Things That are Broken and Awful

Man, have I been busy. And then this (the link is certainly ephemeral, being canoeshit, so the full text of the Calgary Herald story will be posted below) happened.

Now I am constrained, by the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, to be sure, and also by basic human decency, but also by the suspicion that our staff may well be testifying under oath in the next year or so. Nevertheless:

I think I can say this: in all the tragic family stories I have heard over the last 20 or so years, and that is no small number, this famly's has been the absolutely and simply the most tragic. The newpaper story gets it right in general, though often wrong in detail, but there is so much more, so very much more, and it is all not good, it is all a story of unrelieved tragedy. Just imagine everything bad that could possibly happen to a family over a decade or so, and then add two or three more bad things, and you might begin to get a bit of a glimpse of the actual picture.

I think I can say this: probably no other family in the history of CCIS has received so much service, from so many divisions and programs and at such a level of intensity from us. It failed.

I think I can say this: this family was involved with probably every social type service available, from Health to the Police to Child Protection to the Courts to Welfare to Mental Health (all of these agencies and Authorities and programs have different names in Orwellian Alberta nomenclature, but I want to speak Plain English) to various voluntary organizations, including us, and they ALL, and I repeat we ALL, severally, distinctly, and multiply, failed. You can cover your ass all you want, and there is going to be a lot of that going on for the next while, but the proof is in the pudding, the pudding in this case being a dead 14 year old girl. The System failed, and we will have to admit it before we are done, although there will be a lot of blame passing before we are done, I am sure.

I think I can say this: I have started about eight posts about this, with titles ranging from J'Accuse to What Have We Done? to Misunderstanding The Truth to Failing Reality to Decompressing to Why I Am in a Bad Mood.

I think I can say this: there are some things so broken and awful that you cannot make them right. This is life, and very bad stuff can and will happen, and more than once, and outside of any recognizeable karma. Because society doesn't want to deal immediately and personally with the broken and agonized, we pay others to deal with it (at a fraction of the real cost of dealing with it, because you can ruthlesslessly exploit our compassions) and then blame us greatly when we can't solve every problem. And because, you don't think it can happen to you. Let an old social worker assure you, it can happen to you.

Well, I'm up to eight now, each worse than the last, on my career list of unnatural deaths. From time to time I dream of each of them still, and this is just one more nightmare to add to the list.


Calgary Herald, Feb 28

Mom charged in girl's murder

Aunt says drug use made teen 'dangerous'

Kim Bradley, with files from Jason van Rassel, CalgaryHerald

Calgary Herald

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Calgary mother Aset Magomadova begged for help with her violent, drug-addicted daughter for more than a year before ending up in jail, accused of killing the 14-year-old in a fight in their Fairview home.

According to the victim's aunt, Layla Magomadova, who was in the house at the time of Monday's murder, Aminat (pronounced Amina) became mixed up with the wrong crowd and got hooked on crystal methamphetamine when she was 12, not long after the family emigrated to Canada from Chechnya three years ago.

Since then, she bounced between schools and had become increasingly "dangerous" to the point her brother and mother, now charged with second-degree murder in her death, had to stay with friends for days at a time to escape the threats on their lives.

"She hated everyone and did very bad things to our family. Nothing we could do would make her listen," Layla, a single mother of a four-year-old girl, said through tears.

"My sister didn't know anyone to help her, and was asking everyone to help, but the police kept bringing Aminat home. My sister had to protect herself.

"My sister told me one time when she was crying that she wanted her daughter back," added Layla.

"We missed her, the girl she was before she came to Canada. She used to be a good girl."

Relatives and friends described tearful phone calls they received from the 36-year-old Aset following the almost daily physical fights between her and her daughter.

Her mom, who was handicapped after losing part of her foot in an accident before she fled Chechnya, couldn't work and got housing though the city -- a home on Fay Road S.E.

The dead girl's brother, Rizvan, who suffers from muscular dystrophy and is confined to a wheelchair, was home at the time of Monday's murder. He witnessed part of the fight, said his aunt, who will be caring for him. He hasn't described the morning in detail and is still in shock, but has told his aunt the fight started over money to buy drugs.

"She told her mom she had to pay her money all the time. She stole things to get drugs," Layla said, adding she's had several items stolen, including cellphones.

Before coming to Canada, Aset sought protection in Chechen refugee camps with her children after her husband went missing in 1995. According to a newspaper article from Grozny, Aset wrote letters describing the horrors she endured before fleeing her homeland.

"I hope no one else will ever witness and experience what we experienced," she wrote. "I would never have believed that something like this would happen to a human being."

She went on to describe how she never received help to escape the torture, and how she still thought of the "Russians who were grossly abusing me.

"All the memories . . . are terribly painful, it was such a nightmare."

Layla sponsored her sister's application to come to Canada so "her children could have a good education."

She put them up in her small apartment near 17th Avenue and 14th Street S.W. for almost three years after they arrived.

But Aminat's behaviour became so violent before Christmas that Layla was forced to ask them to leave out of fear for her own daughter's safety.

Family friend Sulayman Salamov, who knew the family for eight years before they came to Canada, said Aminat wasn't always bad.

"She was an angel," he said through an interpreter, describing the teen as he knew her in Chechnya.

"Then she met friends in Canada -- 17- and 18-year-old boys -- and she changed, went crazy."

He put up Aset and her son on several occasions to hide from Aminat while she was high on drugs, he said.

"Aset was scared for her life," Salamov said, adding Aminat tried to break into his apartment before and has also stolen from him. "Aset is a very kind person, a very nice person who wouldn't hurt people."

Mark Buckley, principal of William Roper Hull Home in the city's S.W. where Aminat attended school most recently, described the girl as "vibrant and engaging," despite her behavioural problems.

Staff at the school were visibly shaken by her death, and believed she had lots of potential to turn her life around, he said.

"She had lots of spunk," Buckley said.

Police would only confirm they had been to the Fay Road house about five times in the past five weeks, but could not specify why or what the outcome was.

"In this situation, there were no calls to other agencies or to other (police) units to assist. In a murder investigation, we will always look at the history leading up to the occurrence," said Acting Staff Sgt. Chris Matthews, of the Calgary police homicide unit.

"Generally, child and family services is called in situations where children are in danger, in conjunction with the Child at Risk Response Team.

"At this time, we didn't have the need to call the domestic conflict unit, and we didn't have the need to call the Child at Risk Response Team," he said.

Neither autopsy results nor the cause of death has been released.

Aset is due back in court next Tuesday after she finds a lawyer and an interpreter.

kbradley@theherald.canwest.com

© The Calgary Herald 2007

If continued....

Just Maybe There Is Justice

On Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada did the Right Thing, unanimously at that, and essentially upheld the 1984 Singh Decision (the wikipedia article on it is very inaccurate and dated, and I don't care to correct it, not being a lawyer, but someone should though). This much maligned and propagandized about decision is one of the fundamental bases for much of my work: it essentially declared that any human being on Canadian soil was entitled to the protections of the Charter of Rights & Freedoms, citizen or not.

I was dancing around and crowing, so I had to try and explain it to my family, and I eventually found the easiest way to do that was by quoting the US press: No Gitmo North. (So far, non-citizen human beings, and perhaps citizen human beings, are probably not entitled to the protections of the Bill of Rights in the US in matters of National Security, or at least that seems to be the position of the current US Administration, with some US Supreme Court support.)

Now human rights are pretty much my religion, so this stuff is important to me both locally and globally.

See, in the wake of 9/11, Canada brought in IRPA (Immigrant & Refugee Protection Act) which among much other questionable stuff, established the "Security Certificate." This is a process whereby the government can declare a non-citizen to be a threat to National Security for reasons that they don't want to disclose (almost always revelations from "friendly" intelligence sources that would no longer be "friendly" if they were revealed, think Israel and Syria and the CIA) and have them jailed pending deportation. This is bad enough, but the pending bit causes complications: aside from section 5 of the universal declaration, Canada has signed on to the international convention which has article 3 prohibiting returning people to places that they might be tortured. Ultimately, this has meant that people are held in punitive detention on secret evidence without any kind of trial or review, indeterminately ie forever, ie Gitmo North, which exists right now in Kingston, with three inmates, all currently on yet another hunger strike, they want medical care and family visits and other basic stuff that most human beings (actually convicted of crimes in an open court of law rather than possibly bad intentions in a secret star chamber kind of deal) in the Canadian penal system get.

Now this is Canada, so we have to weasel a bit, and the Court gave parliament a year of continuing injustice to figure something else out, which scares me a bit, since we currently have a minority government parliament playing outrageous games with security issues, with the Prime Minister leading the despicable gaming. But still, Canada's Supreme Court is making that of the United States look pretty wimpy.

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Insanity

I am utterly speechless. This is rank insanity.

One of the things I operate for my employer is our Before and After School programing, basically taking care of 7 - 12 year olds who have working/student parents, before & after and all day on PD days. These programs are notoriously difficult to operate, because

1) They are very difficult to staff, as a) you have to have qualified staff, and who wants to go to school for two years to get a no-future not exactly excellently paying job? and b) they involve split shifts, to cover morning and afternoon, with unpredictably occurring full-days to cover days schools are closed. Who wants a job like that?

2) If you operate one in the school, the mighty janitor's union has a lock that says they have to be there, and to be there at some of the hours we need, we have to pay them extraordinarily high overtime rates, and no matter how much money you offer, there are some days that they get off with pay on an ironclad union agreement, and the school MUST be closed.

3) Each program involves a small number of staff, so that when one gets sick or quits on you, it is a catastrophe.

4) This is Calgary, where staffing anything is insanely difficult.

On the other hand, they can also be relatively lucrative.

Now here in Calgary, a certain organization with an acronym that begins with the second last letter of the alphabet and ends with the first letter of the alphabet and which I understand is a good place to stay if you are a young homosexual man, operates a number of such programs around the city. In the past, they have been pretty aggressive about it, as few years back they (rather sneakily I thought) tried to steal the program we have offered in a separate school for over 20 years, essentially by flashing dollar signs at the board. We were able to put a stop to it, but it was a pretty good demonstration of the way that they typically do business.

Now in the staffing crunch that is Calgary in 2007, they announced a few weeks back that they were going to close 5 of their programs, which caused a fair brouhaha as it meant that a lot of parents would be thrown into the lurch. I think that it may have been deliberate, to create a crisis and raise some extra money or something, but if so, it didn't work, every other program in the city is having the same difficulty, and if somebody was do something, they would have to do it for all, which doesn't seem to be in the cards here in Alberta. Personally, I thought it was a bad operational decision: a) it is just as hard to staff three programs as it is to staff one, and b) if you have multiple programs you get some economies of scale, and can keep a margin of additional staff on the roll to cover off the problem of sick/quitting staff.

I thought about it a little, but with three programs operating I have enough scale I think, and really, offering generic out of school care is not really part of our mission or mandate. However, the parents at one school were frantically trying to put together a program of their own, and one of them had a contact with us as an employer, and called us to see about recruiting staff. It turned out that the school was conveniently close, and a new source of qualified staff coincidentally showed up, and I thought, hmmm.

I met with the parents and the school, and they were very happy, when they heard our rates, the content of our program, and the fact that we do indeed provide care on in-service days, and in fact also have an affordable summer day-camp. Oh yeah! they said, and asked us to step in. This is where the insanity started.

Now some background.

1) To operate a program, you have to be licensed by the City. Well, technically you don't, but not being licensed is Frowned Upon, and besides, that is our operational policy. As well, the City pays the (rather generous) subsidy for (rather broadly defined) low-income parents, which for this school is an issue. To get licensed, you have to pay a fairly nominal fee, fill out a form, present some documentation around your operating policies, fire & health inspections (of course), insurance certificate, proof of permission from the landlord, and the qualifications of your staff. Then a Licensing Officer will come out and inspect the program for equipment and on-site documentation, and measure the floor space so as to license you for a certain number of children based on a square meter per child formula. Oh yes, and you have to present your license from the province. OK.

2) To get a license from the province, you have to pay a nominal fee and fill out a form, and present certain documents including insurance certificate, fire & health, operating policies and procedures, proof of permission from the landlord, etc, and then a Licensing Officer will come out and measure the space and give you a license based on a (completely different) child:sq/m formula. Oh yes, and you have to present a Development Permit from the City. Alrighty then.

3) Now, a Development Permit is required for all business/building developments and changes, everything from adding a new fence to your back yard to building a mega mall. And the process required for each isn't much different. You have to pay a nominal fee, fill out a bunch of complex forms, present proof of permission from the landlord, and attach four copies of interior blue-prints, exterior plans, both at (rather high) prescribed levels of detail and dimensions, photographs of the building, and a bunch of other stuff. (I have done this three times now, and I got something wrong each time-- usually the blueprints the school board maintains on a 100 year old school are not up to snuff, just for starters.) It is a hell of a lot of work, and then you wait three months or so.

This is all to determine if the facility (a school) is an acceptable place, in terms of physicality, city planning, and neighbourhood attitudes, to house children for a few hours each day (nevermind that they have been there for 5 or 6 hours already). Okaaaaay...

Well I thought, there is an existing program with an existing permit, maybe I should just use that one? I got the contact name for the afore-described organization, and this seemed possible, along with there being some kind of possibility that they would pass on their equipment, well, perhaps sell it to us. OK, we got the ball rolling on everything else.

Well, then some VP type from the afore-mentioned organization gets in touch with me, could I sign a contract, basically they couldn't give me the kids names, we'd have to register them ourselves, and they wanted to be free of liability, yadda yadda, it seemed sensible I guess, if just a little wee bit strange. The contract arrived.

Holy Moly! The thing was long and full of scary legalese, most of it likely harmless enough, but very dense and frightening, although it looked a bit like buying their equipment was part of the deal, there was a real kicker of a clause: if we were to approach any of their staff (school program or otherwise) to come work for us in any capacity (school program or otherwise) we would be liable for $50,000. Uh huh.

Now, a) we had no intention of doing anything of the kind anyway, and b) the clause and contract looked pretty unenforceable anyway, and c) this was all in consideration for a public, government-produced document, and in any case we had inspected their (very minimal) equipment and found it sorely wanting, so I declined, as politely as I could manage.

Well, if there is an existing permit, perhaps I can get my own copy somehow? I called the city. The good news: I didn't need to, instead I could get something called a Business Use Confirmation. The bad news: it involved submitting pretty much all the same stuff as for a Development Permit, except the process would be quicker. Oh, and I could get the plans from the city Document Library. The purpose of the whole thing is to compare the plans with those from the original permit application to see if anything had changed.

Let me see if I've got this right, I asked: you want me to get the plans of the 100 year old school from the city file where they were submitted for the existing development permit, so that you can compare them with the plans in the city file to see if they have changed between now and then? You are going to compare copies with originals to see if they have changed? Yes he said. Shaking my head, I phoned the city document library. Oh yes, they could get it for me, it would have to come out of archives, so it would take $100 and 2 to 5 working days (the city would have to pull them out of archives to make the comparison anyway, right?)

Franz Kafka, where are you?

Meanwhile, it's ticking down to March 1, and if I can't get this unsnarled, about 30 kids are going to be out on the street.

If continued....

Being Brave, Or, There Is No Hope

I don't like pointing much at the blogs I read, and I read a ton. Sometimes they make me cry. And sometimes they make me post comments, which is a stupid thing to do, because I can then never again link it back here.

I don't want you to know that much about me, really. Knowing the blogs I read tells you way too much about me.

I read one today that had me on my knees, thinking that yes there is a god, yes, god loves us, yes human beings by loving each other can change the world. Proof positive.

But then I think of my dad, of the tragedy of Alzheimer's that haunts my family. It is so very very cruel, and perverse and evil, that disease, and I fear it very greatly. There is no cure or treatment, until the peace of Death finally descends, after unimaginable and unending agony. How can god allow this thing?

God, how can you allow something strong and beautiful to become pathetic and terrified and warped into horror? I understand and deal with the evil we do to each other, too well, but the evil that falls into our lives undeserved, unasked, unmade, how god, can we heal those broken hearts and all the hearts they break? What is the world that it contains addiction, alzheimers, and all the afflictions we don't deserve?

If continued....

Lost Posts

I wrote a brilliant post last night, at about 11 pm.

But I was so tired, I fell asleep at the keyboard and managed to delete it with my nose or forehead or something. Anyway I woke up at about 5 am on the couch, and there it was, or rather, wasn't. Damn.

Damn it was a tasty post, all about the black art of coordinating conferences successfully and dealing with paranoid government guys and managing steering committees and the rules to live by if you ever get stuck with the task. I actually remember it quite well, but am too lazy to type it again. So you'll have to imagine it. Here's a hint: rule 8, if I remember correctly, was "sleep is for the weak" which is pretty much why I was so tired that I fell asleep and lost the whole frigging post.

Anyway, I brought the conference off, it worked out pretty well and left people happy, and I burnt a sufficient amount of year end money to keep the funders happy, yet not so much as to piss them off. Tricky, that.

It is one of those things that is really boring, unless you work in the industry, but what I am really in love with and excited by right now is this, which came up at the conference. I really really hope that it happens, which probably means it surely won't. I've spent the last few weeks of my life preparing very stupid "accountability" documents, and I resent it deeply. Anyway, I have never ever read anything by the government that was so deeply right. Maybe the folks at Treasury Board, despite all the evidence to the contrary, do in fact have souls.

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The Internet is Getting More Broken Every Day

The spam situation is getting to be right out of hand. My filter is catching something over 100 every day, and looking back over the past few weeks, about 12 a day are getting through anyway. Worst of all, about 2 legitimate emails get caught in the filter every day too, and this has caused real problems too. (It's like we may have to go back to the world of faxing to ensure a message gets there, which is a technologyI keep hoping will die.)

Things are reaching a breaking point, and frankly, it scares me. Because most of the proposed solutions are troubling (Big Bro's is here), and, I suspect Darwinian that I am, bound to fail. The whole point of the interwebtubity after it beat the hell out of the walled gardens like AOL and the ilk, is that it is connected to absolutely everything and anything, and that means connected to a bunch of pretty dubious people along with all the nice ones. The obvious solution is to police ISPs, but the refusal of ISPs to be policed is one of the interwebtubity's strongest points.

It is a conundrum to be sure, but I would sure hate to see fruitfull anarchy eat itself, which is what this is starting to look like.

Basically, the internet is wide open, which means that smelly offensive street people CAN get into the mall and see all the shiny webgoodness, and this is a Very Good Thing. I'm not sure that any kind of internet that keeps poor people out, which is what many of the anti-spam schemes amount to, is an internet that I want to belong to. I'm not big on most of the Digital Divide folks as they angle for their own little piece of the pie, but there is a very real problem there that they are feeding off of.

Once upon a time I was pretty sure that the long-term solution was human wisdom and experience, so that even though the broadcast:sucker ratio might be exceedingly big yet almost free, eventually we the ratio would shrink enough that the almost free becomes too expensive for the yield. I was wrong.

For example, at first I figured the pump and dump stock emails were surely long-time losers, as dumb investors learnt some hard lessons, until I realized that they absolutely do work, because there are always gamblers that know exactly what is going on and want to try and piggyback and beat the curve, that is see the pump and buy in low and sell before it dumps, even though the odds are long against them. Its kinda like horse-racing, no real product there, just lots of new entrants to keep the fleecing going on.

Faced with that kind of reality, with not only the fact that the broadcast:sucker ratio is so high, but also that the gamer gaming away is so intrinsic to humanity, I suspect that the Internet as we have known it may be fundamentally broken, it is the tragedy of the commons all over again.

Look, we get this thing right, there will be about 5 BILLION people talking to each other at once, and if only a very very small percentage of them are bad apples, the static will kill the whole enterprise. Is the choice to opt to restrict access to the rich and privilaged? To the cognescenti? To let the democratic politicians who have so consistently failed us for the last 100+ years govern free speech?

How, just how, do you beat human static?

If continued....

Dramas, Dynamics, and Jams

Random thoughts this week whilst writing multiple proposals, negotiating several tricky partnerships, doing the coordinating work for a conference this week, assisting the spouse with a job search, nursing a child with the same nasty flu that has torn great holes in my own organizational infrastructure (to say nothing of the aforementioned conference), and trying to commute in a city that is gridlocked at the best of times but in cold weather and snow pretty much shuts down completely (I've had a lot of bathroom type sit alone and ponder time lately whilst stuck in endless traffic jams).

From the conference: it is deeply ironic, but the single biggest impact of IT has probably been on the printing industry. The flexibility, response time, cost, and quality of product these days if you need to print something cool quickly is simply astonishing.

From the traffic: Julius Ceaser had it right: early in his career he had some sort of political job that amounted to municipal administration in Rome, at a time when it was dealing with horrible traffic problems. He solved them, by banning commercial traffic in daylight hours, which greatly cleared the streets during business hours, and kept everybody up all night with the roar of the carts and wagons and associated draft animals. The general consensus appeared to be that the tradeoff was worth it. I am beginning to think we should follow this, at least in a small way: howabout no truck on the city's roads between 6 and 9 am, and again between 4 and 7 pm?

From the sick child & sick colleagues: why on earth do I hardly ever get sick with anything, and get better so very quickly when I do? I seem to be freaking invulnerable, which is odd since I suspect my diet, exercise patterns, and self abuse of one kind or another would pretty much make me the poster child for vulnerability.

Writing proposals is fundamentally a soul-less stupid activity, as you jam square pegs into round holes and tell what amount to lies and distortions with all the best intentions, sure that they will be read as such. The worst part of the whole process is when you run into the inevitable pettifogger and find your whole sanity, understanding of the world, and capacity to care called into question.

Job searches are truly bizarre, its been about 6 years now since I did any professional type employment counselling, and the times and environment have changed hugely, but one thing remains the same: it is a human endeavour probably only second to the mating dance in the amount and degree of lieing going on, by all parties. The nature and aims of the lies may have changed in today's economy, but the volume and seriousness of them have not changed one bit. I lie you lie we all lie and even agree to lie together, it becomes a consensual hallucination almost. There is a lot of fairly good Anthro theory that posits the telling of lies as a driving evolutionary force, a necessary social lubrication, and watching job searches/recruiting efforts up close, well it's hard to dissent.

From all areas: the world is basically over-run with assholes and idiots. Any grant proposal process, medical system engagement, work-world drama, group task dynamic, and most especially, traffic jam, amply and graphically demonstrates this.

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Vapourings about Stuff

[Inspired by a recent forage through all the boxes in my basement...]

Marley's Ghost, in Dicken's Christmas Carol, reports that he is bound with the chains he voluntarily took on in his life. We all are so bound, of course, the choice we confront is not whether, but which. Marley's bonds were lockboxes and steel; mine, I fear, will be infrastructure and books themselves. Stuff.

Life is, for the tool-using resource-hogging primates that we are, a matter of collecting stuff, and we always end up with more of it than is good for us. But the problem comes in when you start to love the stuff even more than its acquisition (which is bad enough), and then it exacts such a terrible price. I have such a fear of stuff, a fear that I might end up loving it instead of human beings. Stuff is incapable of loving you back of course, which is why it can be so very attractive.

And not for fear of what it will do to you in the next life, but rather, of being turned into a ghost in this one, by all the logistical burden imposed by the possession of stuff. The maintenance and upkeep, the taxes and security costs, the worry and bother, the nailing you down and making you defensive and vulnerable.

All of these things are true but sources of strength when it is people that you love, not stuff. Stuff makes you weak and useless, people make you strong and useful. I deeply fear stuff, or to be realistic and existential, I fear my own self's bondage as I become tied to stuff. It is a route to bad faith attempted en soir, not the pour soir that is the truth of humanity at our best, if I can get all Sartreian Existential for a moment.

I think we are all, at some level, a homeless person struggling to push a shopping cart full of stuff down a rutted potholed ice-strewn street.

The thing I like most about the interwebtubity is its very virtuality, it's apparent lack of stuffness, the way that you go naked into its cold darkness, and the colder and darker it can get, the cooler sometimes. There is no real stuff there, you'd think, and certainly no stuff that you can bring with you to equip and identify you, and it is interesting that so much effort out there is dedicated to establishing the otherwise. But it is all hopeless, everything constructed out there is subject to rapid renovation, loss, death by a thousand bureaucratic cuts of stuffishness, and even horrifying chrysalis. We should learn something.

I remember learning Cree, and studying linguistics in uni, and it was so amazing to learn that there were languages that were verb, not noun-based, like this IndoEuropean is. Ours is the language form that built the modern world, virtual or no, and it is so very deeply object oriented that it distinguishes nouns from verbs in a very fundamental way, when that is I think almost certainly not the real human experience. Our language marries us to stuff, to nouns of things owned and/or desired, of discrete pieces of reality valued by possibility of ownership. Much as Adam Smith was as scarily and deeply right as anyone has ever been, I am pretty sure that Gertrude Stein was just as scary, when she declared the death of the noun as being fundamentally boring, because each is just a name, and names are ultimately meaningless valueless tags. Nouns are just metadata, useful but not really significant information, because what happens is far more important that what it happens to, and how is that for a different way of looking at the world?

I take Marley's lesson to heart: why are we so eager to own stuff that mostly seems to end up owning us? If there actually isn't any stuff, only what you do, it would be a far better place I think, where you owned by and were what you did, not what stuff you laid claim to.

Ownership always strikes me as something like a consensual hallucination, only there as a defence against the tragic vandalism of the commons; that is, until I myself stop blogging and go out and dig in the good wet soil of my garden on a clear spring morning. Then stuff starts seeming pretty important, as I get it under my fingernails. Hmm.

If continued....

Grantsmanship 101

It has been decided, that at the conference I am now coordinating, there will be a session on grant proposal writing. Logically, I should probably be the actually-writes-the-things guy on the panel, but I won't be most likely, because I will be busy coordinating the conference. So here is what I would teach, if I were to deliver such a workshop.

Preamble: The Most Important Thing to Remember About Any Proposal is the old story of the two hikers and the grizzly bear, that everybody around me strongly wishes I would stop telling. It goes like this:

Once upon a time, two hikers were walking through the mountains. They were in a bare rocky valley, when they stumbled upon a very large, very hungry grizzly bear on the other side. The bear immediately charged them. One of the hikers took off running, whilst the other searched around for a weapon to fend the bear off. He yelled at the running guy: "Why are you running? Humans can't outrun bears, bears can run at 40 mph!" The guy running shouted back: "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you."

All other things aside, your proposal doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the competition. This is a very comforting realization.

Anyway...

1) Only Go Where You Are Wanted. Many years ago my boss was touring some people around the agency one day, and they came by my office and I was once pointed out as a guy who was good at writing proposals and bringing in the cash. "What's your secret" they asked. Taken by surprise and put on the spot, I made the ghastly mistake of telling the unvarnished truth: "Never ask for money unless you are already sure you are going to get it." Luckily, none of them were funders.

Now this is absolutely true. Very few RFPs and Tenders actually go out and are judged nakedly only on what is presented, almost none in fact, and matters not included in the proposal actually have a perponderant weight in the decision making. If they don't know who you are and what you can do before you show up at the door, you are wasting your (and their) time.

1.1) Yes Sir/No Sir. Since either they already know and approve of you, or don't know of you and/or don't approve of you, there is little point in using an application process to tell anybody how wonderful you are. Writing a proposal, like applying for any kind of certification, is about minimally making the minimal standards, and exceeding them gets you nothing, and has endless potential to make your life miserable.

My dad was among many other things an expert at driving through low-level bizarre border crossing points in third world countries. His best piece of advice was the same as you hear from experienced criminal lawyers: just answer the question as simply and minimally as possible, and don't ever volunteer anything extraneous. Don't Ever Volunteer Any Unnecessary Information. I just can't stress this enough. You are just giving ammunition to people that don't want to give you the grant anyway, and making complications for those that do. Trust me on this, there is no answer or cover or justification that you can give that will change a hostile mind, and no missing little bit of wonderfullness that will put you over the top.

1.2) Meet & Greet. The point is, you have to be known, and the thing you are proposing has to be a logical step from who and what you are, and spending time on letting anyone know who and what you are is never wasted time, no matter the audience. Ideally, you want to have some kind of community support saying that this thing needs to be done, and the granters need to hear it. Even better, hell best, is to get as many of them out to meet and greet actually see you do the stuff you are telling them you are doing, and here is the key point, doing for all the right reasons. Either your very generalized mission has something to move people with, or it does not, and why on earth are you working there if it doesn't.

Takeaway From 1): the beauty, eloquence, excellence, and thorough covering of your amazingness in your proposal has very little bearing indeed on its success. Don't kill yourself on this stuff.

2) Who You Talkin' To? As you put the thing together, you have to have an understanding of your audience in your mind at all times. And often, the audience is complex. There are three layers: the big guy, the guy that matters, and the guy that will read the darn thing. You have to keep them all happy, and they all have to keep each other happy.

2.1) The Originator. Typically, the funding program you are applying to was thought up by a very senior mandarin or sometimes a politician, who may or may not still be on the scene, and they had definite, very big picture intentions when they did so. Unfortunately, they were/are also likely rather out of touch with events on the ground, but really, it doesn't matter, because it is very rare that they will have a direct hand in awarding you anything (though when they do, forget the rest of this, just do 1) above and you could write the thing in Engrish txtmsg-splng with a crayon on a badly re-faxed form and you will get the cash, forget about everything below).

However, the second part of your audience, the manager that actually has some authority and will have to approve whatever the program officer or tendering committee decides, will in fact take this somewhat seriously. So if the funding stream is based on some groovy concept about venture philanthropy tri-mentoring community of practitioner best practise accreditation standards, it behooves you to read up on the silly jargon and drop some of it in, fairly near the top of the proposal. It's like a check-off item, along with presenting your Board and charitable tax number, and people reading it understand this and like to see it near the top so they can check it off and then go on to the important stuff.

2.2) The Decision Maker. Titles vary considerably here, but this guy can be identified by his or her studious avoidance of ever talking directly to you about the proposal/program, yet being the boss of the folks that do. Anybody that will talk to you about this or that line item, or client number, or proposed technique, very definitely isn't one of this group. And it is almost certain that there is only one person in the role for your proposal, and you really really have to understand their thinking, and the understanding of the people that report to them of their thinking.

That last sentence was kind of convoluted, but very important. The people that will be studying your proposal and voting yea or nay, will be doing it mostly on the basis of whether or not it will please their boss, and only a little bit on whether it will actually do something good. It is as simple as that. And while their boss has to play lip-service to 2.1) the jargony originator, he/she also has their own ideas and priorities and things they would like to see happen. Understanding this, and understanding what what their front-line folks understand of this, is the single most critical piece.

2.3) The Drone. This is the person that will actually make the "decision." Often it is a committee, often it is an underpaid civil servant just trying to get through the door. What they want is very simple: did you give us everything we asked for, does it meet guidelines, can I be blamed if anything is wrong, will it make my bosses happy. You will note, on that list there is nothing at all about wonderfullness or excellence or clever ideas or even good writing.

Incidentally, they tend to have major ego issues, and it is a very good idea to kowtow and admit their brilliance and insight and experience every chance you get, and really, it is hard to lay it on too thick. I only say this because I have actually been dragged into this role myself, and I indeed did have ego issues around it myself.

Takeaway from 2): If you don't have a lock from 1) type activities, you have to a) boost the ego of the front line guys, and b) do what the front line guys think that the actual decision makers want you to do. And then do what you what you are pretty sure the actual decision maker wants you to do. Oh, and c) provide a linguistic nod of your head to the big guys for the decision makers to check off.

3) Telling a Tale. Big Bro once claimed something like "reality is a text-based application" (the rather charming link to this somewhat PoMo declaration seems to have gone so I can't verify my memory). I'm not sure about the total accuracy of that, but in the world of proposals, it absolutely and surely is completely true. There are two critical considerations: logic, and narrative line. The problem is that application forms are specifically designed to destroy both (see 4 below).

3.1) Being Mr. Spock. There has to be a logic, a coherence, a process of induction, to your proposal. It has to fit with what you already have, it has to be seen as a single block in the upper level (not the top one mind you) of a pyramid, as part of an un-seamed garment, as an inevitable extension of an ongoing process. One of the bigger mistakes I have seen charitable organizations make is to hire a proposal writing specialist. Proposals should be written by the people delivering the goods, with an understanding of what is going on and how everything fits together, and the responsibility for delivering the goods, and this cannot be faked.

3.2) It's a Story, Stupid. Stories have a thread, sometimes a macguffin, and always an introduction setting the stage, a development causing a problem, a resolution changing the world, and a denuemont, showing the future. If your proposal doesn't have these things, it will be a weak and shaky cripple, staggering towards a distant finishing line.

Stories are how human beings understand the world; if I may be so bold, for humans reality is a metaphor/analogy-based application. If your proposal doesn't tell a story, it likely isn't going anywhere, metaphorically or tactically.

Takeaway from 3): If you aren't the hero in a tale you can tell, you have no business trying to tell any tale at all.

4) Obstructions. Proposals come with several built in obstructions. The Form. The Expectations vs the Reality. Fatigue.

4.1) Dotting the I's. This can range from sucks a little bit to sucks most horribly. Most application forms are designed so as to ruin 3) as much as possible. They ask a series of questions that are NOT in the order of: scene, event, climax, resolution, denouemont. They ask a series of questions, that appear to be given equal weight because they are nodding to all the parties in 2) above, and because the application was written by none of the parties in 2) above. Trying to figure out which items are important and which ones just have to nodded at takes real understanding of 2) above.

The worst case scenario is an RFP that has a) a whole set of detailed questions, and b) a detailed scoring criteria list, that have no conceivable relationship to each other, and that requires you to fill in the form precisely and only submit requested attachments and only answer each stated question in the space provided/with x number of words. This apparently will usually totally kill off all of 3) above, and preclude all of the considerations in 3) above, and frankly, is often intended to do just that (otherwise, it's a case of incompetent funders, and don't worry too much, see the preamble).

4.2) Saving the World. The deep fear of the proposal writer is that the other guy will promise the sun, stars, moon and sky, which they can't possibly deliver, but by promising it, will beat you out, and then renegogiate the deliverables later. This is actually accurate, but if you have some history and longevity, it will work to your favour, as competitors prove that they can't deliver. Don't actually promise anything close to what you think you could deliver at full stretch. Promise something reasonable. You might lose the grant, but if you get it damn you will deliver, which will feed intensely into 1) above, which is all that really matters.

4.3) Brevity is how you win. Yes you are wonderful, and what you are proposing to do is amazing and unique, and points this way and that to many cool theoretical systems, and good for you. Nobody actually cares, see 2) above, please stop writing applications to yourself. It is as tiring to read them as it is to write them. As a famous scientist once said (I gather), if you can't explain in principle what you are doing to a reasonably bright 5 year old, you are wasting your time. What is it exactly that you want to do, you should be able to put into a single four sentence paragraph at some point, and point the whole proposal back there again and again. Rather than pouring your energy into writing it over and over in different words.

Takeaway from 4): Proposal Writing is like baseball-- in complex situations the team that makes the fewest errors and stays focused on the critical issue wins.

5) Play a long game. If everything depends on any one proposal, you are dead but just don't realize it yet. Persistence and multiple efforts are what work, not flash, magic, and golden eggs. That is pretty much its own takeaway right there.

If continued....

My Head, My Heart, and My Gut

Well tabernac, at the beginning of the season, I predicted that it would be the Colts & the Bears, and tabernac I was right, and totally undeservedly so.

I also predicted that the Bears would win the Big Show in the end.

After much reflection & cogitation, and prayers to the Football Gods (whose mills have indeed ground exceedingly fine this season), I just have to admit that just smidgeon of doubt has entered my soul. My head tells me that Manning & Co will take it on the back of brilliant defensive performance. My heart dearly wishes the same.

My gut is saying I was right way back then, and I should stick with that.

It is going to be a fun Sunday Afternoon, is all I can say. I am like so seriously cheering for both teams.

If continued....

Pots on the Stove

I honestly don't think I've had this many pots boiling at once on the stove, and felt this stressed, except maybe way back when in the mid period of the Central Park/Inner City Better Futures/Alternative Recreation Centre days roughly a decade ago. Well, I actually had less on the boil back then, but had no idea what I was doing, which was half the stress, and the stress at that period nearly killed me.

Nowadays, I am a lot more competent, and better at stress, but goodness gracious, I have a truly astounding number of critical issues on the stove at once. It is very clear, I will not get everything done in time or as well as it could be, I have to do battlefield type triage, all around thinking what can wait and get a less than optimum outcome but still survive, and doing the bare minimum for the faint hopes.

You know, I don't like it. Crap, as I typed that I just remembered another somewhat sub-critical deadline that I just missed today.

There is just a general decay in getting things done right, here in Calgary and Alberta, we are all about doing things now and coping with surprises, which is all good, until it mixes with ridiculous levels of don't lay it on me type accountability, which we mostly get from Ottawa. It's a frontier, people, and that means fast and furious and cut to the chase, don't make rules that make no sense in a rapidly evolving environment because absolutely nobody actually knows what is going on, or how it's going to end.

If continued....