children, particularly those involved with transracial adoption, or those adopting out of the foster care program, where kids have more likely been exposed to numerous traumatic events.  For more details about the need for these services, see the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute’s study entitled “Keeping the Promise”: http://www.adoptioninstitute.org/research/2010_10_promises.php.

Speaking of the Donaldson Institute and entrepreneurial spirit, PARC has partnered with them in developing a curriculum designed specifically for families of transracially adopted children.   When complete, LSS will share in the proceeds of the sale of the book.  This could be a great example for other LSS programs in developing for profit funding sources to supplement government and donor sources. Again I say, very cool.

Question: Should adoptive parents bear sole responsibility for their child’s emotional or behavioral problems when those kids didn’t get adequate love and care in their pre-adoption years?

Post #3: Human Trafficking

Jeff Kinney

One of my Wells Fargo colleagues asked me how my work life compares during this leave of absence to my normal work week (of course, there is no such thing as normal).  My response was something like this: “Imagine our typical 50-60 hour work week, with the normal pressure of meeting deadlines, sales goals, etc.  Now imagine layering on top of that the added stress of trying to identify and obtain sources of funding to pay our salaries.”

That is the reality of the non-profit world.  It is a daily struggle to find pockets of revenue to keep programs going.  A tagline I hear all the time is how do we get off this fundraising treadmill?  I’m not sure that we ever do.

One of the programs we are working with on this project is our services for victims of human trafficking in Massachusetts.  This program addresses one of those societal problems about which very little is known or spoken.  Statistics at the individual state level are a bit hard to come by, but consider the following estimates:

•    14,500-17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into the U.S. every year.
•    Up to 27 million people worldwide are in modern day slavery
•    50% of trafficking victims are children
•    80% of trafficking victims are women and girls.

The Polaris Project (www.PolarisProject.org) publishes an annual ranking of states, based on their trafficking laws.  The bad news is that Massachusetts is among the nine worst in the country.  The good news is that there is trafficking  legislation in committee right now in the Commonwealth that is likely to be signed by Governor Deval Patrick later this year.  As many of you know, LSS was instrumental in  raising this issue before the public and helping to craft that legislation.  Unfortunately, there is unlikely to be a funding mechanism in the bill to help pay for services for the victims of trafficking.  Today the sources of funding for the services that LSS provides are primarily grants.  Funding for many of those grants will expire later this year.  While we are cautiously optimistic that new and pending grant requests will be approved, there is a possibility that funding for this program could be exhausted by the end of this year.

Question: Should the state have a responsibility to fund basic legal and other services for trafficking victims to help them get back on their feet?

Jeff’s LSS Journey: leg 2

One of the things that I’ve been looking forward to the most as part of this advancement internship is meeting LSS clients, the people we serve.  We had an opportunity to meet with a number of resettled refugees last week.  The purpose was to identify a couple of people whom we might use as “poster children/adults” who would be willing to tell their stories about coming to the U.S.   In identifying those individuals, we asked program staff to arrange for us to meet those who had successfully overcome the many obstacles that refugees face and are on the path to rebuilding their lives.  We asked them to tell their “before” story, of what their lives were like before arriving in the U.S. and their “after” story of what life is like today.  Not surprisingly, they shared very few details of their lives before resettling in the U.S.  Perhaps the memories are too painful, or in some cases, the stories are not finished, as many have left family members behind.

I was struck by the precision with which they identified the exact date that they arrived here, and the pride with which several described their increasing job responsibilities.  Several employers in the Worcester area have become big supporters of our clients (FedEx, TJX and Walmart), as LSS staff have done a really good job of coaching and training these people and following up with hiring managers to confirm their satisfaction with the job candidates.  According to our staff, the primary obstacles to landing good jobs are language barriers (many have never had to speak English before arriving here), transportation and personal hygiene.  Notwithstanding these challenges, approximately 70% of the people who are able to work have obtained a job within the first six months of their arrival.  We heard one story of a Mandean family from Iraq who arrived three years ago, and recently were able to buy a house, primarily because the husband has been working two jobs.   This is the first Mandean family to buy a home since this group began arriving.  Several of the people we met are working jobs well below their skill level, mostly due to language barriers and professional certification levels that don’t easily transfer to the U.S., which must be frustrating to them.  Many are continuing their education to allow them to get back to their previous professional level.

The largest single community of people who have been resettled by LSS over the last several years are Mandeans.  I knew very little about this community before meeting Dr. Wisam Breegi, who is Mandean himself and has recently joined LSS’ governing board of directors.  It is primarily through the personal efforts of Dr. Breegi, in conjunction with the Services for New Americans Worcester staff that many of these people are here.  I am sure that Dr. Breegi would be willing to tell you his story and the story of the nearly 600 refugees resettled here, if you just ask him.  Below is a link to a recent Boston Globe article: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/11/11/un_iraqi_mandaeans_hard_to_resettle_in_1_place/

Question of the day: What is our responsibility, if any, to help the refugees settling in to our communities?

My Journey through LSS: leg 1

A number of people have asked why I decided to spend five weeks volunteering for LSS helping to develop a new fundraising strategy.  It’s especially curious since I have no real fundraising experience.  Honestly, I am a bit intimidated by the possibility of failure, or at least not making any real progress, but am hugely encouraged by the opportunity in front of us as an agency.  In my day job, what I do is build relationships, which is really all that fundraising is.  Hopefully some of that experience will help inform our discussion around becoming a more donor-centric organization.

To answer the question about why focus on fundraising, my primary motivation comes from the LSS employees with whom I had interacted prior to my arrival, and the ones I have met since being here.  Their passion and dedication to delivering a high quality experience to the clients they serve is a real inspiration.  Coupled with that inspiration is the cold hard reality that we really need to diversify our funding.  With an 80% dependence on government sources, we have minimal flexibility in tough financial times like these, when our government funders are under tremendous pressure to cut spending.

Second, serving the clients is really what drives all of us, staff and volunteers alike.  I plan to spend a lot of my time here listening to clients’ stories, so we as ambassadors for LSS can retell them to our various constituencies.  Part of my belief is that we as board members and employees need to get better at telling client stories and how LSS has impacted their lives.  If we can’t retell their stories with enthusiasm and passion, we will not be successful ambassadors for this agency.

Third, I need to give a big shout out to my employer Wells Fargo Bank, which has given me this five week opportunity (with pay)  to explore this new arena.  Without their forward thinking support of initiatives like this, I would still be sitting at my desk in Boston.

Lastly, there are several unanticipated bonuses in this time away from my day job : 1) shortened my commute to work each way by 50 minutes; 2) I get to occasionally have lunch with my wife (probably the first midweek lunch together in over 10 years); 3) I have my own LSS e-mail address – jkinney@lssne.org.  Feel free to use it!

In the coming weeks, I will be posting every two to three days (assuming I have something worthwhile to say) about my journey through LSS, probably sharing some opinions, and maybe even some controversial impressions and opinions, in an attempt to get a dialogue going with anyone who chooses to read this blog.  I invite your comments back, and would love to hear your suggestions for how we might be more successful in finding support for this Lutheran Social Services.

Jeff Kinney, Chair, LSS Governing Board