The Need for Administrative Excellence

This week's readings explore the role of government in supporting social innovation. For the most part, these focus on funding measures for businesses, with considerable discussion - or, in Michelle Malkin's case, condemnation - given to President Obama's Office of Social Innovation and Civil Participation (OSI). Essentially, there are considerable public sector resources being pumped into the social innovation sector, and a strong impetus to help socially innovative organizations, particularly nonprofit organizations, become successful.

One of the primary shortfalls of this top-down approach to social innovation is a administration and oversight. While Michelle Malkin's National Review piece is rather lacking in intellectual rigor, to say the least, she does bring up a valuable point - perhaps unintentionally - in that we are pumping money into a sector that is ill-defined at best. Identifying nonprofits that might potentially offer societal benefits is the easy part, because ideas are easy - execution is hard. Moreover, great ideas are sexy, while the challenge of actually making these ideas a reality is far less so. On the surface, it appears that there is far more focus on finding these good ideas than supplying them with the administrative and operations expertise that they will need to ensure their plans' success.

Having previously worked with a socially innovative nonprofit in New York City that hosted federally funded youth in a work study capacity, the issue of oversight is one that concerns me greatly. In my own experience, it's not so much a lackadaisical or lazy approach to oversight that's the issue, it's that the appropriate resources are often not put into these programs to assure that oversight is even happening. My organization was assigned six individuals via work study (sans interview) when we had requested a max of two with the stipulation that we first interview them. When we tried to resolve this issue, there was nobody personally responsible for the program, and weeks worth of phone calls and emails went unreturned. Point being, a program may seem like a great idea, but if you don't provide the necessary resources to administer it appropriately, you'll just end up wasting federal funds in the same way that Michelle Malkin assumes to be the norm.

While identifying innovative approaches to solving societal problems is hugely important, we need to ensure that our support doesn't stop with a grant. Support for the administrative aspect of these programs needs to come in the form of both expertise and financing, as we cannot limit our funding to those parts of a given program that are more appealing. This represents one of the problematic aspects of grant funding in general, as there are such stringent limits on what you can spend money on that it can often result in money being wasted. Ultimately, if the aim is social change, the goal should be to provide wholehearted support rather than lip service and a check.