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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.

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.

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.

Murray’s theses have been disproven by analysts from many angles, and the culture of poverty argument has been discredited by ethnographic work that shows that poor people are just as motivated to work hard and provide for themselves as anyone else in American society, but are challenged by structural barriers in the economy.  Still, images of the irresponsible poor, trapped in poverty by welfare policy, linger in the American mind.

We need a more nuanced understanding of poverty to find common ground and provide social supports for the great many of us who risk being in need from time to time.  Right now about 13% of America is considered statistically poor, but that number is transient.  Old folks are poor; children are poor; young families are poor; and people who go through unemployment, medical calamity, and marital dissolution undergo periods of poverty.  The social policy of a decent community should provide a safety net for people to withstand these periods of privation and continue to contribute to society.  But because of the pernicious mythmaking of the 1980s, and its continued echoes in the conservative belief system, voters and regular people remain focused on an infinitesimally small segment of society: the long-term or intergenerational poor population.  Our inability to get past this flawed focus relegates us all to insecurity and an inequitable society.

As a result of this ethos, we have developed a political economy that places more faith in bootstraps than in a social safety net.  This may owe something to America’s history as a land of manifest destiny, a place where our westward expansion could create a great nation by tapping untapped natural resources and colonize supposedly open spaces.  This is tied to the notion, captured in Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, that the frontier was one of the defining factors in the development of the nation’s character. 

From Teddy Roosevelt through George W. Bush, we have been in significant part a cowboy nation with a frontier mentality – eat what you kill, only the strong survive, devil take the hindmost.  But it is time for America to look around and grow up.  The frontier is gone – and with it, the opportunity to farm new fields and dig new wells and mines.  Now, wealth and value are not discovered so much as they are created by building onto a foundation that has been laid down by our predecessors and is maintained by society as a whole.  Americans need to look around and understand this, and see that if the ladders of opportunity do not have lower rungs to enable the poor in America to get onto the lower floors of this edifice, the next rungs that get knocked off the ladder will immobilize the working class, and then the middle class. 

In an age where economic innovation has largely to do with service between persons, management of information flow and communication, and management and manipulation of financial assets, attainment of wealth is more of a zero-sum game than it ever was when there were unplowed fields and untapped mines in the West.  That is to say, those who get fabulously wealthy off of information, services and asset management do so by benefiting from a tax an opportunity structure that leave many more wanting. 

This is tough medicine to swallow, but growing up means that after looking around and seeing how the modern economy works, we need to learn how to share.  That’s what it means to grow up.  America needs to create a national health care system, commit to effective public education nationwide, and agree on an equitable taxation policy while overcoming the socio-political equivalent of tantrums: tea parties, talk radio rants, accusations of creeping socialism, and gated communities with security guards out front.  So long as too many Americans believe they can get rich, and that the road to that wealth lies in unregulated markets and small government, too many Americans will remain poor.  A decent social safety net is not incompatible with Democratic Capitalism.

                Recently, adultery has been a problem that has plagued all kinds of public-sector leaders.  Clearly there is an individual moral failure in each of these instances.  But one is tempted to wonder whether the magnanimous leader who takes on poverty in a public fashion is the type of personality that so loves people, and the world, that he has trouble setting appropriate boundaries with his affections.  The root meaning of philanthropist is ‘one who loves humanity,’ and with too many politicians – and these champions of the poor in particular – we all are disappointed when this encompassing instinct fails to square with monogamy.  We should all pray for Barack and Michelle’s marriage, because while the political process will likely constrain too much pure advocacy for the poor during the Obama presidency, as an ex-president and former first lady, the sky will be the limit as far as the opportunity to advocate for social change in a Carter-Clinton mold.

But prison leads to poverty, as we should have known from the start.  Prison impoverishes the prisoner, as it literally strips him of assets and income and cripples him with lifetime employability stigmas.  And it also impoverishes the society, as it fails to utilize untold human capital for the good of society.

We will always need prisons.  Sweden and Canada have them, and some people just need to be locked up.  But until we can stand up and tell the honest truth about the failure of a pro-incarceration human capital policy, poverty will continue to live strong in direct proportion to the health of the prison-industrial complex.