Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Budgets, kids, programs, nashing of teeth...
As we've had a rise in violence this spring, many are now (now! finally! as though community safety is a new issue??!) calling for better programs for young people and for summer job opportunities.
Jeff Adachi mentioned to me the other day that our great city has 268 different youth serving programs.
Two hundred and Sixty Eight.
If you say that a third of our entire population is under 18 (and it isn't) that's still one youth organization for about every 1000 kids.
Now, like typical 'news lemmings' (i.e. something hits the front page we must react immediately, running blindly towards a cliff of reinventing the wheel) people want to figure out how find money in the empty wallet of the city to address this problem.
I realize it's a noble desire, but if we had leaders (and political candidates) who were better informed through actual work in the community, they could help promote the current programs instead of spinning their wheels.
Or better yet, looking at how to combine/streamline/cross promote these current programs so that we would actually serve more kids with less money. I realize this might put some NPO executives out of work, but those are the people who can easily move to a new cool job with their education and experience.
It's not that SF is so dumb, or the people here are more violent, or less caring, or more administrative... it's just that we let our big hearts get in the way of doing things the right way...the simple way.
