Two B.C. sex-worker organizations shutting doors

Yesterday, the news was about PEERS Vancouver closing in the spring. Today, the other primary Vancouver organization supporting street-level sex workers has also announced it's done. PACE Vancouver will run out of money to pay its staff in just three weeks.
I'm doing some contract work with PEERS Victoria and can tell you that even though that organization is also going through difficult times, it has a more diverse funding base and is hanging in under a great new executive director, Marion Little. But it will still be facing one of the biggest funding challenges in its 16-year history in the spring, when the same revamped employment contract that is wiping out PEERS Vancouver comes into effect across B.C.
Finding money to help sex workers is an extremely difficult undertaking, as I learned the hard way during my three years leading PEERS Victoria. The reason these groups are struggling is because the citizenry simply doesn't care enough about what happens to the impoverished, marginalized women engaged in survival sex work, and our governments know it.
Please speak up - to your MLA, to the provincial and federal governments. Please make this a personal issue, too, and donate money, warm winter clothing, food for hot soups and stews (PEERS Victoria serves more than 300 "meals" from its outreach van every month to women working our local strolls). Put some time into learning  more about the issues so that this isolated, stigmatized population isn't left to suffer at the hands of our massive disinterest.  

New resolve around better divorces, or just window-dressing?

I'm a bit puzzled by this story, on the province's big new initiative to reduce the court fights when people split up. A good idea to do that, of course, but isn't that the case already? Mediation has been the option of preference for divorcing couples for many years now, at least from the court system's point of view. The big sticking point is getting them to take that option.
As for the example of the Lee family and how we need to view violence against a spouse as threatening to a child - well, that's not a new thing either. In fact, for poor families caught up with the Children and Family Development Ministry, parents risk losing their kids into government care if there's any threat of spousal violence. So even when Dad's violent and Mom's not, she can lose her children just for not being able to figure out how to get away from Dad.
The problem in the Lee case is that the family was well-off. We all have a hard time believing that well-off families can be dysfunctional and dangerous. Different decisions get made - by the ministry, by police - when a family's got money. Tightening up the Family Relations Act isn't likely to change that.
But hey, I don't want to sound like Little Nancy Negative. It's just that this story line seems a bit like someone's trying to dress an old issue up in new clothes and sell it to us as change. 

Death at the Occupy Vancouver protest

A timely open letter to the powers that be from a B.C. blogger and activist very worried about what's going to happen at  the Occupy protest in Vancouver in the wake of a death at the encampment this past week. He's been a participant up until now, but is urging people to wrap things up before more tragedy occurs. 

Fired CLBC boss got $345,000 severance package

Say it ain't so! After all the heat and problems at CLBC, all the lost services to vulnerable people, we find out that fired (an important distinction - fired, not laid off or downsized or anything softer like that) CLBC chief Rick Mowles got a $345,000 severance package from the Crown corporation when he was axed last month. Yup, 18 months' severance after being on the job just six years.
Wow. Kudos to TC reporter Lindsay Kines for digging up this important story - he's been an ace on the CLBC issues since the start, and was the only reporter in B.C. even doing any meaningful writing about this stuff until things got so noisy that Global TV and now the Vancouver Sun finally took a look.

Fed changes start from frightening premise

It makes me nervous to read the news stories about plans the Canadian government has for reshaping the non-profit sector.

Sure, the sector needs some work. What sector doesn’t?

But it’s hardly the unaccountable, inefficient system that the federal government made it sound like this week in the media coverage about the new Canada Not-For-Profit Corporations Act.

“Right now, we ask [the non-profit sector] to take on these jobs,” federal Human Resources Minister Diane Finlay said while announcing new efforts to ensure more accountability from Canada’s 161,000 registered non-profits and charities.

“We give them money to do it. They receive the money whether they achieve their objectives or not. Now all we’re saying is all right, we still want you to do this, but you get more money if you actually achieve your objectives.”

Unless you’ve been involved with a non-profit having to jump through the many - and often meaningless - accountability requirements of federal funding, you might not appreciate how grating of a statement that is in a sector that works very hard for its money. How can we trust change pushed by a government that doesn’t have a clue?

Canada, Britain and the U.S. are all working very hard these days to extricate government from social responsibility. Their efforts tend to focus on initiatives that download the funding of community work to someone other than them.

 Socially invested municipalities and neighbourhoods, new charity hybrids capable of earning their own revenue, mysterious “investors” who are apparently waiting in the wings  to pony up for social causes as long as they can earn a return on investment - all are integral parts of the three countries’ plans for  non-profit reform.

And maybe such strategies will indeed turn out to be beneficial. But pardon me for noticing that underneath every proposed change is an expectation of offloading the cost of social care.

It’s very popular among the government set these days to talk about how charities and non-profits should run more like businesses.

For the most part, they already do. And that’s remarkable given the nutty processes, procedural hurdles and nonsensical funding cuts they deal with as a matter of course. If the goal is a healthy community sector capable of dealing with increasing social complexity, I’d suggest Ottawa start with some personal reflection on the many ways its own systems and policies devalue, complicate and compromise efficient community work.

The nature of non-profit work - running child-care centres, looking after old people, supporting challenged families, preventing environmental catastrophe, finding God, reconnecting lost souls - doesn’t lend  itself easily to standard measurement. In an era when “worth” has only one meaning to government, that’s a major disadvantage.

So much of non-profit work comes down to value-based goals like easing human suffering.  Building community. Saving the planet for future generations. Alas, governments like things that show a return on investment before the next election. 

Community work builds “infrastructure” as surely as construction companies build bridges and roads. So how come nobody has to build a bridge on year-to-year funding or uncertain contracts squeezed whenever the government feels like it? How come we don’t hear about road-builders getting stiffed as a matter of course on annual cost-of-living increases, as is the case for hundreds of social service agencies in B.C. doing the same work for a little less each year?

I do agree with government’s push for more tangible evidence of the benefits of community work. Improvements to the way outcomes are measured and reported would at least settle once and for all that the non-profit sector is doing essential, meaningful work. 

The sector could use a new name, too, because “non-profit” and “charitable” instantly bring to mind some pathetic soul who can’t figure out how to make money and so has to beg.

But what it doesn’t need is a government-led fix that even in its early days has revealed a biased and negative view of the non-profit sector.

Modern-day western governments are obsessed with the idea that charities and non-profits are inefficient users of tax dollars. They think the growing social divide in their countries are because non-profits and community members aren’t doing their job well enough, not because they’ve been hacking apart the social safety net for the better part of 20 years.

They’re wrong. And they won’t set things right with just more of the same.