Raging at the audacity of austerity

Yesterday I was working with a client who receives a federal government grant to do its work. The grant supports the coordination of a national network of organizations who are working with vulnerable people in communities across Canada, to support the work of a number of federal government policies. Over the past few years, these local organizations have been tasked with a an increasingly hard job, in a culture that is not providing them with much support. While I have been working with them, the support from the federal government has been declining, even as need is increasing.

We are planning a gathering of the network, one which many fewer people can attend than in previous years becasue of funding cutbacks. I’m working for a much reduced fee. The gathering we are planning is an important place for the network to connect and organize and the subject of our conversations together will be how to strengthen the connections between local initiatives in an era of coming austerity.

Yesterday, as we were planning, my client told me that the government funder expects that we provide them with evidence from this gathering that the conversations between people were “meaningful.” We are somehow being asked to collect data and write a report that shows this. This is not in our budget. The extraction of this harvest is not in the conference plan, and not what anyone desires to do with their precious time together.

A million thoughts swirled in my mind and a few came out of my mouth. Meaningful to whom? By whose standards? At what level? What does this sponsor aim to do with this “meaningfulness” metric and data? And what if the conversations we are having are meaningful because they are organizing the network IN SPITE of the funder? Because actually, that’s the reality. Everyone knows that this funder, despite their helpful contributions to the cause, are actually imperilling the work of the network with funding that isn’t even enough to get every member into the same room so we can talk about what happens next.

And then I got angry at the federal government’s audacity of austerity. How dare they ask us to do MORE while also cutting back core funding for this network that provides services to support federal government policies. Who is sitting in Ottawa saying “reduce their budgets by xx% and also ask them to do more things that are just for our own edification and confidence that they are spending the money well?”

Of course I am not going to release the identity of this group of people, but I can assure you that they do excellent work across Canada on issues that very few other people or organizations are able to handle. They provide safety, security and wellbeing for people that need it. And they are largely staffed by folks with lived experience of the issues that are at play. It’s a wonderful client.

We are heading into an era of austerity. If you are a government funder, I want you to know that the funding you are now providing to organizations needs to be used by them to organize for a future in which you are not a viable partner, and in some cases, you might even be the problem that needs to be organized around (“oh, you already get government funding? Our Foundation only grants to organization that have no other funding”). Years of funding cutbacks have ceded your authority to tell people what to do. And no amount of evidence based evaluation has stemmed the funding cuts, so you’ll forgive people who don’t believe that you need data to make decisions. It is clear that this is not how most program funding decisions are made, especially in an era where flat rate percentage cuts are being applied across the board. That is not to say that organizations that do essential work will not continue to advocate for themselves. But it does mean that, as a “partner” in the work, you won’t be at the head table any more. Folks will use what they have to try to survive you, not appease you. And when, in some bright future, funding is restored, it will be to a network that survived in spite of your “support” and not because of it.

It breaks my heart that folks who are just barely holding on to their jobs and doing essential work are being asked to spend time and money to provide funders with fawning thank you notes that their funding produced “meaningful” conversations. I can assure you that every conversation that folks in this network have is meaningful. Leave it at that.