With a tremendous sense of sadness when I read of Union Mission Savannah’s decision to split itself in half by spinning off the J. C. Lewis Health Center to become its own independent company. But I understand. They did so for two reasons: government bureaucratic policies and money.
Governments operate and allocate money in silos from one another. So government health care funds health care; housing funds housing; employment funds employment and so on. And this happens at multiple layers; the federal, state, County, and city levels. Each has their own rules and requirements to fulfill. Separately they can be challenging but collectively they are damn near impossible.
The result is that most organizations receiving government support can only manage doing the one thing that they are given money to do.
Irregardless the vast majority of people needing help are in dire need of more than one thing. Someone gets their health care taken care of only to not have housing so they get sick again! Or someone has housing but cannot find a job so they lose their housing which then leads to sickness and a vicious cycle is born.
It is ironic that government demands local efforts form collaborative partnerships to receive money but they themselves are incapable of working together. Their policies and rules conflict with one another. So they cannot leverage their dollars and buy the biggest bang for the buck. Millions are wasted treating individual symptoms and the need never diminishes. Talk about job security!
Government enforces their rules and regulations with allocation of our tax dollars. So, if someone is trying to accomplish more than the policies call for then that is against the rules and funding is reduced. Do it the government way, funding can go up. It makes it very easy for bureaucrats as policy dictates there is only one way to do anything. Sure there are many good people who work for government and some take risks to buy real results, but rules are rules and that is what rules the day.
Union Mission has been different because it successfully blended federal, state, County, city, philanthropic and local support into a one-stop shop where the very real needs of people were met at same time. Its approach is similar to being admitted to a hospital where rarely it is for just one symptom. Union Mission treated the entire person and not just individual symptoms.
It’s not rocket science.
Union Mission fulfilled the bureaucratic rules and regulations along the way. Often barely! These often crazy rules were forever being challenged and boundary lines pushed. Union Mission was forever busting out of the bureaucratic boxes that were forced upon it to receive funding.
Sure it had its issues in doing it this way. Sometimes it messed up but it took “the-try- until-you-get-it right” approach. Over time it got many more things right than it did wrong.
The result of doing it this way speaks for itself. Flip through the last twenty annual reports and tens of thousands asked for help, thousands obtained health care, hundreds ended their homelessness, and hundreds found jobs. A once unmanageable homeless population became manageable. The quality of life of an entire county went up.
And Union Mission was moving upstream with its programs to prevent homelessness from ever occurring in the first place. Isn’t that what everyone really wants? Like anyone really wants another homeless shelter?
And there was plenty of external validation of such an approach. The national spot light often shown on Union Mission. People from around the world came to see it for themselves. The place is filled with awards, accolades and, more importantly, token expressions of gratitude from those who worked their way out of the mess that their lives had become because of Union Mission’s approach.
This will soon be a thing of the past with the splitting of the J. C. Lewis Health Center from Union Mission. Sure the Health Center will receive some increases in federal funding but it will not generate the impact that blended funding and melded services did. And health care by itself will merely treat symptoms again just like housing alone will.
There is always more than one way to do things and Union Mission has repeatedly demonstrated that. Until now! It is putting itself back in the box and will soon look much like every other program in nation. At least the bureaucrats will be happy.
