Measured Steps

"Our work is far from done."

President Barack Obama, quoted in: Jackie Calmes, "Obama Sets Plan to Spur Job Creation," The New York times, December 9,2009.

Apparently that work does not include any job creation strategies specifically targeted for low-income, low-skilled people out of work or never in work. I thought I heard murmers about a public jobs piece but maybe this is hidden in the details or one of the many other proposals being considered in Congress.

Nothing wrong with small business incentives,more infrastructure and extended unemployment benefits. These are probably good things. And the green investments,especially for homeowners, seem intended to create a buzz and spur momentum rather than open up the green economy in a big way.

Alltogether, safe,measured steps. No doubt Obama will still take his lumps for at least recognizing a problem and trying to act.

Embarrassing Discipline

"Creating lasting environmental, social,and economic change requires discipline -- a concept with which many foundations...have traditionally struggled."

Susan Wold Ditkoff and Susan J. Colby, "Galvanizing Philanthropy," Harvard Business Review, November 2009.

And discipline comes from markets, elections or other governance mechanisms -- none of which is especially relevant or strong in philanthropy. So, discipline has to be self-imposed. That's the rub. How do you do it? This useful article seems so self evident that it's embarrassing. Yet I suspect few foundations really follow its basic argument.

"We think of this process as getting clear, getting real, and getting better. How do we define success? What will it take to make change happen? How can we improve our results over time." Great questions we should ask everyday.

There's still the problem of 75,000 foundations "getting clear, getting real, and getting better." That's a lot of individual clarity. Some might call this entrepreneureal heaven or hell. But it would be a good start.

Moment Talk

"It's the moment," an annoying phrase said by lots of people, especially during the past couple of years.

"It's the moment" along with "new normal" mess up my time/space continumm. And I'm not talking about the Obama moment, a moment, hopefully longer, to be sure. Rather, this phrase gets bandied about as a call to action by invoking a tantalizing mixture of historical punditry and reading the tea leaves.

A few years back this phrase led the charge for a renewed assault on poverty. Oops! A recession. Now it gets thrown about because of the unprecedented policy and funding opportunities in Washington. These opportunities are certainly real and of longer consequence than a moment -- health care and climate change, to name two.

In the words of famous organizer, Myles Horton, I wish people would talk more about the long haul. Moments add up; we're in long-term economic doldrums; and making change takes a lot of time. Sure, we want to get our foot in the door,and that's what moment talk is about. I'm more worried about whether we can deliver on long-term change.

Moment Talkk

Broken Levees

"The United States was not more prepared for massive unemployment than New Orleans had been prepared for its levees to fail."

Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich, "Why Welfare Reform fails its recession test," The Washington Post, December 6,2009.

Edelman and Ehrenreich pummel TANF for all the right reasons but fail to talk in many specifics about what a new safety net would look like. TANF has consistently failed from a "moving out of poverty" perspective, although many smart people think it has succeeded. Success for them has meant lowering the welfare rolls and putting work at the center of welfare policy. And as the article shows, some parts of the safety net are kicking into gear -- UI, food stamps, EITC usage, etc. But it's not enough.

"We need a massive emergency relief package not only to fund new jobs but to repair the grevious holes in our national safety net. Fifty million people need help now--not in three months or six months, but today."

The questions, of course, are what kind of job creation and for whom and what kind of national safety net. Public jobs? And should we be looking back to AFDC or forward to a new kind of work-based safety net geared to higher unemployment and the new, new economy. Unfortunately, I fear we'll have this debate piecemeal or after the fact.

Investment Choices

"But Obama's options are limited, as the administration already has signaled it is unwilling to make any investments that would add significantly to the nation's ballooning deficit."

Michael A. Fletcher and Ben Pershing, "As Obama opens jobs summit, he faces limited options," The Washington Post, December 3, 2009.

And that was going into the summit. One can't help but compare statements like this with the Obama administation's willingness to increase troop levels and spend unknown billions in Afghanistan after eight years.

The numbers on youth unemployment are staggering. We need to invent new ways to combine work experience with educational attainment and post-secondary credentials --hopefully oriented to skills, occupations and parts of the economy that will be in demand for the long term. Given future demography and likely skill demands, it's probably fair to talk about this as a national security issue. That's not just another glib appeal for resources: we need to face up to the long-term implications of slow job growth.

I continue to be frustrated by the unwillingness to even talk about targeting employment approaches to low income and low skilled. There is a kind of progressive trickle down theory that is enamored by the power of multipliers. No doubt there is some truth to this theory, but that's not the whole story. A lot of people get left out.

Promise Building Blocks

"So, the most wrenching challenge for the Promise Neighborhoods selection process will be to identify those neighborhoods where the level of poverty and the strength of the sponsoring organization justify the investment...A Promising Neighborhood will not succeed without a lead organization,empoweredand accountable,that is deeply rooted in the community."

Dan Howard and Nan Stone, Realizing the Promise of Promise Neighborhoods, The Bridgespan Group, November 2009.

This paper offers great advice for the Feds, investors and local applicants for Promise Neighborhoods. Adopt common outcomes, use evidence-based programs, pick the right neighborhood size and boundaries, require "common foundational strategy" that enables learning across sites and pick strong lead organizations.

I have two questions and one observation. The questions relate to references in the paper about changing family and neighborhood conditions. HCZ isn't focused on many aspects of family well-being; nor is it a community change initiative in the broadest sense. Are these important? Or are these the kinds of local "experimentation" that need to be minimized-- or treated as "means?"

My observation is about the stunning silence of the paper about the capacity of local schools and educational partners. It seems to me that the success of Promise Neighborhoods will depend upon jumping on the bandwagon of promising change efforts already underway, adding some elements and strengthening others. Starting from scratch seems to me like a low probability path to success. The Feds should ask: What parts of the HCZ "conveyor" belt should already be in place?

Rubbernecking

"The extent of failures was stunning. Since 1981, 423 U.S.campanies with assets of more than $500 million filed for bankruptcy...combined assets totaled more than $1.5 trillion. What we have found is that as many as 46 percent of the failures could have been avoided"

Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui, Billion Dollar Lessons

I'm feeling like a failure voyeur visiting an amusement park for creative destruction. Big name companies, one after another, stumble and fall -- mostly from bad choices. With a little distance and a safe perch, many of these decisions seem hilariously stupid in light of the facts. Many of the CEOs seem like pumped up peacocks striding in full plumage towards the chopping block.

Millions lost chasing millions. Never again will I crack a joke about public sector debacles or nonprofit misteps. And these business failures mostly took place in non-so-bad times.

One wants to enter these stories like a galloping Paul Revere and shout that technology is changing big-time, those are not your skills, buying companies at top price is addictive and not good and that those market changes are forever.

That's the fatal attraction of rubbernecking.

West Wing Bling

"That's the Chicago Way...The rap is that his West Wing is dominated by brass-knuckled pols."

John F. Harris, "7 Stories Obama doesn't want told," Politico, Yahoo News, November 30, 2009

Just like the not-very-good mystery by Michael Harvey, The Chicago Way, this depiction of Chicago as brass-knuckled and all that draws more on its history of gangsterism and vice than political culture. Be careful of the imagery you choose.

The Chicago Machine in its heyday was more about control, discipline and cohesion than anything else. It married a top dog with legions of precinct workers. It was about jobs, the patronage surcharge, the business of the public sector and loyalty. Sure, enforcers delivered retribution for independence but rarely, if ever, were they deployed for goals like building a green economy or health care reform. Shutting down Meigs Field?

I'm not sure the West Wing folks would thrive in the Machine environment, no matter their self image. That's probably a good thing.

Double Trouble

"In the 1960s, there were grand intellectual debates about whether capitalism was heroic or evil;today we simply worry about how to make it work. At last we may be doing the same with foreign aid."

Nicolas D.Kristof, "How Can We Help?" The New York Times Book Review, November 22,2009.

I'm not sure that this is the right analogy, nor that making capitalism work is easy or achievable. What if we compared U.S. anti-poverty policies and foreign aid?

"One of the challenges...is that aid organizations typically claim every project succeeds. Failures are buried so as not to discourage donors, and evaluations are often done by the organizations themselves -- ensuring that every intervention is above average."

Sound familiar? We have our successes like EITC but moving out of persistent poverty in a substantial way has been illusive for many.

Like in the foreign aid world, "[W]e're seeing more aid organizations that blur the boundary with business, pursuing what's called a double bottom line: profits but also social return."

Triple bottom line is the new mantra.

In the end,smart anti-poverty and foreign-aid policies and investments work best in the context of economic growth.

Multiplier Blues!

"Between 1967 and 1982, Chicago lost a quarter million jobs...During the 1970s, 25 percent of all Chicago factories closed...The brutal trend continued. During the decade from 1982 to 1992, manufacturing employment dropped another 18th percent."

Dominic A Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography

Progressives trying to fix the economy or at least think intelligently about such an enterprise have rediscovered manufacturing. It's part of the buzz. It's the wage levels, of course, and the outstanding multiplier effects that derive from manufacturing jobs. To the claim that U.S manufacturing is dead supporters talk windmills.

Manufacturing is not dead. In the 1980s in the face of deindustrialization we had to make this argument in Chicago as high-income commercial and residential uses invaded traditional industrial districts. There were still viable firms and good jobs. Similar arguments have to be made today, in addition to dreams about the green machine.

But I'm afraid manufacturing neighborhoods are gone, for the most part,and won't return. Pacyga traces this saga, not much more than 100-150 years for Chicago, of industrial growth, immigrants, building neighborhoods, fighting for labor and civil rights, spreading the wealth, relocation, deindustrialization and neighborhood decline. The businesses went regional, to the border, across the oceans or simply died. The jobs are gone and so are many working neighborhoods.

Manufacturing jobs and multipliers built a world around them. It was a complex, rich, dynamic, conflict-ridden world that required economic value to grease the wheels and build a middle class. How will we do this in the 21st century?

Training for Jobs

"I thought after I finished the [training] program,I'd be working. I only had three jobs with the union and only one of them was longer than a week."

Delonta Spriggs, quoted in: V. Dion Haynes, "Blacks hit hard by economy's punch," The Washington Post, November 24,2009.

It's tough times. But there is no reason to raise expectations by training people and then not delivering on the jobs. Construction jobs are way down -- so why train new people if you have the people you trained last year on the bench? Training organizations take the money and government agencies and policymakers feel more comfortable training rather than creating jobs. What a waste.

One way to deal with the job problem is to create public service jobs that go along with the training. I started out in the community development field in the 1970s running construction training programs using CETA public service jobs. We rehabilitated old buildings and worked with three unions. Young people got jobs for a year,picked up skills, completed their GED's when needed and moved on into apprenticeships, other jobs or back to school. For the most part, it worked.

Now we're thinking about public jobs again, at last. But the same old questions about targeting to low income,substitution, make work, and scandal are surfacing as well, paralyzing the thoughtful ones ensconced in the halls of government. No single new investment will turn the jobs picture around for everhyone. I hope that policy-makers have the guts to create a public jobs program devoted to low-income young adults in our urban and rural communities.

Fanatical Utopias

"Papa was unprepared for the Age of Fanatical Utopias."

Kati Marton, Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America

Marton's gripping memoir,biography and expose traces her parent's heroic encounter with Nazism and Soviet Communism in Hungary. The almost total society of spies, informers, misinformation and oppression engulfed and tortured her journalist parents but then miraculously spit them out as the regime stumbled momentarily from revelations about Stalin and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Her family escaped to America.

At about the same time, a different sort of Utopia was being constructed in Chicago and other cities to house poor, Black families in high-rise public housing.

"The realities of high-rise life soon became apparent and smashed these utopian dreams. One resident complained in 1965:'The world looks on all of us as project rats, living on a reservation like untouchables.'"

Dominic A. Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography

I'm not arguing equivalencies. Projects are not regimes. Highrises are not encompassing ideologies. What struck me was the different scale and scope of utopian thinking in these examples and how this thinking bred a vicious oppression that fed on people in different ways.

Frothy Ideas!

"On Labor Day, September 7, 1931,more than forty thousand union members marched downb Michigan Avenue...calling for more jobs. The parade...demanded an end to Prohibition as one answer to unemployment. Bystanders cheered placards stating "Give Us Beer and Employ a Million Workers" and "What the Country Needs is a Stein of Real Beer."

Dominic Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography

Even the egg inspectors got into the action by calling attention to the diminished consumption of eggs because of Prohibition -- that is, "pickled and hardboiled eggs."

Not only are these frothy ideas from the grassroots but the grassroots, at least a part of it, got out on the streets and marched. The unemployed organized and had their say -- in addition to stopping evictions and organizing relief.

I haven't witnessed any recent marches by the unemployed or those generally dismayed by the economy, foreclosure and our jobless recovery. But I could have missed something, with so much attention focused on the current policy "moment" and, of course, the dampening psychology of the "new normal."

And the last thing Obama needs is piling on from his friends while the right abnegates any responsibility except whining and pursuing their political strategy of "saying no" and presidential disparagement.

But local and regional marches would be fine. I suspect there could be some new allies, partners and sponsors if the "big tent" was big enough. That would be good. All we need are a few community organizers.

Biz Philosophy

"As Dick Clark, the quiet, longtime head of Merck manufacturing who became CEO after Gilmartin, put it,'A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.'"

Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall and Why Some Companies Never Give In

Now, who said that? I was at a green manufacturing conference last week in Chicago and speakers invoked this phrase at least three times -- and attributed it, of course, to Rahm Emmanuel. It's one of those business folk sayings that probably has no individual author -- although you never know.

"Addiction to scale is undisciplined. To neglect your core business while you leap after exciting new adventures is undisciplined. 'Packard's Law'...a geat company is more likely to to die of indigestion from too much opportunity than starvation from too little."

Scale is religiously invoked in the nonprofit and public policy worlds -- in contrast to boutique pilots. How many groups choke on scale?

"Failure is not so much a physical state as a state of mind; success is falling down,and getting up one more time without end."

This could have been Ben Franklin speaking until the "without end" put me in a Sisyphean stupor. Is success fun? Or just compulsive? Or both?

Chicago Footnotes

"Washington's administration broke with the traditional Chicago growth machine on various issues...[T]he administration killed plans to revitalize Navy Pier and for a World's Fair."

Dominic A.Pacyga, Chicago: Biography

This is a great book on Chicago. I'll definately devote a posting or two to its Chicago story. One short section, however, rang a bit false to me, maybe because I played a small part in the mayoral administration of Harold Washingtton and maybe because this brief era seems more important to me, even now, than a couple of paragraphs. But that's history.

There are a few factual problems in this section: Jesse Jackson did not lead the voter registration campaign in the African American community that was central to Washington's success in 1983 -- lots of people and leaders played important roles. Rob Mier's name is misspelled. James Rouse's deal for Navy Pier was infeasible -- and Washington led a Navy Pier Task Force to identify alternatives. The World's Fair died of its own bad assumptions once they were exposed to the light of day.

I think the phrase "balanced growth" better describes the development approach of the Washington administration -- in contrast to what had come before that exclusively focused downtown and at the airport. Neighborhood voice and institutions played a key role, but the were not the only development actors. Pacyga does underscore the lasting importance of our work for protecting manufacturing areas and industrial corridors.

My dissenting perspective on the Council War's days is that competition inspired creativity and innovation -- probably some instability as well. That was a good thing in a strange way. Getting Council majority prompted a certain complacency. Of course, we'll never know the full potential of the Washington era because of Harold's untimely death.

Bow Bull!

"Americans don't bow!"

Chris Matthews, Hardball, November 17, 2009.

"In recognition of mankind's inherent propensity for tragically foolish decisions, Congress allocated nearly $500 billion for the construction of a new national monument honoring human folly."

"Congress Approves $500 Billion for Monument to Human Folly," The Onion, November 5, 2009.

Bowgate will certainly be preserved along with many other meaningless and futile controversies over nothing that take up our time claiming profound consequence. Patriotic nationalism brings out our best and worst.

"Our goal is to create a structure that, like the human race itself, is doomed from the outset and plagued by innate flaws."

Kickstart Jobs

"Nobody wants to talk seriously about class in America, but the elites are smiling and perusing their stock portfolios while the checklist of Americans locked in depressionlike circumstances just grows and grows."

Bob Herbert, "A Recovery For Some," The New York Times,November 14, 2009

Will the Obama "job summit" kickstart creative action? I hope so. A lot of ideas are swirling about -- tax credits, wage subsidies or public jobs. Many cities are even trying things out -- knitting together various financing pools, contracting opportunities and private job sources.

"Glenn Beck would describe anything like the Works Progress Administration as a plan to recruit pro-Obama brownshirts..."

Paul Krugman, "Free to Lose," The New York Times,November 13,2009

Yes, that's a part of the political problem. But not all. Having started my career in CETA, I wonder if today's crop of mayors and administrators would commit to make a large public jobs program work on the ground. No patronage. No substitution of jobs. No make work. I think they just might.

Red Corpuscles

"Once a decision is made on Afghanistan, Obama will need a similar transfusion of red corpuscles -- and need to make a similar case. In Afghanistan and other distant places, America's sons and daughters are saving the liberty of the world."

Michael Gerson, "A Strategy Needs Some Steel," The Washington Post, November 11, 2009

The temperment offensive continues against President Barack Obama, even on Veteran's Day. Not only is he supposedly Carter-like but now he resembles Woodrow Wilson in his professorial "vagueness." Wilson, however, understood his lack of red corpuscles and did something about it. A very important war?

"Obama is ... more explanatory than inspirational."

Gerson misses our deep,collective American need for a little explanation after eight years of George W's red-meat passion. Are we still capable of sustained, honest and transparent thinking?

Red corpuscle passion produces unnecessary wars and overextended police actions. That's what puts our fellow citizens in harm's way.

And the reference to "steel," not so good in terms of what it conjures up.

Borders Book Bullies

"In-Stock Guarantee on Hundreds of Thousands of Titles...Ask a Bookseller..."

Crumpled Borders Advertising Hand Bill in My Pocket

Of course they are nice,fresh-faced bullies. After being sized-up and approached three times by a Borders Book Bully in Chicago about whether I needed any help, I asked: "Is this new customer harassment a mandate from corporate, wherever that is?" The sheepish bully nodded yes, turned, and moved on to the next inocent customer who also didn't need help. My bookstore experience compromised, I also fled.

What's the rationale here? Is it about nudging? Being like Wal-Mart? Expressing a latent dislike for egg-headed bookbuyers? A desperate move to keep the Borders ship afloat? Why doesn't Borders staff panhandle or beg for donations at the information desk to keep the bookstore alive as a monument to intelligent consumption? I would donate.

I frequent the Borders computers, ask questions and even like the occasional helpful intervention when my puzzled look conveys "lost." But happy-faced inquiries take away the wonderful wandering serendipidy of bookstores. More questioning will drive me, a book-buying addict,to even more e-commerce.