1999
Winner:
Wisconsin
Works (W-2)
And the Winner Is...
The Institute for Government
Innovation celebrates creative
governing. Are the media and the public too tainted to pay attention?
by Mary Tamer
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 executive assistant 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.
