Child Poverty: Why Youth Must Lead

Teach every child to raise his voice
And then, my brothers, then
Will justice be demanded
By ten million righteous men.
Make them hear you.
When they hear you,
I'll be near you
Again.

 

 

Two headlines from today.  If you commit just a bit of sociology, you might even sense a connection between them:

 

“If ever there was a wakeup call, this would be it,” the mayor-elect says of a report showing city has highest child-poverty rate among Canadian cities.

 

Crippling child poverty.  That's a whole generation growing up in tense climates, without proper nutrition, without proper supports.  But clearly, this is someone else's problem, right?  Those parents should be doing more, working harder, hustling for cash, or something.  It's their own fault, right?  Nothing to do with us.

 

So long as governments keep taxes low and especially provide tax breaks to businesses, that'll create jobs - then people just need to hustle to get them and everything else will be fine.

 

On to story number two:

 

Some 73 students were suspended or expelled for bringing weapons to school over the past school year, up from 42 the previous year.

 

Guns.  In our schools.  What's behind this?  Are backwoods bigots from Pakistan invading our schools and using their mind control powers to make our kids bring weapons to class instead of pens? Is this a reflection of the erosion of Canadian values, or the Americanization of our culture?

 

Here's an idea:

 

Chris Penrose, executive director of Success Beyond Limits, a youth outreach program in the Jane St. and Finch Ave. area, said he is concerned about violence among teens. But he said the weapons spike likely has to do with larger community issues, including poverty, education gaps and youth unemployment.

 

There is plenty of money in Canada right now; there are 118,000 millionaires in Toronto alone.  There are plenty of services - public, not-for-profit, corporate social responsibility - that exist, offering an alphabet soup of services.

 

And of course, there's the prevailing wisdom of our laissez-faire model of capitalism; in Canada, it doesn't matter where you come from, what hurdles are in your way, if you push hard enough you too can be one of the 118,000.  You gotta work hard, be willing to start simple, but above all you gotta hustle.

 

The implication, of course, is that if you don't succeed, it's your own damned fault.

 

Here's a term that will be familiar to pretty much anyone in town with responsibility for managing finances - ROI, Return On Investment.  If you can't see a clear, short-term return on whatever your investment might be, you don't do it.  Low-hanging fruit are therefore preferable; the least effort required for decent gains in short time frames.

 

Let's reframe that a little bit so that we're all on the same page:

 

- If you don't have resources - if you're poor, young, accessibility-challenged, whatever, the pressure is on for you to hustle hard over the long-run if you want to get anywhere in life.

 

- on the other hand, if you've had some success in life, long-term investments aren't worth your time; it's all about the quick-wins, the best bang for your buck, the low-hanging fruit.

 

For the haves, it all makes perfect sense - you spend half your life working really hard to gain success, but when you're there, you put the pressure on everyone else and focus on quick wins.

 

Now, picture you're a child who lives in a marginalized neighbourhood.  Maybe your parents were born somewhere else; maybe they grew up marginalized themselves, but in either case, they've invested time and energy - time away from their kids - and have nothing to show for it.  If anything, the amount of energy they've put into trying to get ahead and the frustration they've faced in not succeeding has bled into home life, which isn't great.

 

This is the lesson a youth can easily take away from this - the people with resources will tell you to hustle, but the truth is it won't get you anywhere.  In fact, this whole "you gotta come to me" approach to success is pretty much an excuse for those with power to stick to their low-hanging fruit and not share their millions.

 

What happens when you feel the people who are supposed to be the movers and shakers in town are making excuses to exclude you and our peers?  How much effort are you willing to put into getting an education, working crap jobs if you can find them, if you are never going to get where they are because society's designed to keep you marginalized?

 

Leadership is solving problems.  The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.  They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care.  Either case is a failure of leadership.

 

This is worth pausing on. 

 

Our society is anti-leadership, from the top down.  We have governments cutting programs, cutting taxes and cutting cheques on things like child care and mental health supports for veterans rather than making long-term investments.  We have bosses that are increasingly pressuring employees to be functionaries, content-producers, client-managers and business developers, yet training is not being provided and salaries aren't matching up. 

 

Even in our education system, teachers are being told it's their job to be educator, mediator, psychologist and content-creator to massive classrooms that include children with learning challenges.  Parents are being told to do more, but do they have the resources, time, or cognitive/emotional bandwidth?  Are they too absorbed with work, or too depressed and frustrated from a lack of work to give their kids what they need?

 

We can look to previous generations and say "they did it, so quit making excuses" - but without asking if it was a good process for them, or how the changing nature of work (who really has a 9 to 5 job anymore?), the rise of mobile comms devices and the soul-sucking challenges of gridlock play a role.

 

There is next to no leadership out there right now.  The people with power and responsibility don't want to be leaders - they don't care about their people's problems.  Sometimes they don't even care about their organizational programs, because they plan to be gone before they blow up (low-hanging fruit, remember)?

 

Or, they don't feel empowered themselves.  This can be justified in many ways (blame being a common one) but the basic fact is that they aren't, in their current condition, up to the challenge of leadership.

 

Some of them actually believe throwing the kids in the deep end is a good strategy, because that's how you identify the strong swimmers.  What happens to everyone else is one of those "not my problem" things.

 

Yet we desperately need leadership right now. 

 

We're hearing the same things from every echelon of society; government is broken.  Infrastructure is screwed.  Organizations are a mess.  Yet those within those institutions will step up to the mic and tell us "everything's fine, we have a bold plan, just trust us and don't mind the man behind the curtain."

 

Back-of-napkin plans are being sold for their commercial value, not because they make sound structural sense.  Marginalized voices are being drowned out with top-down messaging.  Rabble rousers are being silenced through defunding, firing or even eviction.

 

Is it any wonder that youth are taking their cues from the world around them and realizing that if they want to be safe, if they want to have power, they have to be willing to take it through whatever means are available?

 

A kid not investing in schoolwork, being a bully and carrying a weapon aren't defying social rules of engagement - they're picking up on the socio-cultural cues around them responding in kind.

 

This is it; this is where laissez-faire capitalism meets behavioural economics.  In a game of competitive escalation and a reduction in personal investment, it's who's got the biggest stick who wins power and privilege.

 

And as of right now, there is no way, no one who can do anything to stop this trend. 

 

Why?  It's the culture, stupid. 

 

We have a silo-based culture, full stop.  Even those who talk about disrupting silos are really just trying to stuff more stuff into their silos.  Funding is there, but getting it is so competitive that an increasing amount of investment is going into competition, not solutions.  Lost opportunities, duplication, gaps and overlaps are resulting.  There are communities in this city that are glutted with programs and players, and yet the structural issues remain.  Why aren't we learning from this?

 

I question whether the people leading the charge right now are prepared to wrap their heads around the enormity of the challenge.  Even if they do care, the reality they grew up in and are living now is fundamentally different than the one being faced by marginalized youth today.

 

The best champions of any problem are those with lived experience.

 

Which comes to the crux of the matter, the core component of culture change, the disruption that is most difficult but most necessary.

 

The way forward isn't for more downtown adults to impose solutions on youth; if those youth aren't themselves leading the way forward, whatever gets built isn't going to work.

 

This requires a fundamental shift in the way we look at society, at ourselves, and at the role of power.

 

We always look for the best-in-show to invest in; they're most likely to provide the best ROI.  We then take them from wherever they are and put them in environments considered to be good for growth.

 

All of this is backwards.

 

We have to start focusing on those least likely to succeed with minimal effort and put them in the driver's seat.  That means going to their communities, learning to speak their language, taking them serious and treating them seriously.

 

We have to create the best environments where these youth are - in other words, don't bring youth to MaRS, bring MaRS to the youth.  That means more investment of time and interest - which, but its nature, requires motivation to want to make things better, not for a quick ROI, but because it needs done.

 

Which comes to the last, most challenging, most fundamentally important component of our needed culture change.  Right now, we see power as a form of wealth to be accumulated; power is something we want because, when we have it, we can get more through giving less.

 

That stops right now.

 

From this point forward, power isn't something to be obtained; it's blood to be circulated.  The same goes for money.

 

Here is John Tory's challenge - he needs to be the anti-Doug Ford.  He needs to step away from the practices that have brought him success in life, because it's not about him right now.

 

After years of seeking high office of some kind, of being the guy at the top, now is the moment for John Tory to show true leadership by stepping back and becoming a conduit rather than a capstone.

 

The same holds true for every person of influence in this city; councilors, Executive Directors, CEOs and talking heads.  We need to be empowering leaders, not giving orders.  We have to be cultivating solutions from the grassroots rather than imposing infrastructure on top of.

 

This is not a lofty vision, nice words on a page.  It's a fundamental necessity. 

 

Our society is crumbling and the solutions we're coming up with aren't good enough.  We are failing the next generation, and they know it.

 

If we aren't prepared to empower youth to lead, there will come a day not too far from now when they will simply take what they want by force.  That is, after all, the lesson we're teaching them.

 

The choice is ours.  The consequences will be ours.

 

Either way, it will be youth that lead.

OpenGov: Want Structural Solutions? Quit Funding In Silos!

Part of the push behind the whole Open Government/Open Data movement is that policy advisers and makers have realized they simply can't solve all the problems that lie before them.  

That's nothing new, of course; what's changed is that, thanks in no small part to social media gaffes, mistakes and ignored policy pieces are coming to light in rapid, viral fashion.  Add to this a toxic, hyper-partisan political climate where every gap, overlap or oversight is pilloried as the devil's work and you've but an unsustainable dynamic.

One of the key problems identified in actually solving structural issues in jurisdictions at all levels is internal bureaucratic culture.  Decisions are made at the top and instructions are flowed down with little explanation and no context.  Differing departments can be working on a piece of a bigger puzzle without any idea what the end picture is supposed to look like.  

Even worse is what's called "the black hole" phenomenon, where results collected at the front end get flowed to the top without any comment or indication of what worked/what didn't/how that information is informing the decision-making process.

Add to this the "clay layer" of middle managers who are in a state of stasis - probably never going to go up the ladder, but damned if they're going to take challenges from below.  Fresh ideas from the bottom and any exposition from the top gets stopped in this layer that traditionally hoards knowledge like it's their ticket to survival.

Sidebar - this identified cultural problem is what the political culture is increasingly trying to resemble.  Always a step behind, they are.

A perfect example of why this is a failed model is program funding.  Governments, as you know, fund programs.  Some new programs are developed from within the bureaucracy while others come from the political government of the day (and as often are not, have political motivations).

So the process works like this:

Political Side has an idea - let's say it's that cutting down on incidences of Type II Diabetes will cut healthcare costs (and improve lives).  They give money to Ministries with narrow mandates of how to allocate these funds down the chain.

Ministries turn that money into funding streams - they will give it to health agencies, but with narrow mandates of what kinds of programs they can create and flow funding to front-line service providers for.

Front-line service providers will apply for funding - which means tailoring their ask to perfectly match the requirements of the proposal, which has been increasingly narrowly defined from the top down.  It's no wonder grant-writers get paid so well; knowing how to frame a proposal to meet the desires of the program (rather than the needs of the community) is tricky business.  If you're an organization without money to hire a good grant-writer, sucks to be you.

Funding and information flow one way.  The people at the top never get their feet wet.

There are a couple of problems with this model.  

One - how do the people at the top make their decisions on what and how to fund?  What informs the parameters they set?  Good question - it's not always clear.  When it's all about the money, though, it's not in everyone's best interests to ask.

Two - what if the parameters set are wrong?  What if the front-line has identified needs that aren't matched by any program, or are best matched through a shared-solution that fits into more than one funding bucket?  

This is where advocacy comes in.  It's possible to advocate for changes and promote differing interests; we see this happen all the time.  The problem is, again, that advocacy/government relations is a specialized and costly skill.  If you don't have the money, you not only can't get grants, but you can't promote your clients' best interests with decision makers.

Hence, Open Government and Open Data.  The goal is to open the decision making process so it's clear to everyone how and why certain choices are made - and, in theory, make it easier and more affordable to influence the process.  

The same applies to Open Data - if people on the front line see that the choices being made aren't going to work, they can formulate and pitch alternatives.

But all of this is moot until the internal culture changes.  So long as it's accepted practice for information to flow one way and the assumption is that the people at the top know better than the people at the bottom, we won't have Open Government.

What government should start doing is co-designing funding streams with partners all along the chain. 

This way, the programs offered will be clearly designed to support the ground-level needs and realities of communities and the big-picture agendas of government.  There are good firms out there who do consultative co-designing this way, like Swerhun and Exhibit Change.  They're even local.

But to get there, government needs to do some co-designed structural changes to how they do business internally.  Break through the clay layer with some grassroots, as it were.

The fact that the federal and provincial governments are paying for a Human Resources cultural competency program suggests to me they might have twigged on to this need to change perspectives internally and that it's not just about top-down management.

That's an excellent place to start.  If government were to fund an internal co-design process that seeks to address the structural problems of a strictly hierarchical and silo-based organizational structure, they could vastly improve the efficacy, impact and adaptability of their operations and planning.  

They'd also set a good example for non-governmental players, too, including those capital-hoarding companies that are missing the boat on catalyzing internal innovation and stemming the massive costs related to occupational mental health/presenteeism.

A focus on cuts reduces your bandwidth and flexibility. 

Systems, not silos, is the way to sustainability.  

And if they don't believe it coming from me, that's fine - I'd be more than happy to connect decision-makers with folk up and down the ranks and in every sector who feel the same way. 

But you'd want to start with these young folk who will inherit whatever system (or mess) we leave behind.  Believe me - they've got ideas you should be open to.