Supping with the devil evokes a rare Faustian night out on the town. But for community organisations it is a regular gig when dealing with modern governments.
You are presented with a seemingly bland discussion paper on which future policy will be based. The paper invites suggestions, is tolerant of all views and suggestions and professes ideals that you can share. How can you refuse? The problem is that the paper politely excludes the value base of your own organisation. So whatever you submit will be translated into a form that at first looks unexceptionable, but which undermines your central concerns.
So do you pick up your bat and go home without a sou for your organisation, or do you engage, allowing hellfire to singe your soul?
Discussion papers speak of stakeholders, of inputs, outputs and outcomes, of a variety of trade-offs, such as those between risk aptitude and public accountability, innovation and maintenance, flexibility and quality assurance, client empowerment and equality of access. They also speak of stakeholders, clients, collaboration, governance and economic sustainability.
Their value statements put people at the centre, insist on the client's right to appropriate support, emphasise the need for respect, and focus on turning passive members of society into active contributors to the economy. Above all they seek a policy that will be economically sustainable.
It is difficult to argue against the values that each of these concepts enshrine. Who could argue against economic sustainability, public accountability, collaboration, quality assurance and flexibility, and encouraging people to be active rather than passive?
Indeed the evaluation of programs to which these terms give flesh is particularly needed in community organisations. Good intentions and mission statements do not automatically turn into programs that respect the dignity and help the growth of those they reach. Catholic organisations, in particular, need no reminding of that.
So community organisations should welcome being asked to provide appropriate evidence that they do the needed good things in the good ways that they promise.
The problem is that the discussion papers are systematically blind to much evidence that is appropriate. Underlying them is a metaphorical framework deriving from a financial analysis of a manufacturing business. The process of production is mapped in terms of costs and results from ordering of material to selling the completed product. All costs and processes are placed under the heading of inputs, outputs and outcomes. Innovation describes more efficient or cheaper production processes. Integration means combining plants or making them compatible.
When seen from this perspective, organisations that serve people in need resemble factory plants, identical in their part in the process, and so interchangeable. Differences between them unrelated to the productive process will be ignored or disapproved of. The people who work in organisations will be seen as units of input and measured by their costs and productivity.
The people in need, for whom the organisations exist, will be seen as the object of the productive process. Their value lies in the capacity to contribute to production. Respect is shown them by giving them a consumer's choice over the services they choose. All is commodified.
This metaphorical framework has its uses as a subordinate paradigm. It can focus attention on the costs and efficiency of programs. But when it becomes the master metaphor for caring for human beings, it betrays all that most community organisations are about.
Their fundamental insight is that each human being is of great value in themselves. When people are in need they make a claim on society independent of how they can contribute to it economically. Some may never be able to contribute. But the goal of working with people is to help them grow into responsible human beings able to relate to other human beings and to society. The ability to find work and work efficiently is only one sign of growth.
The process by which people move from isolation and from destructive responses towards others and society to taking responsibility for their lives is through relationships. Through community organisations isolated people may meet other people who care for them and respect them as human beings and model a way of relating to others.
This can lead them to reflect on their lives, to begin to see in themselves the value others see, and to ask in hope and not despair what they want to make of their lives. From that flows the possibility of contributing to society.
The manufacturing metaphor is inadequate to account for this process, partly because human transformation cannot be produced. It ultimately rests, not on choice, still less on repeated consumer choices, but on the recognition that one wants to change. That recognition is a gift, a grace, but it can grow in the context of relationships that are also experienced as a gift. It will always come as a surprise.
If the manufacturing metaphor must include among its outcomes such unmeasurables as gift, love, grace and surprise, not to mention the extraordinary courage that keeps a depressed person alive a day longer, or leads a homeless person to wipe themselves out on port rather than meths, its calculator will self destruct.
When organisations are required to define people as measurable inputs they will be struck dumb. They need a much broader and humane frame of evaluation.
When supping with the devil, the risk is not of being poisoned but of developing a taste for junk food and then feeding it to those you invite to your table. When supping with the devil it is best to bring your own Angel food with you, and offer it to the old adversary. Maybe he will develop a taste for it.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.