Today’s NGO Human services providers face a wide range of contradictory demands and processes, and localised community planning appears to be dying art.
There is the demand to demonstrate more significant Impact, ensure their agencies are effective, efficient, and increase their teams’ performance with fewer resources.
It is to be achieved within an artificial government’s marketplace, which has created a competitiveness culture through needless, timely and costly tendering and funding application processes whilst expecting more collaboration. Competitive tendering driven with little thought on its effect on the sector, or the communities they work within.
The argument is that this stop stagnation and creates innovation yet appears to be diverting valuable resources and energy, causing instability, confusion, and uncertainty.
Policymakers are poor at evaluating services beyond its economic or political value. The gulf between them and frontline works grows daily as does the silos within and between departments.
KPI End outcomes are all that matters, the journey, the process or experience service user have is no longer valued or understood.
Many clients today face multiple chronic and complex health and social challenges that make it virtually impossible for them to be proactively involved from informed perspectives in evaluating or choosing their services, even when there are mechanisms to do so. The support for them to do so provided by community development workers is slowly being errored.
Fee for service model encourages residents to “shop around” for services, erroring many long-term relationships, trust and creating more significant uncertainty in the funding streams for affected agencies and in some cases inflated service delivery costs.
The trend toward “big data” fuels the effort to create more integrated systems since the government now has much more data available to analyse system outcomes and often leads to conclusions being formed that have no bearing on reality for the end-user or those working on the ground.
Quality Assurance focused not on “quality”, but compliance with flawed and poorly designed contract KPI’s that evades nuance and fails to understand complexity.
Clients are no longer seen as individual citizens requiring unique support but seen as collective groups that need ‘managed’.
Failures in service delivery are addressed by ‘collective impact’ groups and funding from competitive commissioning. The focus on ‘strength-based approaches’ to social challenges unintendedly shields agencies egos, evades accountability and shifts blame or responsibility back to the NGO or the community rather than the responsible government departments.
Community development and capacity building are rebranded, commercialised and poorly taught and executed. God forbid that we have informed and empowered and well-supported community members.
So, what can be done?
Know your clients end game and work backwards
Design your strategy and service from the community or the client’s perspective rather than your own. To achieve this put you and your agencies ego to the side, walking a mile in their shoes, seeing them as your equal, and partner in the problem-solving process. Dropping your assumptions, your unconscious biases, proactively listen and explore opportunities to experience what they experience. Person-centred, co-design co-planning, co-execution is more than just a conversation to placate and selling them your plan.
The focus on outcomes at the cost of ignoring the context or environment your working in is a costly mistake.
Stop the pretence
The government needs to stop reshuffling the deck chairs, through rebranding, restructuring, and continuous funding reforms and complex tendering process as they often produce nothing, but an illusion. They consume time and resources, sow confusion, and make for a good media announcement, but fail to address the underlying systematic issues.
We need to lose the defend the empire culture and honestly and critically focusing on processes and service models that are not delivering for the end-user.
Focus on the right thing
“hard on the issues, not on the people.” Too many plans and reforms focus on identifying blame or shifting responsibility, or worse distract. We need to be done with the buck-passing and small win psychology and instead re-focus on the systemic issues that need to be changed. ‘Collective impact’ comes through collective responsibility.
Accountability
The culture of positivity and strengths-based approaches, while valuable can often lead to denial and allow people to bury their head in the sand. Through being frank, and fearless, we must hold our hands up when mistakes are made or when progress is stalled, and when what we are doing isn’t delivering. There have to be consequences for not delivering on strategy. Clear accountability drives change.
Raise our game – Quality
Quality needs to move beyond just data-driven numbers but be at the heart of everything we do. Reflective practice needs to be something that’s not just taught at university but embedded in every organisation and our everyday routines.
Above are just some tips, we would love to hear yours.
Whatever plan you end up with goals must be clear, concise, achievable, community and client-driven. Ownership for its development, execution, success, and failures by all is a must.
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