We don’t deliver pizza!
Recently an analysis of why public systems fail began this way:
“One can ‘deliver’ a parcel or a pizza, but not health or education. All public services require the ‘customer’ to be an active agent in the ‘production’ of the required outcomes. Education and health care initiatives simply fail if the intended recipients are unwilling or unable to engage in a constructive way; they are outcomes that are co-produced by citizens.”*
* Jake Chapman, System Failure:
Why Governments Must Learn To Think Differently.
p.10 (second edition – Demos 2004)
Agency programs, volunteer efforts, professional interventions cannot “deliver” the healthy ecosystem, the habitat, the home and family and neighborhood and civil society that our species needs. Our best efforts will bear fruit only
if we can enlist the people and the neighborhoods themselves in rebuilding their own lives and their own communities.
One cannot “deliver”:
- an extended family,
- a best friend,
- an informal support group,
- a peer group,
- a network,
- ongoing care and help.
Programs cannot “deliver” community. Time Banking is about enlisting everyone to participate in creating and sustaining community. Time Banking calls for a paradigm shift – a 180 degree turn – in how we go about helping others.
Focusing on what is wrong with the client or with the neighborhood will not enlist their energy or tap their real potential.
Success requires that we enlist the client and the community as partners, as active agents, as coproducers of an outcome. That is why we have to take a new look at what our society has been doing. Our social programs have been
staffing “delivery systems” that deliver services designed to “fix” people and neighborhoods. We have to stop trying to deliver pizza.
Our society is trying to meet real needs – but in the process of helping, through government or foundation funded programs, we may be saying: “If you want more attention and more help, come back with another and bigger problem.”
In effect, that means that the only asset the clients have is their ability to have problems. That’s hardly the way to create a partnership or enlist collaboration.
If we don’t find some way to reknit the social fabric of community, we know we will continue to be overwhelmed. And if we cannot enlist those we are helping as partners and co-workers, we are losing an invaluable resource while, at the same time, sending the message that the only way to get help is by having more crises.
Time Banking sends a different message. It says: We need each other and we benefit from each other. It enables us to function as change agents and catalysts.
That way, we set things in motion.
We don’t deliver pizza.
But maybe, we can make some together and then share it.
Copyright of Holy Cross Centre Trust 2010
This certainly will have some effect.
News letter 11 of 10 June ‘A Letter from America’ is very true. Needs to be sent to sensible people, perhaps it will produce some effect on the new coalition government if sent direct to them.