1. Planned Parenthood is a member agency of United Way. This is patently false and easily verifiable with a phone call or a casual glance at United Way’s Annual Report.  In fact, Planned Parenthood hasn’t been a member agency of United Way since the early ‘80’s – Thirty years ago!
2. It costs the state money.  Every year, the state contracts with a local nonprofit to manage the state employee campaign.  In Oklahoma, the contracted nonprofit is United Way of Metro Oklahoma City.  The costs United Way incurs managing the campaign (vetting participating agencies, preparing materials, recruiting volunteers, soliciting employees, receiving cash, check, and payroll deduction contributions, distributing contributed funds to each of the recipient nonprofits monthly, conducting an independent CPA audit of all funds received and distributed, and preparing reports for the State) are all paid for by the donors themselves through an administrative fee capped by legislation at 12-15%.  The actual cost incurred by the state to provide oversight for all this is minimal.
3. United Way decides “which charitable organizations have access to state employees.” Another patently false assertion that could have been easily disproven.  The state legislation requires that participating charities meet certain standards (they have to be tax exempt, they have to be registered, they have to be incorporated, they have to be audited, they have to provide their tax returns for review, they have to have low administrative overhead costs, they have to demonstrate a certain level of public support, etc. etc.) The state campaign committee, not United Way, decides who meets these criteria and who doesn’t, which determines who gets in and who doesn’t.
4. Assisting state employees to make donations to the charity(ies) of their choice is not a “core function” of state government. Well, at least the representative came up with SOMEthing that’s at least arguable rather than stone wrong.  I suppose allowing employees to support local faith-based and nonprofit organizations isn’t a CORE function of state government… like taking care of homeless children is, or providing healthcare to the poor is, or preparing for and responding to disasters is, or making sure our children are educated is, or helping at-risk youth get on the straight and narrow is, or preventing chronic disease is, or providing adoption services is, or taking care of the developmentally disabled is, or treating people with addictions is, or intervening in domestic violence is, or providing medications to the mentally ill is, or providing character education to youth is, or recruiting and supporting foster families is….

WAIT A MINUTE!  Why, the nonprofits supported by the Oklahoma State Employee Charitable Contribution Campaign do ALL those “core functions” of state government!  And they do it by relying on public donations (even donations from state employees!).  I’d even bet they might do it as cheaply, as efficiently, as compassionately, as effectively as our vaunted state government does, with voluntarily donated funds!

Representative Faught will end up COSTING the state money if the faith-based and nonprofit charities supported by the OSECCC aren’t able to perform these “core functions” that the state can’t do on its own.

Restore the state charitable campaign.  Save the state some money.

A 7 year old boy, crying and throwing a tantrum, stood in the middle of the WestTown Resource Center waiting room. His mother had just told him, “Pick up your toys. Time to go.” The seven year old was not crying over toys. Through his sobs and gasps for air he managed to say, “I’m tired of moving. I don’t want to stay in a motel. I want a home.” This little boy had faced things that no child should have to. He, his mother, and 2 year old sister came to Oklahoma City fleeing domestic violence in Texas. He suffers from asthma and is dyslexic. His mother is unable to work due to chronic health problems and post-traumatic stress disorder secondary to the domestic violence. As the end of their time in DV rent-free housing approached, the family faced homelessness. After staying a week in their car, the family moved into the Wonderfully Made Shelter in northeast Oklahoma City, but a week into their stay at the shelter, the 7 year old’s health declined. His mother took him to the doctor, who recommended he have surgery on his throat.  The doctor insisted that the boy not stay in a communal living facility during his recovery. His immune system would be too weak and the risk of infection would be too great.

The mother, young boy, and his little sister left their hard-won spot at the Wonderfully Made shelter to stay temporarily with a friend. The boy’s surgery was successful and he was on his way to recovery. In the middle of the night, while staying at the friend’s, the family woke to a smoke-filled house. The friend’s family, the mother, and the young boy all made it out safely when they realized in the rush and chaos of evacuating that the 2 year old was still inside. The mother ran back inside the burning house and saw her daughter’s little feet sticking out from under a bed.  Mom pulled her to safety. The fire fighters were amazed by the mother’s bravery, risking her own life to save her two-year-old. Everyone was safe, but the family had now lost their fourth housing placement in a few months.

Mom came to WestTown on a bitter cold afternoon. She had spent the morning with her seven year old at the hospital. He had an infection in his lymph nodes as a result of the surgery. The mother had called shelters, they were all full. The temperature was forecast to drop to 17 degrees that night. Staying in the car would be life-threatening to any person on this cold night, not to mention to a toddler and a little boy with a serious infection. Through the United Way Hotel Assistance program, we were able to put the family in a hotel for a week. We are working with them to find permanent housing. But in this waiting period the hotel assistance was literally a lifesaver for this family. After going through so much: domestic violence, eviction, surgery, hospital stays, a house fire, this family is able to recover and rest warmly in their hotel.

Written by: Maggie Murdock

February14th, 2012

While 20 homeless programs at seven federal agencies may dismay Washington bureaucrats and bewilder people just looking for help, here in Oklahoma City we’re creating a model for collaboration that will help eliminate duplication and get the homeless the services they need to get back on their feet.  The WestTown Homeless Services Campus will open later this year in Oklahoma City. The first of its kind in Oklahoma, the campus will have a day shelter and a resource center, a “one-stop-shop” for social services with multiple agencies co-located on site.

 Just building the campus required an artful and creative blending of municipal, state, federal and private funding – a byzantine process that was led by City Council members, the City Manager, and the extraordinary staff in the City Planning Department.

 On the resource center portion of the campus, many of the nonprofit, faith-based and government agencies working with the homeless and those at-risk of homelessness will blend their talents and diverse funding sources to ensure our neighbors don’t get lost in the system.

 Get ready for some alphabet soup.

 At the resource center, the YWCA, which gets federal funds from DOJ to assist people who are homeless as a result of domestic violence, will work together with NorthCare (federal homeless funds from SAMHSA), Healing Hands (federal funds from HHS), Positive Tomorrows (federal funds from DOE), TEEM (federal funds from DOL), NSO (federal funds from HUD), and the Homeless Alliance (federal funds from ARRA) to ensure a homeless family with children gets the medical care, appropriate mental health services, educational support, job training and placement services, and housing they need to get back on their feet.  We also hope to have staff from DHS, SSA, the IRS and the VA.  We’re working with MetroTransit (federal funds from DOT) to make sure people can get to and from the campus.

 CityCare (federal funds from HUD) will be operating the day shelter portion of the WestTown campus and working with the VA, NorthCare, Red Rock, the Metropolitan Library System and others to make sure our homeless have not only a safe place to be during the day, but access to the mental health, substance abuse, medical, housing and other services they need.

 These are only a few of the agencies that will be providing services at the WestTown campus.  And their federal funding is only a portion of their budgets.  All except the government agencies are also financially supported by local foundations, our incredibly generous business community, faith groups, and individuals.

 And I haven’t even mentioned the extraordinary partnership between the Baptist Medical/Dental Fellowship, Good Shepherd Ministries, Healing Hands, the Oklahoma County Pharmacy and Butterfield Memorial Foundation to provide a mobile medical/dental clinic that will serve clients on the campus, the neighborhood, and be available to go to disaster sites in our state.

 Is having 20 different homeless programs at seven federal agencies complicated and cumbersome?  Maybe.  But here in Oklahoma City we’re finding a way to make it work.

(Interesting side note: the term “op-ed” was originally coined by the New York Times to describe these items not because they are “opinion editorials” but because they are “opposite the editorial page.”  The term “op-ed” is about geography, not content.  Who knew?)

Professor Williams’ piece briefly describes a tawdry scandal at the public housing authority in Philadelphia and concludes from that example that, “corruption is highly probable in nonprofits.”  Why?  Because, according to Professor Williams, “nonprofits have no bottom line to meet.”  Clearly, the good professor has never served on a nonprofit board, nor worked in one, nor, apparently, given much thought to how nonprofits work.  All the nonprofits with which I’m familiar have a bottom line that gets met every month or they go bankrupt.  Certainly the Board of the Homeless Alliance knows what our financial bottom line is, and recognizes that the only ways to meet it are controlling expenses or raising more funds.

Another example of the good professor’s ignorance of the real world of nonprofits is this stunningly ill-informed passage, “The fundamental difference between nonprofit organizations and their profit-making counterparts is that nonprofits tend to take a greater protion of their compensation from easier working conditions, more time off, favors, and under-the-table payments. Profit making organizations take a greater part of their compensation in cash.”  Well, obviously.  We all know that taking the greater part of your compensation in cash effectively immunizes you against corruption.  Enron, WorldComm, Lehman Brothers, Morgan-Stanley, AIG, Adelphia, Arthur Andersen, Duke Energy, Dynegy, Global Crossing, Halliburton, Qwest and Tyco clearly demonstrate that if you’re pulling down loads of cash, why, a corrupt thought would never cross your pure and noble mind.  And can we talk about those “easier working conditions” at nonprofits?  Ever been to a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen?  How about a charity hospital?  Oh, Professor Williams, please join us in a Salvation Army or Red Cross disaster van and enjoy our cushy working conditions.  Come on in, Professor, and kick back while we counsel this 5-year-old rape victim.  Relax while we convince some young gang-bangers there’s a better way.  Enjoy the soothing work environment while we help this mom with cancer discover a better way to die.

Here’s another line from the good professor:  “In the profit-making world, there is much greater monitoring of the behavior of people who act for the organization.”  Hahahahahahaha!  Ever had an A-133 audit, prof?  Thought not.  Go back over that list of profit-making entities in the previous paragraph and tell me they were monitored more intensively than the lowliest local nonprofit that’s getting reviewed by donors, United Way allocations volunteers, a truly independent board with NO financial stake in the organization, government grantors, private grantors, and a truly independent CPA firm.

I’m guessing that logic is not a subject much taught at the vaunted George Mason University where Professor Williams is undoubtedly tenured (and therefore immune from having to produce insightful or even vaguely useful prose).  If it was, the good professor might have hesitated to draw such broad conclusions based on the lonely example of a local housing authority.  We can, however, have some fun with his brand of logic:

• Professor Williams cited one example of corruption at a nonprofit.  I cited 13 at for-profits.  Therefore, I conclude that businesses that make a profit are 13 times more venal than nonprofits.
• Big Six accounting firm Arthur Andersen got the death penalty for its shenanigans with Enron and WorldCom, therefore, all accountants and CPA’s are heinous criminals (with easy working conditions).
• The Oklahoman published this ridiculously flawed and dim-witted piece of tripe; therefore everything in the Oklahoman is flawed tripe.
• Walter Williams is a Professor at George Mason University.  Walter Williams wrote an ill-informed, spectacularly stupid, demonstrably wrong bit of analysis; therefore George Mason University Professors are defective.

Or we could just use the “normal” logic and simply conclude that Walter Williams is a fool.  Q.E.D.

-Dan Straughan

 We say “homeless” to describe these individuals and families as if being without housing defines them – as if it’s the disease itself and not just the symptom that is most obvious to the casual observer.

After all, a two-finger typist like myself finds it much easier to write “homeless” than to keyboard, “person with undiagnosed, untreated bipolar disease who started drinking to kill the pain and is now an alcoholic, and because of the bipolar and the drinking made some really bad choices in relationships and learned about domestic violence firsthand, and had too many babies with the bad choice, and got in trouble with the law and got a record, and because of the alcohol and the bipolar has a really bad employment record – complicated by the felony, and because of the employment issues and the bipolar and the felony and the drinking got evicted a couple of times and owes OG+E and ONG a couple $100, and owes past landlords several $100, and has exhausted every social connection they ever had, which weren’t that many to begin with.”

If we said all that, instead of just “homeless,” people would see how asinine it is to think “just getting a job” is the solution.

• Shelter beds cost more than either transitional housing beds or permanent supportive housing beds.  That’s right, the band-aid solution is actually more expensive than solutions that try to get at the root of the problem.  But homeless shelters are the “simple” solution, easy for donors to see, understand and support.  Unfortunately, homelessness is a complicated problem and the simple solution won’t (can’t) have a permanent impact.  Don’t get me wrong.  People who go to our shelters often get their lives back in order and escape homelessness because of the help the shelters have to give.  In fact, most of the people who go to our shelters never return.  Unfortunately, shelters are not the answer for those of our homeless who have multiple barriers to getting back on their own two feet.
• Although we’re spending millions on shelter, we only spent $107,000 during the study period on case management.  Case management is what we used to call social work, and its the thing that prevents homelessness on the front end, and moves people out of homelessness on the back.  Imagine you have a mental illness, lets say you’re mildly bipolar.  Hard to hold a job and your inability to hold a job means you periodically get evicted or your utilities get turned off.  That’s depressing, so you turn to drugs.  Now you have three big problems.  One night you get taqnked up and get in afight that the police respond to.  Now you have a record, untreated mental illness, a substance abuse problem, a spotty employment history, crappy credit and a history of evictions.  Truth is, at this point, only someone trained to navigate the system and help you keep to the straight and narrow is ever going to be able to dig you out of the hole you’re in.  That’s a case manager – a critical component to ending homelessness in our community, yet only 1/3 of one percent of the total cost of homelessness.
• Local hospitals contributed more than $5 million to the cost of homelessness, with nearly three-quarters of that coming from St. Anthony Hospital.  This does not include any reimbursed costs (like from MedicAid) that the hospitals may have incurred.

There are other lessons to be learned from the report – especially concerning the chronic homeless and Oklahoma City shouldering the burden of caring for our neighbors’ homeless.  We’ll address those in later posts.

-Dan Straughan