THE SURVIVAL SCRAMBLE...CHILD AND YOUTH CARE IN SOUTH AFRICA

A job description was something never given to me. A title....yes..Director. A job description ..no! The Boards of Management in each, at some point, gave me a task. "You will spend 50% of your time fundraising'. The Home, or you, as Director, will have 20 mentions a month in the media". "You, your face, will be the brand of the Home and used for marketing". Each month the Board of Management monitored this and evaluated its effectiveness. Good publicity equated to a good programme. Avoid negative press at whatever cost.

Chunks of time were spent on PR, giving talks at meetings of benefactors, writing "adetorials", making sure that the press attended functions. Existing to survive. Existing to exist.

I am sure that this is something that will resonate with Directors of child and youth care programmes in the non-government (NGO) sector throughout South Africa. Especially in our current funding crisis. It's painful to be constantly distracted from managing the core business of professional child and youth care by demands to brand, package, profile, market (sell), publicly relate... scramble for survival.

Always, but again, especially now in South Africa as a result of the non-payment of subsidies, there is an urgency simply to exist, to survive. 

Come desperate times - come desperate measures.  

It is enticing to use the children in our programmes and their stories, their situation, for fundraising. It's a risk loaded strategy with possible ethical implications.

The children on my first appointment gave me two warnings. Don't drink more than two glasses of wine and don't trust newspaper reporters. At the time it was trendy to call children in care, "neglected, abandoned and abused. Story goes that a reporter 'had combined these labels into a single journalistically emotive word "weggooi kinders" ( throw away children) but with a possible implication on translation into "garbage children".  More than righteously indignant, they were outraged . And rightly so.
There had to be instituted a procedural condition that before publication articles were to be vetted. Not always possible, but well intentioned journalists understood. Nothing about us, without us.

Related to this was the issue of the Home's mini-bus (in South Africa called a "combi"). All the usual good branding strategies were used. Brand colour....red, brand name...the name of the the Children's Home, brand logo.... on all sides. Now tie this to the stigma of the "weggooi kinders " idea. "People stare at us like we're  monkeys in a zoo". So they gave "the finger "sign to staring  passing motorists. Not good PR at all. The next combi had to be white with no markings. Red was for goods ( and me).

The better corporates have a binding set of corporate ethics. What is morally acceptable and not morally acceptable in its operations. There are no doubt child and youth care facilities in South Africa with such a binding course of ethical conduct for fundraising, accounting and disclosure, but I have yet to see one.

Desperate times, desperate measures . Risks that ethical boundaries  become fuzzy.

Children do tug on the heartstrings and so on the wallets of most open hearted adults. This makes the children themselves an organisation's biggest fundraising asset I suppose. Especially the younger ones. In a facility that provided a residential programme for older boys many in trouble with the law we always jokingly said that we operated at a disadvantage, "Take a photo of a young child on Nelson Mandela's lap and the funds pour in. Put one of ours on his lap and his pocket will be picked.!!"
Then also, children in care can be a funder's greatest asset for the same reason. Try telling funders that if they give to children, they must leave their cameras at the office!!

There is a local facility with an educational and residential facility for physically challenged children. It regularly busses children, wheelchairs and crutches into the local shopping mall to sell raffle tickets to shoppers or to request donations in return for a lapel sticker.

Phone call from local newspaper. Journalist: " The beer festival in the city is to donate the profits made to the Children's Home. This links the name of the home to a function dedicated to drinking alcohol. How do you feel about that, and taking funds from them when many of the children you care for have had their lives disrupted by alcohol consumption?" Me: "It's guilt money. The intention is good. I have no problem using guilt money for the benefit of the children".
But the question got me thinking . Are there ethical organisational considerations in the source of our funding? I know of many organisations in the apartheid years that refused to register as NGOs as they refused to take apartheid regime money

There appear to be other ways of using children and young persons for funding. It's to use the focus target of government. When government provides large grants for social crime prevention like diversion programmes for young persons in trouble with the law, then it pays to have such a programme in the organisation. There are two types of funding. One for a project, the other for the funding of posts. (post funding). If post funding is received staff may be deployed for other child and youth care programmes or even other unattractive adult programmes and hidden in the system. The same applies to project funding, especially when the accounting systems don't cater for silo accounting with proportionate allocation. It has been my experience that when target numbers of young people are  not reached excess money is not returned to State. But then State seldom if ever applies this requirement.

Personal experience taught me that deliberate deficit budgeting in the annual business plan can be a favourite of Boards of Management to solicit funding. The threat of closure withing some kind of time frame is an emotion puller.. It's quite easy to do. If a Trust or a completely separately governed Building Fund is set up with the sole purpose of assisting the Home or Organisation, then incoming funds from external sources (other than government) may find their way into the Trust. The balance sheet of the Facility then doesn't look that good. You can't really attract funds if the place is making a profit or sitting on a big surplus.

Then again. Pay administration costs and /or rental to a church which owns the property or supports the project. Own a second business and hire it as a service provider.... the list goes on.....

Come desperate times...come desperate measures

The argument is always is that it is done in the best interests of the children using whatever means is available. Maybe it is , but it's really a pity that higher level organisational ethical thinking may get scrambled in the scramble for survival. 

It shouldn't have to be like this.