A Volunteer-Run Organization, Missteps and Whistleblowing (Part
1)
I started volunteering for St. Vincent de Paul in 1998, nine
months after I ended twenty years in the for-profit world and a few months
after I began working in the nonprofit world.
We say “St. Vincent de Paul,” but we really mean a group of volunteers who
receive food from Second Harvest of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties, a
farmers’ market, and a few businesses and deliver it to poor families living in
East Palo Alto and east Menlo Park, California. And we
really, really mean a group of volunteers organized for the past twenty-five
years or more by George, a retired engineer now in his eighties.
At the nadir of the Great Recession, the group was
delivering two boxes of food, weighing a total of about 50 pounds, to about
five different families three times a week.
George used individual contributions to help families with rent and
utilities money; we provided some with vouchers for furniture.
New charities continually entered to serve the community's
expansive needs. By 2016 thirty charities
received and distributed free food from Second Harvest to the 28,000 residents
of East Palo Alto and additional families in east Menlo Park. That works out to about one Second Harvest
partner agency per 200 persons below the poverty level – three times the number
of agencies per person in poverty in Second Harvest’s entire region.
Then the economy began to improve. Housing was becoming so expensive in Palo
Alto and adjoining cities that tech workers and others began to move into new
homes in East Palo Alto. While still
poor, the City’s demographics shifted: blacks, who made up 61% of East Palo
Alto in 1980, were displaced by Latinos, who comprised 64% in 2010. New construction, hotel taxes, and retail
sales helped increase the City government’s operating revenue by 42% from 2011
to 2015. The City’s violent crime rate
dropped from two-and-a-half times the overall California rate in the late 1980s
and early 1990s – East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate in the country in
1992 – to just over the California rate in 2014[1].
Over the years our small SVdP changed, too. We received more and healthier food from
Second Harvest; the number of families we served dropped to less than half the
peak number; and, as a result, the amount we delivered per family
increased. The aging, mostly white
volunteers from outside the City were replaced by mostly Latino local volunteers,
some of whom were beneficiaries as well as volunteers. Beyond the view of nearly all volunteers, the
group’s bank account swelled to over $100,000 following receipt of a bequest
and other contributions.
As a nonprofit charity, the East Palo Alto conference of SVdP
confronts challenges similar to those of HomeFirst. Although far smaller than HomeFirst, its
issues shed light on HomeFirst’s situation, and experience at one helps
understand, I think, realities at the other.
First, the question of organizational mistakes and
whistleblowing. The wrongs at SVdP, so
small that they hardly compared to HomeFirst’s issues, were of two sorts. First, food was wasted when it was given to
clients who did not want or need it. Food
was generally distributed based on understandings about the ethnicity and size
of families, but unless they made clear their preferences each family was likely
to receive a jar of peanut butter, x cans of green beans, y pounds of dry
pasta, and so on regardless of whether they would be eaten or discarded. On other occasions, the number of families on
our lists were so few and food inventories were so great that we delivered quantities
in excess of what a family could reasonably consume – think five pound cabbage balls, for example. Second, volunteers,
who took food home after completing their deliveries, might not have qualified
for assistance, and they generally did not sign the required forms documenting
the assistance.
The SVdP volunteers were aware when their actions made
little sense, in the same way that HomeFirst employees were aware of their
missteps. But we controlled only a small
portion of the process of recruiting families to receive food, ordering food
from Second Harvest, receiving food from donors, and delivering portions on our
scheduled evenings. Although HomeFirst’s
issues were possibly far more egregious, HomeFirst was also fifty times the
size of our little operation so you would expect theirs to be larger. Raising problems internally meant telling
George, but in a volunteer organization his control was not absolute,
either.
SVdP lacked HomeFirst’s management and oversight structure,
so whistleblowing procedures were undefined and seemed unnecessary. Although George was in charge, he and the
other volunteers were close to being peers. No formal board oversaw the group’s activities. Our volunteer involvement was not an economic
transaction as was employment by HomeFirst.
Loyalty – to George and to the group’s mission – felt more natural at SVdP,
but the cost to exit the group was small compared to the loss of salary for
leaving HomeFirst.
SVdP was not restricted by government grant agreements as
HomeFirst was, but like HomeFirst it was obliged to comply with Second
Harvest’s rules. SVdP was one of more
than 300 charities distributing Second Harvest food from more than 650
locations, and its problems were small, if existent at all. The food was kept safe and was not being sold
or stolen in volume; we did not merit much attention.
The SVdP issues were similar to the minor wrongs and
deceptions that we all commit on a daily basis[2]. They were far from the serious harms that
whistleblowers are expected to disclose.
Revealing them would make no one a hero.
The response, then, seemed to be: as with any friendship, if you don’t
like the way they behave, there is no reason to make a big stink; just leave. But that is, more or less, what HomeFirst
told me before I was fired.
[1] Lawrence, Sarah and Gregory Shapiro, “Crime Trends in the City of East Palo Alto,” UC Berkley School of Law, November 2010; and Federal Bureau of
Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports.
[2] DePaulo, Bella M. “The Many Faces of Lies.” In The Social Psychology of Good and Evil. Arthur G. Miller (ed.) New York: The
Guilford Press. 2004
No comments:
Post a Comment