An article in the November 30, 2009 issue of The New York Times sparked my thinking, once again, about the high attrition rate of behavioral health and social service organizations. The article, "Less Diversity in Supervisors of Foster Care” cites the statistic that under the watch of John B. Mattingly, appointed in 2004 to head New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, the number of foster care agencies has dropped from 43 to 33.
A little later in the article, Fatima Goldman, executive director and chief executive of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, observed that the cause was just a lack of time for agencies to develop the management infrastructure needed for the current environment. “There just hasn’t been time for some agencies to build the core infrastructure to survive such a dramatic shift that’s occurred over the last few years, especially the overall economic downturn…That is the nail in the coffin for so many organizations.”
Talking about ‘time’ alone as the demise of many of the non-profit organizations isn’t dealing with the ‘whole picture’. There are a few other factors:
- Inability (or unwillingness) of public purchasers to measure and compare the performance of their contract organizations—have transparency in performance and make future referral, rate, and contracting decisions on that performance data
- View of the leadership of the organizations in the field that management capabilities are not integral to continuing their service mission; this has been permitted to exist by public purchasers for years and reinforced by the good intentions of management teams.
Time is now an issue for many organizations in the field. They have, indeed, waited too long to put in the management systems—financial, IT, planning, development, etc.—that they need to make it through the next decade.
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