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How
do homeless people find work? The answer is not very easily.
With no home to call their own, and no personal phone for
receiving messages, the prospect of the employment process
can be daunting. What is a potential employer to surmise when
phoning for an interview, only to be met on the other end
of the line by a shelter worker fielding calls for the nighttime
residents?
In
Seattle, the city found a solution in creating Community Voice
Mail, a system by which the homeless and phoneless can check
messages 24-hours a day and thus receive crucial messages
from employers and others, without the stigma of homelessness
attached to their names.
Seattle
is not alone in the good news department. In the Badger State,
a program known as Wisconsin Works has reduced the welfare
rolls by 80 percent in four years time.
Farther
south, Florida’s Healthy Kid Corporation provides 50,000
uninsured children with necessary and comprehensive health
care.
And
in Los Angeles, a program called Humanitas has helped teachers
and their pupils become partners in learning. Since the program
began, 30 percent of students are more likely to attend college,
and 80 percent are less likely to leave school.
Success
stories worthy of making headlines? Perhaps, and some certainly
have. But, considering that these innovative programs were
born from all levels of government — not nonprofits or
NGOs — many seem to swim just under the radar screen
of a prying press bent on fishing out stories of a different
nature.
“The
media,” said KSG Professor Alan Altshuler, “tend
to focus overwhelmingly on stories of fraud, waste, abuse,
and red tape.”
Enter
Innovations in American Government, started at the Kennedy
School in 1985, as a means of recognizing and replicating
government innovation, first at the state and local levels,
and, starting in 1995, at the federal level as well. Through
an annual awards competition — funded by the Ford Foundation
and administered by the Kennedy School, in partnership with
the Council for Excellence in Government — the program
spotlights and then offers monetary rewards for “good
government,” specifically programs using successful,
creative approaches that can be easily adapted in other locales.
In the 16 years since its inception, more than 23,000 applications
have been received, and, as of 2000, 280 programs have been
recognized with Innovations Awards. One hundred and forty-five
winners have received the $100,000 top prize, and 135 finalists
have gone back to the office with honorariums of $20,000.
In
April, backed by an historic $50 million gift by the Ford
Foundation, Innovations became housed under the auspices of
the new Institute for Government Innovation, of which Alshuler
is faculty chair.
“We
all depend critically upon public services…and know that
the media portrayal is extremely partial,” continued
Altshuler. “The Innovations stories partially balance
this negative image, encouraging people to think in more refined
fashion about the pros and cons of government performance.”
But
the negative images are hard to temper, acknowledged Bill
Parent, director of Innovations from 1994 to 1999, when many
media junkies — himself included — follow the path
of human nature, focusing more time and attention on tales
of government gossip and scandal, while neglecting to read
accompanying stories of “government working well.”
As
a result, Parent said, “There are major effects of the
program that are hidden from the public view.”
The
Invention of an Institute
Are
government and innovation even compatible? Indeed they are, according to Gail Christopher, who commands the
job of director of the institute. From her modest office in
the Taubman Center, Christopher — in the post for less
than two years — operates with the ease of a veteran.
A self-proclaimed “social entrepreneur” and “possibility
thinker,” she arrived at the Kennedy School in January
2000 after years of working with and in the kinds of government
offices that her program now recognizes.
Changes
are under way as the result of Ford’s $50 million endowment,
and Christopher is the shepherd of those changes. Under the
new framework of the institute, the Innovations Awards will
still remain as the flagship program, but the institute will
further promote its role on a number of levels: staffing will
increase; fellows will be brought on board; and the focus
will expand beyond the scope of sharing good government ideas
simply within our own borders.
“I
am hopeful that under these auspices it will be possible to
go deeper than the innovations themselves,” said Lisbeth
Schorr, a member of the Innovations National Selection Committee
and a lecturer on social medicine and health policy at Harvard
Medical School, “to identify the new institutional arrangements
that would support the spread of effective innovations.”
The
Ford Foundation, as the founding force behind Innovations,
chose in recent years to replicate its own success elsewhere,
prompting the formation of sister sites in South Africa, the
Philippines, Brazil, and Chile, with other programs under
way in Mexico and China. Closer to home, Native American groups
created Honoring Nations, an awards program run by the Harvard
Project on American Indian Economic Development that recognizes
innovations in the governance of American Indian nations.
Ford
Foundation President Susan Berresford said the overseas programs
are “helping to fortify traditions of good practice in
new democratic governments and in governmental systems promoting
decentralization of authority. Thus they come at a time when
support for effective, reliable, and creative governmental
employees is especially important.
“Creative
solutions for public problems abound in government at all
levels,” said Berresford. “That has been amply demonstrated
by the Innovations Awards in the United States and is increasingly
apparent in other societies around the world. The Kennedy
School incubated this idea with great success, and this significant
support will allow its new institute to make connections and
engage others on an international scale.”
Christopher
is quick to give credit where credit is due, lauding the success
of the program to its founders and former directors. Concerned
with the growing distrust for government and government failures,
Christopher said that the Ford Foundation asked itself what
could be done “to create a counterbalance to the perception
that government was the enemy. They wanted to find examples
that government was working.”
The
idea had been developed by Berresford, who was then vice president
of the foundation’s U.S. and International Affairs Programs
to former Ford Foundation President Franklin Thomas, and David
Arnold, then a Ford program officer who directed the foundation’s
governance projects. On the Kennedy School side, professors
Pete Zimmerman MPP 1977 and Arnold Howitt, “brainstormed
the process that is still in place,” recalled Parent,
now the assistant dean at UCLA’s School of Public Policy
and Social Research.
“We
live in a world in which government activities are often the
subject of criticism,” said Berresford. “The now
highly publicized awards help remind the public that government
is often innovative and effective.”
“When
people believe that government never does anything right,
it is hard to gain support for a great many functions that
government can most effectively perform,” said Schorr.
“By highlighting innovations, the awards make clear that
government agencies and officials are capable of performing
at very high levels indeed. I see this as a major purpose
of the awards program.
“At
the same time we have to remind ourselves and each other that
if we want government to be effective in improving lives,
innovations are only a first step.”
Delineating
the Disconnect
Where
can the root of the people’s distrust be found? Christopher
said it is part of a cultural legacy for Americans to hold
“a healthy skepticism of institutions, but it has gone
too far.” Certain factors impacting the people’s
perception of the public sector are easier to pinpoint: the
Vietnam conflict for one, Watergate for another, and the divisive
impeachment of former President Bill Clinton, followed by
a presidential election that kept the country guessing for
weeks. All of which,
said Christopher, “contribute to a steady diet of negativity
that begins to desensitize you.”
“We
have done a lot of polling, and we have found people, especially
young people, feel quite disconnected from government,”
said Pat McGuiness MPA 1975, president and CEO of the Council
of Excellence in Government, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization
whose members are former government and private sector leaders
now working to improve government performance. “A strong
majority refer to government as ‘the government,’
not ‘our government,’ so there’s something
about this disconnect in that they don’t see it as relevant
in their day-to-day lives.
“We
have found that, when they are given more information, they
become more interested, and their level of confidence does
go up,” continued McGuiness. “That’s why a
program like this…can be very helpful in engaging citizens.
The press obviously plays a role with the focus on scandal
and the problems and foibles of government rather than the
successes…. I think we have had some success, but the
challenge is great, and we have a long way to go.”
“If
we are going to change the national conversation,” said
Christopher, “we need to have a sustained presence in
the public consciousness.”
In
this instance, there is no better time than the present. With
Washington, DC, facing what Christopher refers to as a “human
capital crisis,” in the next few years — with up
to 50 percent of seasoned government employees eligible for
retirement in the next three years — institutes of public
policy, such as the Kennedy School, need to tempt talented
graduates to look for the less lucrative jobs within the public
sector, something that is happening less and less.
“There
is a belief that bureaucracy is dull,” said Christopher,
“so we may see a real deficit in talented public servants.
The innovations program provides laboratories to see things
differently, showing that government can be a catalyst for
innovation, and they can have a role in that.”
“The
innovations program demonstrates that people in public service
can be leaders and entrepreneurs as well as bureaucrats,” said Dean Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
One
hope, said Nye, is that winners of the Innovations Awards
will “serve as models for our students. In addition,
we learn from them in terms of new experience for research
and case studies.”
But
the good word on Innovations needs to be mainstreamed, said
Christopher. Great efforts are made each year for press coverage
of the annual announcement of winners in the fall, but results,
to date, have been moderate at best. Still, while the media
may not report on Innovations with rapt attention, Parent
said the program’s success can clearly be measured in
other ways.
“When
we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the program, the Ford
Foundation did some research as to how many programs had been
replicated,” said Parent. “We discovered that there
was more replication than many of us thought, so we know that
the word gets out.”
Word
is getting out, even if it may not be as quickly as some would
like. Programs like Wisconsin Works has hosted visitors from
all over the country and the world, seeking to copy its dramatic
success of reducing welfare caseloads. One Church, One Child,
a 1986 winner from the Illinois Department of Children and
Family Services, where churches and government work together
to find homes for children seeking adoption, has motivated
similar initiatives in 14 states. And Continuum of Care, a
1999 winner from the U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development that helps the homeless become independent
again, now dwells in 650 cities, 2,000 counties, and two territories.
It
is for these success stories, and the many others, said Christopher,
that the institute will “be finding creative ways to
integrate that body of knowledge,” inside and outside
the confines of the Kennedy School.
“We
should be a gateway to the world of innovation,” said Christopher. “A democracy is only viable if the
people are participants.”
Mary
Tamer is a freelance writer and editor who lives in Boston.
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