The Modern Robin Hood

In the beginning of my career I had a surprising and monumentally rewarding experience working for The Man.  I worked in the press office for the City of New York Administration for Children’s Services as a communications associate.  In the midst of unglamorous daily routine, I got a peek inside the top level workings of the Giuliani administration and I got to hang around with some amazingly talented folks at the top of their game.  This was a time when child protection was changing rapidly in the city and the old way of doing things was simply not good enough anymore.  Innovation was flourishing, right in the middle of the country’s biggest city bureaucracy.

One of the innovators I met was a Deputy Commissioner at the time, Linda Gibbs.  I admit, I hadn’t thought about this energetic and rather brilliant lady in a while, but then I read this recent article in the Times, about a program she spearheaded to provide cash incentives to parents of children at risk.  (Read it– the details are interesting to say the least!)

The first time I read through the article, I thought– dang, that is some outside-the-box thinking!  Paying parents to parent their children, and paying children to do what is in their best interest.  It got me thinking about programs which are innovative versus programs which are proven.  How does an organization choose to balance the new and the old?  When is it time to take a leap and try something really different from the status quo?

On the one hand, funders love to be the first ones to fund a new idea.  Why?

• It is more remarkable than funding something that has already been done before.
• They get to put their ownership stamp on a project.
• They get to be the ones to say, “We are only funding this for 2 years, then it has to be self-sustaining.”

Ahhhhh.  There’s the rub.

Nonprofits are encouraged to be innovative, because funders enjoy working on innovative programs, but then when the incubation period is done the funder leaves, satisfied, and the nonprofit has to figure out a way to keep supporting this programming.  Naturally, nonprofits are often reluctant to take a leap too far from the status quo, when the stakes are so high to keep it going on its own steam after such a short time.

All the same, nonprofits do make this leap all the time.  Finding new ways to do things because they are better– outside the box or not.  When I worked at ACS, there was a program associate whose name I can’t remember.  She saw that a significant number of kids were in foster care who had incarcerated mothers.  She also noticed that foster parents were not, on the whole, bringing kids to visit their mothers while they were in prison.  She found out that the reason for this was that the visitation room at Riker’s Island was so frightening to children, so bleak and unwelcoming, it was often more traumatizing than it was worth to bring the children there.  In addition, transportation to Riker’s was difficult and pretty scary in itself.

With barely any budget, this program associate set change in motion.  She worked with the Rose M. Singer Center on Riker’s to get permission to convert an unused visiting area room into a children’s visitation center.  A little paint, some donated toys and kid-friendly plastic furniture, coloring books and crayons– suddenly there was a place that kids could feel at home, despite the circumstances surrounding their mom and family.  She also worked to secure private bus transportation at set times during the week for foster parents and children, so that they would not have as many problems reaching the island.

Now, a decade later, the ACS Children of Incarcerated Parents Program has grown tremendously.  It “stuck”.

So– maybe the idea of paying parents to be good parents is off the wall.  But just imagine if nobody had been brave enough to try it.