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.

There was a point in time over last summer in which 60-75% of the staff in the NeighborScapes office at any given time was Jewish. Purim was a big deal, and most of the staff were gone for the High Holidays; I think I spent Purim alternating reading about it so I’d be more prepared next year and trying to do billable work. The nuances of Hanukkah and Passover remain a mystery to me (what the heck, what is an orange doing on a passover seder plate? I GUARANTEE the Jews did not have oranges when they were fleeing Egypt), as much as I’m trying to learn.

But there’s a certain charm to Hanukkah, that comes from more than just being the Jewish holiday that’s chronologically closest to Christmas that also involves exchanging gifts and lighting candles. I’m overcoming the irony of a nonprofit that focuses on green jobs and a Green economy celebrating a festival of oil. Instead, I look at it, as with everything, from the perspective of nonprofit operations, where using one day’s resources to last eight is the kind of holiday miracle that our funders expect us to perform regularly.

Giving us one day’s resources to last eight is impossible. It’s insulting. It defies science and common sense and spits in the face of good work. It takes overworked, underpaid employees and demands that they do ever more, work ever harder, to meet need rising like a tsunami with resources washing away like sand.

This, I think, is missing the point of the miracle. It is a superhuman accomplishment to do eight days of work with one day of oil. It is superhuman to achieve in six months what should take a year, it is superhuman to meet 2010 (or 2011’s!) needs with resources at 1990 levels. There is no science or logic to it. I want to throw up my arms and quit.

But, always, something comes along. Prairie State offers us a partnership with YES right when the NeighborScapes network has been exhausted for summer fundraising. HCI pays us when our operating funds are right about to dry. A new van is donated right when the possession or absence of a van will make or break our summer camp, a high-skill volunteer with specifically the skills we need shows up on our doorstep a day before we need them. A partnership with National Able brings us Sandra, right when we need her most- even though we’ve tried to reach out to National Able for months before.

I’m educated. I like to operate with certainty and science. I like to look before I leap, plan for the worst, have a back-up strategy AND an exit strategy. But that’s not the funding environment I find myself in, nor the kind of nonprofit I work for. With the economy so unstable and NeighborScapes so new, sometimes I only get one night’s worth of oil.

But NeighborScapes is a lighthouse to too many people for me not to keep the candle burning. So maybe I’ll learn from my Japanese heritage and study a little Kaizen, working towards constant improvement in myself, my work, and those around me. Maybe I’ll honor my white grandfather who spent forty years in a factory for Ford, and see my work as one powerfully important step in a much larger picture. And maybe, during the winter Holidays, it’s the time of year for Hanukkah Miracles to happen.

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.

A trust fall is a trust-building game often conducted as a group exercise in which a person deliberately allows themselves to fall, relying on the other members of the group to catch the falling person. Variants increase the risk, by having the falling person start from elevated positions, be blindfolded, or not know who will catch them. And there is every reason in the world for youth services nonprofits to teach trust falls to their participants, but not engage in them themselves.

Kelly Evans from Hire Learning runs a tight ship. She takes an innovative approach to job training, and runs the kind of program that should rightly be replicated across the greater Chicago area, if not wider audiences. She is the kind of shrewd, fast-moving, strategic start-up executive director that all startup executive directors should aim to be. And I can easily see Kelly Evans being the next Gary Leofanti and Hire Learning being the next Aunt Martha’s.

Hire Learning has a lot of overlap with NeighborScapes. We serve much of the same population, doing many of the same or similar services. Hire Learning is headquartered in the same town that NeighborScapes’ board president and two board members live in. And, according to conventional wisdom, we should be competitors, and I am a fool for saying that Hire Learning will catalyze your dollars and volunteer hours to enact a far more powerful and lasting change than almost any nonprofit I’ve seen in the Southland.

But Hire Learning knows something that most other nonprofits in the Southland do not know, and this will be the key to their exponential growth. Hire Learning needs only Kelly Evans’s shrewd interview of a potential partner and her Board’s approval, before she will throw the full and growing heft of Hire Learning’s capacity into that strategic partnership. Hire Learning is an engine catalyzing other organizations’ growth, and uses the goodwill that it builds up and the collaborative fundraising that results to drive its own growth. Hire Learning helps itself by helping others.

This has been juxtaposed recently in our application for a Federal grant. Hire Learning was brought to the table two days before Thanksgiving and had a letter of commitment detailing specific offered in-kind services by Tuesday before the holiday. Other, far more established nonprofits with far bigger operating budgets, who have the full cost of the federal grant in the bank as cash reserves, took a far slower approach, and required a full month and the absolute guarantee of a subgrant in the case of winning the federal grant before making the same commitment.

This, I think, will be the key to who survives in the face of an IL budget crisis. I’ve seen the United Way numbers, and know that offices will close, staff will be laid off, hours of operation will shrink, and it’s very likely that some of the more unstable nonprofits will halt operations altogether. But Hire Learning is going to go for broke, making the dream happen for other startup nonprofits, strategically selected by a shrewd executive director with an eye for explosive growth. Maybe some of those nonprofits will be selfish with that money. But maybe subgrants and goodwill built up by Kelly’s efforts will translate to capacity building for Hire Learning, and be the route to Hire Learning’s true potential. I hope so. NeighborScapes is taking the same route. Kelly is an inspiration to how I understand nonprofits in the Southland, and I think Hire Learning and NeighborScapes share a lot of ideology.

So, here’s to Kelly Evans and Hire Learning, and a paradigm of collaborative growth. I trust Kelly Evans and Hire Learning to catch me or mine when they need it, and be a model for other start-up nonprofits to do the same. And, Kelly? We’ve got your back, should you ever need us.

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.