This commentary is by Russell Bradbury-Carlin of South Deerfield, Massachusetts. He is executive director of Interaction: Youth Services and Restorative Justice in Brattleboro. He has been at interaction for 10 years.
Brattleboro, where I am the executive director of a human service nonprofit agency, has been going through many of the same problems that other communities in the state and the country are experiencing: a significant increase in homelessness, addiction and crime. And, while many of us in the human service community have seen these issues increase for a number of years, the pandemic and the fallout from the disruption to our society it caused accelerated these problems. It brought them to the forefront of our community’s awareness, especially to those who had been aware of the longer trajectory.
Recently, our community has had an understandable response to these issues: we’ve increased the level of police involvement. In Brattleboro, our police department has created a new addition to its force: the Brattleboro Resource Assistance Team, or BRAT. These are unarmed officers who will be more present in the community and seek to direct people who are disturbing the community in some form or manner to get assistance. And the town of Brattleboro recently approved $700,000 to open a police station outpost at the bottom of the parking garage downtown.
These are reasonable responses to the issues facing the town. But, they are obviously not the solutions to homelessness and other social issues (which are often not in and of themselves illegal) and one could argue not the ultimate solutions to crime.
I fear, though, that they are predicated on a very concerning assumption. I have heard this assumption referred to, if not directly said. This assumption goes along the lines of: Brattleboro is filled with nonprofit human services organizations. And they have tried, but failed, to deal with these issues.
Let me contradict that assumption.
First, after working in human services my entire working life, I believe there are some structural and broad latent beliefs about our work that are misguided. We are treated, at times, by an old model of “charities” — not that different from a group of volunteers working out of church basements. That could not be further from the truth with the many organizations who work with the homeless and people suffering with addiction.
Many of our federal and state partners are contracting with us to do professional work. Professional work that, if nonprofits didn’t take on, the state would have to. It makes sense. Our organizations are more embedded in our communities and it is much cheaper for taxpayers to have nonprofits perform these services than to have state workers do them.
Unfortunately, we are asked to do (and most often do) professional-level work, but with contract structures that see us as scrappy volunteers (forcing us to actually have to be unnecessarily scrappy). Our contracts do not come with cost-of-living increases, for instance. We often get the same amount year after year while our expenses increase. And when increases do come, they sometimes come with an expected increase in workload — not really covering actual costs.
A well-run nonprofit operates with 25-30% administrative cost. This covers executive director, financial staff, HR, other administrative staff’s salaries, often the cost of rent, electricity, heat, phones, internet, etc. Federal and state contracts have recently started to cover 15% of that cost, up from 10%. Unfortunately, this did not include an increase of 5% in contracts, but only the permission to cover administrative costs with existing funds. That still leaves a significant gap.
So, to bring this around, nonprofit human service agencies have been operating for decades on vapor and pennies. In the meantime, homelessness, addiction, mental health struggles have skyrocketed along with the cost of living. While we essentially make do and scrape along with what the amounts we are given.
Where does this funding come from, you may ask.
Well, it seems that when a “crisis” arises, funds can be found. Recently, I learned that when the state of Vermont opened two family shelters for the winter (much needed!) they signed a contract with a for-profit, out-of-state firm to open and operate these shelters. Human service nonprofits often pay staff to run similar services where we pay an hourly range of somewhere in the lower to mid $20s. We often struggle to hire staff.
This for-profit is paying their frontline workers $107.50 an hour! Their executives will be paid $330 per hour! Why is it that state governments can suddenly find funding to respond to these emergencies, but have not broadly and significantly responded to the slow grinding down of local, nonprofit, human services. I believe that almost any local human service nonprofit could run the most successful homeless shelter at half the cost of that for-profit organization.
Yes, there is a crisis with these issues. But, I’d like to think we can walk and chew gum at the same time. If we are increasing police forces and hiring for-profit firms to do human services, let’s pay nonprofits for what they are being asked to do. Let’s adequately fund human service nonprofits.
No wait, I take that back. More than “adequately.” Let’s fund them like the professionals that they are. Let our local human service nonprofits and our communities thrive.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Russell Bradbury-Carlin: Fund human service nonprofits like the professional organizations they are.