NeighborScapes

It’s easy to forget about Forever narratives when you’re working on a State or Federal fiscal year. Health and Human Services are Forever under budget cuts, as we protect political sacred cows (why HHS isn’t one is an issue I won’t explore right now); every year, based on grants, government contracts, and individual donations, NeighborScapes has to stop and re- consider which programs it can operate, and the scope of its capacity, to avoid operating in the red or draining our personal money to continue to run. Forever doesn’t mean much if, come June, we lose a major funder, or have to re-locate, or our staff changes.

Unfortunately, lives change, and for many of our children, participants and staff, NeighborScapes is one of the few permanent things in their lives. Daniel, one of our greatest success stories, graduated the program, entered college, had health insurance, was in a year-long relationship with his girlfriend, and had a part-time job that paid enough to support himself- and was ready to take on the role of mentor to this generation of participants. A week later, he lost all of that, because life happens and sometimes people fall into losing streaks. Meanwhile, Rosa, one of our staff, had transitioned from NeighborScapes to a full-time job in a field that would lead directly into grad school- but lost it, because life happens.

Most funders would consider these impermanent gains, symbols of NeighborScapes’s failure as a program. But NeighborScapes can’t fix in a summer what could take years to happen, and we aren’t a magic bullet to fix all of our participants’ and staff’s problems from the moment of first contact. We can give people the ring and the lantern, but life happens, and sometimes people need bailing out.

I think one of the most enduring roles that NeighborScapes plays is that of an elective family. Our tiers of mentors and our personalized career services offer participants and staff something that they may never have seen before, and our “once in, always in” ethos provides enough security for participants to take calculated risks for personal growth. It’s still very much a new family; budget is tight, and we’re figuring out how to pay our bills. But having enough security to take those calculated risks is where we get our power.

We’re always grateful to donors, whose commitment to community, family, mentorship and growth makes this possible and eases some of our financial worries. And we’re working hard to chase the bigger contracts, the equivalent of temporary jobs. But I’m feeling good about where we stand, for this summer. The great thing about forever narratives is that commitment to them is the strongest thing they have going- and everybody here is committed to what we do.

Chris Furuya is the program coordinator for NeighborScapes, a volunteering, community organizing, and civic leadership nonprofit located in the South suburbs of Chicago. Her twitter handle is earthangelNS.

Chris Furuya, NeighborScapes: Work Force Development’s Program Coordinator and NeighborScapes: Social Good’s Grant Writer and Program Coordinator will be giving a lecture at the University of Chicago on Sunday, Feb. 20, on “Job Creation: How To Get Paid to Do What You Love”. Abstract follows.

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The school year is just past half over, and most consulting firms have already hired. Grad schools won’t get back to you until April, or as late as May. And, if you are a fourth year and don’t have your next steps lined up yet, you’re probably sweating.

The scary truth is that work as we know it has changed dramatically since the economy bottomed out. Only 24.4 percent of 2010 college graduates who applied for a job had one waiting for them after graduation (up from 19.7 percent in 2009). The average job search takes 8-10 months of full time, dedicated effort, and experienced professionals are going 2+ years without work, using social services to be placed in entry level and menial jobs to pay their bills, or dropping out of the work force altogether from fatigue. The decks are stacked against recent college grads, and even more, as levels of education decline.

Even the college grads that do find traditional work, are finding much more brainless work at salaries far below their pre-2008 levels (and generally starting at ¾ of the rate of an entry level truck driver). This is particularly powerful in its long-term effects. A recent New York Times article reports that “when jobs are scarce, more college grads start out in lower-level jobs with lower starting salaries. Academic research suggests that for many of these graduates, that correlates to overall lower levels of career attainment and lower lifetime earnings…The pat answer is that college students should consider graduate school as a way to delay a job search until things turn around, and that more high school students should go to college to improve their prospects… For many undergraduates, especially those with large student debts, graduate school would be prohibitively expensive. And while more than half of this year’s high school grads are expected to be enrolled in college in the fall, most will have to work to help pay the bills. For them, college is not a retreat from a bad job market; a bad market is an obstacle to a college degree.”

In summary, there’s barely any work, the jobs that are available pay poorly and offer little room for growth, and education buys progressively little as time goes on.

However, the flipside of this is that the ground is fertile for a new wave of entrepreneurship and small business creation. Established organizations are closing, creating room in the market for new organizations, and while the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is running out, it has inspired a new wave of job creation opportunities for those savvy enough to turn a stone into soup. Chris Furuya of NeighborScapes: Workforce Development and NeighborScapes: Social Good walks you through creating a job you’ll love doing, while making a living as you do it and identifying clients that are delighted to pay you.

Chris Furuya is a University of Chicago alumna, class of 2009, and previously of Snell House. She has completed an AmeriCorps VISTA/LeaderCorps year through the United Way and Aunt Martha’s Youth Services and Aunt Martha’s Health Care Network as a community advocate and program assistant with heavy grant writing and young adult/employment experience. Her work through NeighborScapes’ workforce development program has placed hard-to-employ young adults in jobs specifically tailored to their interests and skills, offering a living wage and career development opportunities, and mobilized high skill workers to volunteer their way into full-time employment. Meanwhile, her work as program affiliate and primary grant drafter at Metro Alliance Consulting/NeighborScapes: Social Good has brought poverty-alleviation, community development programs to under-served Chicago south side and southland communities. Chris is currently a Research and Development Associate at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and an Associate Consultant at LM Strategies. Chris continues to work with NeighborScapes on a project-specific, interest-driven basis. Chris has previously published articles on job creation and career development in Ms. Career Girl, Monster and Excelle.

I do a lot of things at NeighborScapes. I’m a mentor for a few young adults who I’ve bonded to particularly over the course of some of our organized programmatic activity. I’m a liason for the nonprofit to community stakeholders and partners, and frequently the first point of contact for donors and volunteers (or have a propensity for recruiting random people I encounter to donate or volunteer…) I’ve done limited program design, and some extremely reluctant audit work. But, lately, I’m a grant writer, bolstering the capacity of other nonprofits in the Southland and cavorting about as a gun-for-hire. I get a kick out of finding out how to run a nonprofit at optimum performance, and helping grow nonprofits to that point.

And, over the course of my grant writing experience, I have indeed learned a lot about what makes nonprofits function. A staggering proportion of them cater to the grant, fulfilling the expectations of whoever promises to keep their doors open and their salaries paid. All of the grant writing training I’ve had, has told me to write the grant by promising to fulfill each of its terms, and do it cost effectively.

The problem with this, is that it creates a culture of thousands of cookie cutter programs vying for limited (and shrinking) federal funding contracts; the effect is replicated in the hundreds across State contracts and in the tens across County ones. The bigger private foundations see the same effect, in proportion to the degree of detail their proposals ask for. Requests for Quotes (RFQs) tend to be pretty specific in the activity they want the recipients of their awards to perform, and if an applicant fails to make those promises, that applicant is Seldom Offered Licensure (S.O.L.).

This frightening reality often makes the more hefty, established nonprofits that really could drive meaningful, sector-wide change, paralyzed and less able to enact this change. Instead, they strive to always do what they have always done, but better and cheaper and for more people. This is good, if what they are doing is sensitive to the needs of the surrounding community and the modern era. But it is very, very bad, if, say, Washington DC or Springfield, IL do not know the needs of Dolton, IL, and don’t know what questions to ask. Or, if a nonprofit in Tinley, IL designs a financial literacy program in 2001, the cornerstone of which is “buying a home is always a good financial investment”- and relies on the grant to pay its people, and fears changing the curriculum for ear of losing the grant, to the point that it runs essentially the same program by 2010.

The NeighborScapes philosophy is to always do one better than the grant asks for. This is smart, from a competitive angle- an application that promises 110%, and a nonprofit that has been coached to perform what it has promised, will almost always have a strategic advantage over those who only promise to do what’s asked of them, all else taken equally. It’s smart, because it gives back to the funder- not only in supplying the funder with feet on the ground to carry out the funder’s mission, but with a deeper understanding of the social goal the nonprofit and the funder share. And it’s smart, because it preserves the diversity, individuality, and nuance of the individual nonprofit applying for the grant. If, after all the boxes are filled, there’s still room in the margins- a nonprofit is free to add whatever to the margins it pleases, so long as it believes this extra will also please the funder. And, you know, that the RFQ has not specifically forbidden such margin doodling.

It’s why I’m sitting in a borrowed office today, far past when the regular tenants of the miles of cubicles surround me have gone home, busting All Services Securable to bring in yet another massive federal grant with draconian expectations. I’m an hourly employee, my job doesn’t offer benefits, and I’m making far below my worth in a for-profit company. But I love my job.

I think it’s because NeighborScapes takes the same philosophy for its youth- and its staff. Yes, I’ll design a GED program for Yasmine- but if Yasmine wants to be a CSI, I’ll design a GED program catered to getting her into crime-solving. Karen wants a job with benefits and health insurance, to support her family- but also loves numbers? Okay, let’s put her on a career track, not just somewhere that will take care of her basic needs. Let’s preserve the artistic leanings of the youth who come to us looking for menial jobs that will pay regularly, let’s make businessmen out of hustlers, let’s make scholars out of students and advocates out of earnest individuals.

People- and organizations, especially nonprofits- are complex and nuanced and beautiful. And I’m so glad to be able to help keep them running- and keep them remembering what it’s like to be themselves.

Chris Furuya is the program coordinator for NeighborScapes, a volunteering, community organizing, and civic leadership nonprofit located in the South suburbs of Chicago. Her twitter handle is earthangelNS.

When I was growing up, my favorite Disney movie was The Little Mermaid. Setting aside my problems with the show now that I’m an adult, I manifested my true, middle-class, capitalist gestalt by loving Ariel’s collection of junk. These were things that had been lost in disaster or cast aside as useless, preserved by someone who had no idea what they were, but was enraptured with the possibility of them- and the connotation that those objects had, of a world that was mysterious but beautiful.

Ariel only got it halfway, though. It’s not enough to just collect the junk; you have to fix it, shine it, make it do things. It’s not enough to demand an answer of Scuttle for what the items did; you have to use them, and teach others to use and value them, too.

My living space, alas, looks a lot like Ariel’s cavern. I love books, and show my love of them by collecting them constantly. My library would look a lot like the Beast’s, if the Beast had no taste for presentation; the shelves are crammed with books without any real governance, and the space in between is filled with other miscellaneous bric-a-brac that is  both supremely useful-someday, and presently quite useless.

The key to this collection compulsion is that every item I collect symbolizes possibility. With the yarn, I don’t know yet what I will make, but I know it will be beautiful because I value my skill at creating things. With the books, I don’t know yet what they will contain, but I will almost certainly someday discover it.

Figuring out what makes a good nonprofit run, and then doing those things, feels very similar. A good grant provides governance, and a skeleton of how goals should be achieved- but deliberately leaves the entrails out. It’s up to the grant writer to invent things like the heart, the lungs, and the liver. Even if the appendix isn’t strictly necessary, it’s usually good to include it just in case.

I like discovering things. Discovering talent, discovering possibility, and cultivating it to bring it to bear fruit. I believe that the strongest tenant of environmentalism and the strongest tenant to social change is to waste not, and there’s so much out there that, with some repairs, a good scrubbing, and a coat of polish, can run far beyond anyone’s expectations.

Chris Furuya is the program coordinator for NeighborScapes, a volunteering, community organizing, and civic leadership nonprofit located in the South suburbs of Chicago. Her twitter handle is earthangelNS.