Community Solutions

There was a very nice op-ed in the NYT today about community organizations working together to solve various problems in their communities. It hits a lot of points that I see a lot when we're looking at successful interventions: careful analysis of data and results, focusing on specific goals and methods designed to reach them, and accepting incremental gains and imperfect solutions rather than trying to focus on the one perfect solution that will fix everything if we can actually get it to work.

Which raises an interesting question: Why aren't more people doing this?

Part of the problem is simple awareness. People can't try to use solutions they're not aware of - which is why seeing this sort of article is always a rather nice thing. Some of it is uncertainty. Trying an unfamiliar solution is always a risk, since it's sometimes difficult to to know whether or not it will work better than what one is already doing.

One of the bigger problems, though, is resources. Most places don't have the money to throw at every possible solution in the hopes that one of them will work. Some of them don't have the money they need to address basic services; paying even more than that to help fix the problems that causes is not likely to happen anytime soon. Most liberals, of course, look at that problem and ask why we're not having the government fund programs like this - but, of course, there's a bit of an ongoing debate about whether the government should take things like this on.

Believe it or not, I think the concerns about spending government money on this are partially valid. Part of the reason programs like this work are because they are community driven programs; it's entirely reasonable to worry that a program run by the federal government would not be able to connect with the necessary people in the community. And there's a legitimate desire to make sure the government is spending its money on useful things that makes turning the government into a funding source with almost no control (or oversight) a problematic idea.

In the end, though, I think those problems can be overcome. It would take leadership and an electorate that was willing to trust each other and their government a bit more to even build a system where we could pay for these things without demanding too much control, certainly. But I think that's a more likely possibility than assuming that private charities and donors will step up to cover the cost of these things on a wider scale than we're currently doing.