Money Alone is Not Enough for Successful Services

$500 million may have been put in the stimulus for Vocational Rehabilitation, but will that really help anyone with a disability get a job? Money is only one piece of a successful service.

Sure services need funding; for example, VR in my state has stopped accepting new clients for lack of funds. Without the funding to actually provide a service, well, that's the end of that. VR can't help someone with employment if they can't take that person as a client.

But it doesn't matter how much funding is available if the agency doesn't have the infrastructure, knowledge, or ethics to actually provide the service.

Infrastructure: If the system is not set up to facilitate the service it's intended to deliver, then the service fails just as completely as if it didn't have any funding. What good is VR finding someone a job if that person loses the supports they need to survive? Are external impacts on the program considered and targeted, like employer beliefs? Does the agency focus so much on training that it has neglected competency at job search? Is the system broken anywhere structurally?

Knowledge: Does the service system understand the clients enough to service them? I don't just mean technical understanding of a disability category, but actually understanding individuals and the community. Are service providers being trained with reliable, correct information? Are they being trained at all? Do they have sufficient training also on their own jobs and on what resources, both internal and external, are available to them and their clients?

Ethics: Joel Smith posted an excellent essay It's not about money that discusses how real civil rights, for example equal access to education, are often lost in the bickering about the money. Is more money for a service going to really put an end to atrocities perpetuated by people in that service, like staff abuse, or Diana O'Neill? Do we even want more money going to a system that lets that sort of thing happen?

While I tend to support funding social programs, sometimes I step back and question: When might it be necessary to let a program die and replace it with a new program that functions better? When are the problems with infrastructure impossible to fix without a new foundation? When is ingorance so endemic that retraining needs to be undertaken on a global basis anyway? When has a system become so puppeted by administrators and red tape that it has forgotten exactly who it was intended to serve?

From Obama's inauguration speech,

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.

Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.

Are enough resources being put into program evaluation? How do we know when it's better to start over?