A photo showing Yvgenie in our Russian Ministry coaching a member of the Moscow Lay Counseling Group. It has great outcomes with lives changed.
The USA economy is not so good so many of the philanthropists who support social action and good works are not giving as much as they did during the great times. Not only that, the various government agencies that support poor people, homeless people and troubled kids through nonprofits are out of money. What is going to happen to all those programs?
Karen and I are in Chicago attending the Annual Conference of the Social Enterprise Association. It's goal is to help nonprofits learn how to develop other streams of income through using business principles and ideas. For example, today I heard the President of Kaboom tell how he took a young nonprofit with zero assets and currently has an annual income of 26 million dollars by working with corporations who pay Kaboom to build top notch play grounds.
The SEA is also committed to helping profit businesses develop a larger, social, spiritual mission and use their resources to impact the lives of their workers and community. We saw many different kinds of for profit groups that are transitioning into this kind of hybrid organization. The SEA is having a very positive impact on our nation.
I was given a free scholarship to attend the conference and I am very appreciative of their gracious offer. I am meeting a lot of outstanding men and women who are highly committed to serve others and want to do it with good outcomes. One of the speakers today said the reason he was so successful was his attention to details and to outcomes.
One of the greatest things that ever happened to me professionally was learning about outcome research. In much of my college education, especially the graduate school years, I heard little to nothing about outcome research. The emphasis back then was on making sure the theory we chose was the right one. It was almost like seminary. Choosing an orthodox theory or theology is critically important to a seminary student. A Baptist needed to make sure he understood why being dunked was critically important but for a Presbyterian, believing in immersion not sprinkling would likely end his career.
I currently hold a very different view about the care and cure of souls than I did back then. I was urged to choose between and among several orthodox counseling theories. Was I a follower of Freud, Jung, Rogers or Ellis? I was way too young and inexperienced to know what to do. And, as a Christian, I was confused about how any of them fit into my faith commitment.
After some years I heard about making sure whatever theory I used helped people get better not worse. That means we had to look at the actual outcomes of our work not just our ideas about what worked. For example, one of the most popular theories in graduate school was based on how psychologists could train rats, monkeys and chickens to behave as we wished by responding to a certain set of behaviors with a reward. Many counselors were ecstatic. They thought, "At long last, we know how to control people." However, this method works to only a very limited activities in humans so the actual outcomes are not a great as the theory would suggest.
The same is true in social action. We have thousands of well meaning and passionate people setting up nonprofit groups trying to help the poor, disenfranchised and victimized. Unfortunately, many of these groups and their caring leaders have almost no examples of people successfully helped by their efforts. What shall we do? Look hard for great outcomes.
This kind of thinking is music to my ears because I have been trained to use only the kind of interventions that we are sure will produce great results. The way we discover that is two fold: 1. We do careful literature research on what others have done that has really helped our target population. 2. We do research with our own target population and see if they are living better, more successful lives as a result of our interventions.
Groups that are NOT producing better outcomes need to be close and the money they raise given to groups that are getting great results.
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