How to Change the World

Anyone working in the nonprofit or foundation worlds can tell you about the emphasis on proof.  The people with the money necessary to make good things happen want to see evidence that the program they're funding makes a difference, usually in terms of measurable outcomes like higher standardized test scores for kids or rates of employment for adults.  And that's all great.  I'm a quantitative researcher, and I want to see proof of effectiveness too, especially because contemporary statistics provides us with a dizzying array of tools that allow us to measure and isolate effects of various factors.

And yet...

I just read this wonderful Washington Post article about ReWired for Life, the program started by Sonja Sohn, aka Kima from The Wire.  When Sohn started this program, she didn't have a solid research base that informed her approach.  Hell, it's not even clear that she had an approach, beyond a vague notion that the remedial class from Season 4 seemed promising.

What she does have, though, is a commitment to making a difference and the knowledge that the people she wants to help need to be equal partners in the endeavour. Educators know that the single most important step to helping anyone is getting him or her to buy in.  Once they're invested, once they care, you can get somewhere.  Incredibly difficult challenges will still arise, but if the person cares, the two of you can work through it together.  The two of you can figure out where s/he went wrong and how to avoid similar problems in the future.

The foundation of any effective program of uplift has to be a desire to engage.  Engagement is incredibly difficult because real engagement is a two-way process.  If you want to help people, you have to allow them to have a voice in how they want to be helped, and you have to be open to those times when they're going to help you.  Your program is absolutely going to change from what you intended.

I wonder if our focus on measurable impact gets in the way of engagement.  I kind of doubt whether Sohn's program will show statistically significant outcomes, at least in its first few years.  She's working with a very small sample size, and the kids in ReWired are the highest of high risk.  Maybe her biggest "obstacle" to demonstrating her program works is that, right now, she has a purposefully flexible program that changes to meet the needs of her partners, the kids she's trying to help.

Can a flexible program measure its impact in a way that will satisfy people obsessed with the bottom line?  Will enough donors recognize that ReWired for Life and programs like it represent our best chance at truly effective philanthropy and give them the chance to offer the people who need uplift a voice?

I really hope so, because, sh!t, reading about ReWired for Life gave me a great deal of hope.  Big ups, Kima Greggs.