A message from a member of the WV BoS CoC Youth Action Board to raise awareness of housing resources and services f… https://t.co/I1eIeBaXi9
Around 2013, I wrote a Manifesto. I wrote it out of anger, at a time when I was done with other people, organizations, and entities constantly defining who we were as an organization and coming to wild and inaccurate conclusions about where we were headed. As naive as it was in hindsight, it was born of a time and place where we needed to put our foot down and clearly explain our intentions or our "why". I was pissed, so I sat down, hammered it out in one take, and posted it. I had no inkling that it would resonate with people, but it did. When it did, I was nervous, excited, and humbled.
Fast forward to 4 years later and so much has changed. Recently, we've gone through what I would describe colloquially as a "rough time". For the organization itself, my coworkers, and myself personally. So, being the true believer in extreme ownership that I am, I owned the place we were, humbled myself before my failures and to my colleagues, called on people smarter than myself for help, and got to work fixing things. Lo and behold, in a truly "holy shit" moment for me, the Manifesto provided us with a framework to craft a plan to reorganize and restructure the entire organization.
Now, I can neither grasp entirely why the Manifesto provided such an anchor, or foundation for people outside our organization or even for ourselves, and I generally regard everything I write as so much nonsense, but if I were to be objective, I would say that the Manifesto was helpful and a guide simply in its blunt simplicity. It was neither flowery, nor philosophical as I am often prone to being, but got right to the point and hammered it home simply and efficiently.
If you didn't read the 2013 Manifesto, please feel free to do so at your leisure: https://www.wvceh.org/blog/the-manifesto.html. For those who are busy and revel in the "Cliff's Notes" experience, let me break it down for you really quickly. In the Manifesto, I hit on the five main competencies that I wanted the world to know. I kicked it straight about who we were and what we believed, including:
1. Ending Homelessness: I intimated that we weren't here to manage homelessness, nor bandy about going to meetings and talking about how we thought it was a swell idea, but that we were here to do work. That our intention was to work ourselves out of jobs and go sell insurance, or start a vegan bakery or something. Essentially that we were the real deal and not a bunch of political posers.
2. Using Evidence: I regaled the viewer with the fact that we despise bullshit and love reality. That we were interested in doing more of what works and less of what doesn't.
3. Collaboration: I called upon the gods of "systems theory" and coherent goals to let everyone know that we couldn't be hot shit in a vacuum. That others had to come along with us in pursuit of this goal of ending homelessness. That using "our" a lot more and "my" a lot less made sense to me.
4. Creating Solutions: I was sick of people coming to weird conclusions based on nonsense. Arguments, territoriality, and the like was getting us nowhere. Figuring out ways around barriers was (and still is) working.
5. Changing: I needed to send a message that once you get comfortable with us being one thing, hold on to your hat, because we were probably going to be something different soon. We've struggled with this internally as well as externally, with staff finding it daunting to move toward change, and outside entities constantly desiring us to operate from an historic framework for the sake of comfort.
And that was it. The thing that got a moderate amount of attention. It was our frustration boiled down into less than half a dozen concepts that guide us still. That being said, all things need revisiting; updating (see #5 above). So, given our recent move toward restructuring to meet the needs presented to us, it's time to add some concepts to the Manifesto:
Right now, there's enough malaise going around for all of us. That doesn't mean we quit. It doesn't even mean that we take a break. Now, more than ever, we should be realigning ourselves to be faster, leaner, meaner, and more effective. We should be built for the famine, not the feast. In the immortal words of Sean Connery in "The Untouchables" "What are you prepared to do?"
A message from a member of the WV BoS CoC Youth Action Board to raise awareness of housing resources and services f… https://t.co/I1eIeBaXi9
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