PERSPECTIVE ON SKID ROW : Make ‘Customers’ of Charity Cases : Turn these neighborhoods into research laboratories that include the homeless in developing remedies.
Physical scientists are a powerful special-interest group in our society. Through the National Science Foundation and a host of other institutions, the nation deliberately promotes science and technology. There’s an infrastructure to support their activities--technology parks and industrial consortia to team up, pool resources and share results so that “breakthroughs” and “synergies” can result. Scientists who decry the use of vague language because it is “unscientific” are more than willing to use it when it serves their purposes. Even more, they have to use it because no one can “prove” that most technological innovations will pay off handsomely in the future.
This does not mean that science and technology have a blank check any longer--the cancellation of the Supercollider is a case in point. But there’s no doubt that the United States has science and technology policies.
We in the human services sphere might then ask how we fare when it comes to social innovations. To our knowledge, there are no “social innovation parks”--no zones of major cities deliberately set aside for the purpose of experimenting with social ideas on a systemic and systematic basis. We have industrial enterprise zones but no social innovation zones.
We have learned that change and innovation are tantamount to survival for industrial corporations such as General Motors and IBM. Why is the same not true of social institutions?
Many months ago, several members of organizations in Los Angeles that serve the homeless began coming together to pioneer new approaches. Participants try to abide by the rule that there is no one best way to serve the poor. This by itself helps to remove the senseless bickering that in the past has divided institutions. For instance, it is not important whether an organization adopts a secular or a religious philosophy in serving the poor and the homeless. What counts is the joint recognition that both approaches are needed and that they need to work together.
However, merely bringing diverse organizations together is not enough. We believe that a major portion of what is known as Skid Row ought to be remade as a “social enterprise zone.” Even more, it ought to be seen as a “recovery center” for the entire city of Los Angeles. Such a social enterprise zone would focus creative talents and energies on the possibility of recovery.
There can be no healthy parts of Los Angeles unless every part is healthy and we cannot continue to hide or perpetu-ate the kinds of antisocial behaviors that are prominent in Skid Row. (As the riots demonstrated, no part of L.A. is safe if the whole is not.) We are not saying that every resident of Skid Row can become a productive, wage-earning citizen; in fact, realism about the wide range of homeless people is necessary for the changes we seek.
If the events of the past few years in Los Angeles have demonstrated anything, it is that new approaches to social innovation are needed desperately. Organizations serving the poor will not only have to reorganize and restructure themselves, but foundations supporting these efforts will also have to change. We need to start thinking of the poor as consumers of our services, or even as customers. Even more, the customers need to be co-designers of the zones we are proposing and testers of any ensuing proposals. This is merely the social equivalent of test-marketing. As consumers in all industries are driving the design of services, so too should the consumer be involved in shaping human social services. If a consumer feels unconsidered, he or she will likely reject a product as irrelevant.
We also have to do something deeper: We have to recognize that many programs that are intended to serve the poor and the homeless actually reinforce the problem. In the language of dysfunctional families, many of our approaches must be viewed as co-dependent forces in maintaining poverty and homelessness. Our goal as producers, unlike that of widget makers, should be to reduce, not encourage, repeat business and increase our customers’ self-sufficiency.
A recovering city needs to have, for instance, an Institute of Addictionology to study addiction in all its forms, chemical and non-chemical, not merely the obvious ones. Such research might serve our customers by getting them hooked on beneficial rather than destructive behaviors--computers, perhaps, instead of drugs. The goal would be to establish an atmosphere of discovery and creative collaboration--a university of urban health. The old institutions have got us to this point in social progress but are stalled. There has to be a place to ask the “what if?” questions and carry out the “why not?” experiments.
