Opportunity or Death Sentence

Have you ever been approached with a challenge that you felt immediately overwhelmed by and automatically under qualified for?

Insert my day yesterday.

As you may be aware, I have been participating in a series of social service summits organized by our Mayor and his peeps that are aiming at identifying the biggest social issues that our community is facing and to do something about them in a collective & collaborative way.

Yesterday was meeting three and had the intention of breaking the larger group of about 150 people that attended the first and second events into three smaller task force oriented groups. The role of these groups are to develop a grant-type proposal that will tackle the issue of that group.

The topics of the groups came from the two initial meetings from the breakout groups that were formed. The groups came up with some great ideas and some needs.

1. Develop a plan to provide better communication between agencies and between agency and clients

2. What would it mean to provide for basic needs the best way possible?

3. How can we improve service delivery to clients?

Three really great questions and to be honest question that each organization regardless of focus should be asking themselves. Not really discovering the biggest needs in the community though and it’s definitely focused on meeting the hungry, homeless, aging, disabled, etc.

I opted for group 2 because NeighborLink meets basic needs for people. Maybe not as extreme as the hungry but pretty extreme for our clients.

As the group began to meet and be led by two of the steering committee formed to organize these summits and groups, the conversation quickly went to trying to end the confusion we all felt. Our question really didn’t warrant a proposal and it definitely didn’t meet a basic need.

I spoke up and said that the question is easy. Organize a consulting oriented organization and go agency to agency advising them on how to become better. I then mentioned that, “this question really isn’t what you’re wanting us to do is it?"

The leaders then mentioned, no not really, but we’ll need to figure out what the needs are before you can create a plan. Duh…right?

I rebutted by mentioned that I believe we could have a bigger issue at stake because the title of the group was really misleading and there are going to be quite a few angry people in other groups if they realize this small group is going to be deciding what’s important and what’s not without getting any say. This not going to fly.

So, at the end of the day, myself and a handful of others were charged with deciding what the biggest basic needs are in FW and leveraging resources towards those needs.

I’m not sure if this is an opportunity or a death sentence yet. Who am I to say what’s the biggest need? What would keep me from being biased in this situation? What will the rest of the groups/people that are investing in this on their own time just like me going to think when our group is doing something that seems deceiving?  Going to have to pray over this one big time.