A call to succession

Take heed all who venture here, for thy toils are many and in great demand.  The Republic of Texas bears its share of those in need, and the crowd is growing.  We have been given this, the honor of God's work, which we gladly accept.  However, our strategies for the future are often presumptive that we shall be here for that future.  What if that is not so?  In what capable hands shall we leave our legacy?  Let us all be mindful that we shall not exist forever.  The torch, as both burdensome and enlightening as it has been, must be passed.  We would be surely heartbroken if the travail of our decades of service were unraveled by a generation less compassionate.  We combat poverty with a vision described to us by Lyndon B. Johnson and Sargent Shriver.  How dare us let that vision die.  Let us pledge to build something that lasts.  Let us make changes that inspire.  Let us know that everything we do matters, not just today, but for generations yet unborn.  Let us marvel at Charles McCann and David Bradley, and aspire to carry on their honorable work.  Let us rejoice in those in Texas who have made a difference.  Let's prepare others to continue the great work of those like Stella Rodriguez and the dozens of Executive Directors, legislators, and champions of our network who have created a true heritage of managing the paradox of poverty.  Who shall rise from among us as we bequeath that which we have built together?  Go forth, ye Texans of advocacy and action.  Stray far from inattention and reproach.  Find that one who is conscious of the distress of those in need and has a desire to alleviate it.  Bring them to the ledge, prepare them for their journey into greatness, and nudge them into flight.  It is our duty to those who have carved the trail.  It is our duty to mankind.

Meals on Wheels comes to an end, but why?

On December 8^th, 2017, Community Services of Northeast Texas, Inc. (CSNT), who has been delivering meals to home-bound citizens for more than a quarter century, delivered its last meal.

The Board of Directors of CSNT voted on November 1^st to end the esteemed program, citing over $35,000 in losses during 2017, and an outstanding debt of more than $250,000 dating back several years due to losses caused by the program.

Every person reading this remembers Meals on Wheels as a program that provided hot meals every day for those who couldn’t leave their home.  Food delivered right to the door, with a smile from a familiar face, and a kind word of acknowledgment, if not encouragement, was a daily ritual as important as any other to those on the receiving end.

Staffed primarily by volunteers for ninety percent of its time in existence, it meant something to those making the delivery as well.  Providing a daily contact, checking on someone’s wellbeing, and bringing what might be the only daily meal, was a special event that made delivery drivers feel quite warm inside.

So, what happened?

Somehow, we let our culture change.  Somehow, we let our daily grind become more important than service to others, particularly our elderly.  I’m hearing terms like YOLO (you only live once) and WIIFM (what’s in it for me) as I try to figure out what happened to our beloved Meals on Wheels.

Let me take you through a look at the program, its challenges and changes, and perhaps you can see what happened.  Be warned, it is too late to save it, but this, instead of a treatment, might serve as an autopsy, allowing us to learn things that just might prevent us repeating this process with other programs.

Let’s start with a fact that may be surprising.  In two Texas counties, particularly Williamson and Burnett, the Meals on Wheels program has over four hundred volunteers.  In Cass, Camp, Marion, Morris, Panola, and Harrison Counties, collectively, there are zero volunteers.

Let’s explore one idea that may have caused this.

The vast difference between the two areas of Texas is as simple as urban versus rural.  Williamson and Burnet Counties are more suburban than urban, but they have tons of business, schools, population, jobs, and people with time on their hands.

The aforementioned Northeast Texas counties have much less of these things, and it shows.

The rural setting that harvested little to no volunteerism over the last decade is not an indictment on the people who live there.  It’s just simple actuarial fact.  People are getting older, retiring, and volunteering less.

We could stop there, and say we have found the reason, so let’s close up shop and be done with it.

Not so fast, I say.

Using this excuse is the coward’s way out.  There are many factors at play here other than mere demographics.

Let’s look at who tried to help us.  We reached out through the media to get financial help.  Collectively, in six counties, we raised forty-five dollars during an online campaign, and every dollar was from a CSNT employee.

We petitioned all six counties in which we delivered meals through Commissioners Court.  Less than $5,000 total.  Only Camp and Morris Counties responded with funds.  They each gave us 25 cents per eligible person in their county.  Yes, twenty-five cents.

We asked for volunteers.  Nothing.

We approached rich people.  We got fifteen hundred dollars.

If you add all the donations we have asked for specifically for the Meals on Wheels program for the last ten years, and presented it as a daily dollar figure, it would be less than a penny per day.  At our peak, it took several thousand dollars per day to run this program.

The government gave us money, didn’t they?

The government gave us $4.95 per meal delivered. To deliver one meal costs about seven dollars when you have no volunteers.

So, if you do the math, losing two dollars per meal, per day, can be quite costly, especially when you are delivering more than a thousand meals per day.  Multiply that times 240 days of delivery each year, and that’s a loss of a quarter million dollars per year.

We found ways to keep our losses to under an average of forty thousand per year, but the losses just kept adding up.  I remember one year, we lost one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars.

Some may wonder about all the other money we get.  It’s public knowledge that our agency receives close to ten million dollars each year from the federal government, so what’s the problem?

The problem is, your milk money is your milk money, it’s not for candy.

Federal dollars must be spent only on certain things.  You cannot use one program’s money to pay for another program’s expenses.

Head Start gave us a $4.5 million program this year, then gave us $3.5 million to get it done.  We had to come up with the other million on our own.  Yes, we do that every year.

The feds gave us $2 million to spend on utility assistance in twelve counties, but not one dollar of that can be used for Meals on Wheels.

That’s just the nature of federal grants.  People who violate that rule usually end up wearing orange jumpsuits in federal prison.

Volunteerism then, becomes the engine that makes Meals on Wheels work.  When it leaves, it takes the program with it.

At one point, Harrison County had about two hundred volunteers.  We hired one person to coordinate that, so it would be a well-oiled machine.
All was going to plan until one day, we had to change some routes because a paid driver resigned.

When the paid driver’s routes were reassigned to the volunteer group, the first set of volunteers complained because the route was in a ‘bad neighborhood.’

When I asked if we had an unsafe neighborhood on our routes, it was explained to me by the volunteers that it “of course was unsafe, there’s nothing but minorities in that part of town.”

That was the last day I allowed that group of people to volunteer for our program. That group of people was from a local church.

As time went on, volunteers became more insistent on which routes they wanted to deliver, and the reasons for such made me furious.

Within a year, no volunteers.  There are some things I just won’t tolerate.  Racial bias is at the top of my list.

With that story behind us, we were always recruiting good-hearted volunteers, but to no avail.  Sometimes we would get well-meaning citizens wanting to help, but they were eligible for the program themselves, so that was no good.

One of the reasons getting volunteers was a little tricky was the condition of the roads on which recipients lived.

A delivery vehicle’s suspension has a useful life of about eight months traveling up and down the back roads of our counties.  Thus, repairs to our vehicles were high, and often.

One of our funders was leasing vehicles to us, and expected us to pay for all the repairs for vehicles that were no longer fit for the road.  This caused us to part ways with one funder years ago.  We were losing so much money working with them, the parting of ways was beneficial for us, but, it was not enough.

To save time, money, and vehicles, we needed a new delivery system.  It would include delivering only once per week.  One hot meal and four meals to be saved for later. 

We went to every recipient on every route and talked to them about receiving a hot meal and four meals that could stay in their cabinet or freezer until heated and eaten.

We provided some samples of each, and over ninety percent of our recipients requested the ‘shelf stable’ meal over receiving a frozen meal.

We requested a waiver from the Department of Aging and Disability Services (DADS).  We got the waiver, changed our delivery model, and actually started losing a lot less money.

This continued for two years.  We were actually digging into our debt.  We had reduced our debt in that program from $470k to $270k in just a little under two years.

Somewhere in another state, an agency was delivering ‘shelf stable’ meals that did not meet the nutrition requirements as set by federal law.

DADS then decided to stop issuing waivers for that type of meal delivery.  Because we had no choice but to operate under a waiver, DADS chose not to offer us a contract in 2016.

Over four hundred recipients immediately stopped getting meals every day.  To this day, many of those people still do not receive a meal.

For the last year, CSNT has served a meal per day to an average of 114 recipients.  We still lost money.

In November, the Board of Directors voted to stop the bleeding.  We notified our two insurance companies who pay us for those 114 recipients that we could no longer deliver.

They went to work quickly to find other ways to provide nutrition for their clients.  All has worked out, and I feel confident those clients will be properly served by their home health care providers.

Some people may still get a meal every day, but it’s not from us.  Some people choose Mom’s Meals, but we don’t recommend it.  Some people, hopefully, have family and friends who care enough to be what we cannot, to help when needed, to feed when hungry.

You may only live once, but everyone deserves to live that life with dignity and with the highest degree of independence possible.

Our heartfelt love goes out to all home-bound persons we have served over the years.  We will miss you.

At the time of this post, Dan ‘Lucky’ Boyd, CCAP, NCRT was Executive Director of Community Services or Northeast Texas, Inc., a Nationally Certified ROMA Master Trainer, a Certified Community Action Professional, and a National Pathways Peer Reviewer. Boyd is also a general partner of Adams Boyd Consulting, LLC., First Vice President of the Texas Association of Community Action Agencies, and President of the Community Action Association of Region VI.

Stop being offended

Okay, listen [or read] carefully. You may be offended by this blog post. Here goes. 

If everyone who was offended by something was to speak up and get that something removed from existence, what would be left? If you were offended by this blog post and got it removed from existence, then it never would have been posted, and thus you could not have been offended. Duh. 

So, as we go through life, things are going to offend us. That doesn't mean they should be rubbed out just because they are offensive to you or your group. Sometimes, you just have to be offended. 

I'm offended by many politicians. Should they be removed from existence? No. I'm offended by the clothes some people wear. Should we take their clothes away?  No. I'm offended by signs, hair styles, comments, looks, emails, and the occasional facebook or blog post. 

Sometimes you just have to get over it and go do something positive. 

Try to help someone by understanding them and giving them the respect of listening. Stop being offended by life. It's a miserable existence.

Become a Republicrat

Oh, the arguments.  Oh, the politics.  Can't we stop worrying about WHO is right, and just start leaning toward WHAT is right?

I recently read a blog that suggested hunger in America is not a problem we should address collectively. Now before you put on your yellow Democrat hat and start pointing fingers, they did make the distinction between starvation and hunger.  Starvation, we should worry about.  Hunger, not so much.

Bob Lupton's article Chronic or Crisis? Learning to Tell the Difference, wrapped up with the sentence, "Never do for others what they have the capacity to do for themselves."  This is supposed to be some Golden Rule of empowerment, but if you add two words to it, it becomes the edict from the Republican business model, "Never do for others, for free, what they have the capacity to do for themselves."  Case in point, Charles Schwab.

Back to the starvation vs. hunger fight, malnutrition deaths in America occur more frequently than in Italy, Kyrgyzstan, Belgium, Portugal, Serbia, Costa Rica, Japan, Viet Nam, Cuba, Canada, Spain, Kuwait, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Iceland, Hungary (gotta love that one), Australia, Malta, Norway, Ireland, South Korea, and a dozen other countries.  I know it's only 1 in 100,000, but that's almost as many people who drown in America each year, and look at all we do to prevent drowning. Additionally, more people starve to death in America than are killed in fires each year. The people who try to prevent that are called heroes. (Data source: WHO)

Hunger in America has been reduced to the new political buzz term, "Chronic Food Insecurity."  Give me a break.  Being hungry in America is a crisis.  Distributing free food helps.  I agree with our aforementioned blogger, that it doesn't do enough.  However, children who do not eat well do not learn well.  This is a research-based statement, so don't tell your friends I made it up.

Here's where all this needs to go.  The Republicans who believe that poverty is an evil plot to destroy the government need to sit down with the Democrats who know where all the skeletons are buried.  Come up with a solution that engages churches if you want, but rich churches need to help poor people, not rich people who are down on their luck for a minute.

Get your tail out in the community and meet the people who work at the convenience store.  If they have worked there for more than a year, maybe that's the best they can do.  If you think getting them a better job will make their children healthier, then help them get a better job.  If it disgusts you that you see that same convenience store employee standing in a line for free food, strike up a conversation with them, and they will give you an education.

We are living in a day of 'situational' poverty.  People are poor because of their situations, and in some places, the situations are so dire, people starve, not just go hungry.

Come to Texas, and I will take you to places that are worse than third-world countries, but is there a big church or a corporation that wants to help?  Nope.  I know of a church that has over 15,000 (maybe more, by now) members that is less than 150 miles from 50,000 people who don't have running water or electricity. How about a little help, Joel Osteen.  I knew your father, and I think he would want you to do more.

Okay, I'm done.  Get your Reps and your Dems together and work this out.  Government can help, but politicians all know corporate people who got them elected.  Those are the folks we want to talk to about this.  Create Republicrat stew and I think we can feed everyone.  At the same time we can create REAL capacity for them, and make a real difference.

LB

Lest We Forget

We put a lot of emphasis on the fact that we forget things as we get older.  I've learned that you don't necessarily have to be getting older to forget things.  I've also learned that the things you do forget as you age are not nearly as important as the things we tend to forget culturally.

So, the 'we' in the equation is society, people, businesses, or whomever you choose to analyze at this point.  They've all forgotten the same thing.

What is this illusive thing that has escaped us?  It is our reason.  Yes, we've forgotten our reason.  Actually, it has been forgotten on two fronts.  I'll explain.

First, so much happens these days that just doesn't seem reasonable.  Taxes, politics, and health care ranking right at the top of the list.  However, the most important forgotten reason is our reason for doing things, or the 'why' of life, if you will.

Sure, we go out day after day and do stuff.  We know what we do.  But so many of us have forgotten why we do it.  It is for love, money, status, trappings, etc.?

I think it's time for us to take a hard look at why we do things, then we can figure out how to do them, and then maybe we can tell the world what we've done, because I'm sure it will be spectacular.

Lucky Boyd, American Philosopher

Recognizing lesser known artists

Earlier this week, another blogger posted something that sounded like the Lone Star Music awards had come up with the idea of rewarding lesser known artists.  While it's great to see their nominee list be free of the same names of the past, I did feel everyone needed to know the TMAs have been rewarding lesser known artists for almost a decade.  The following is my response.

Nothing could be more pleasing than to see some lesser known artists getting deserved recognition.  The Lone Star Music Awards are still, as wonderful as they are, a popularity contest.  As you mentioned, anyone with an email address can vote.  There is a place for this type of recognition, and Lone Star does a great job of this ‘people’s choice’ type of contest.  There is a lot to be said for popularity, and thus it should be considered when handing out awards to music makers. 

Let’s look at that logically in the context of what might happen.  The teenager who lives next door to me got a computer for Christmas, made himself a CD of some angry techno music and together with his 5,000 MySpace friends, collected some sort of award for getting the most clicks on a website.  Now he’s an award-winning Male Vocalist and he’s never performed a show in his life.  While this sort of thing couldn’t happen with the Lone Star awards, it can happen on a smaller scale when you realize that the winners of this popularity contest are going to be the artists who get the most fans to go through the process of voting for them.  

There is another type of recognition out there that is highly respected, but places less importance on name recognition and popularity.  These are the Texas Music Awards, sanctioned by the Academy of Texas Music, Inc., and now in their ninth season.  Each nominee is selected based on the music recorded during the qualifying period.  Nominees are determined using strict, publicly stated criteria by a panel of industry professionals, complimented by a public nomination process that lets the fans tell the nominating committee which artists, albums, and songs should get top consideration.  Once the nominees are named, often there will be names on the list which are unknown to the masses.  However, their recorded music will hold up easily, standing toe to toe with most of what is being produced by more popular acts. 

Former recipients include Wade Bowen, Michael Martin Murphey, Pauline Reese, Shake Russell, Jason Allen, and Hayes Carll, to name a few of the more popular acts.  As a matter of record, the TMAs awarded Hayes Carll with the Rising Star award in 2003 and the Singer/Songwriter award in 2006, long before he became the national name of today.  The TMAs are all about recognizing artists who have recorded excellent music, whether they are popular now or not.  Most of them will end up popular in the future, many on the strength of receiving the TMA. 

What sets the TMAs apart from any contest, competition, or popularity ploy is its unique voting process.  The public is allowed to vote.  Anyone with an email address can vote.  However, the collective public tally counts only 10% of the total voting process.  Next, members of the Academy of Texas Music, Inc. are allowed to vote.  There are performing members and voting members in this group and their collective voice counts 20% of the total voting process.  The bulk of the votes, 70%, are cast by a group known as the Honoree Board, and they are the best possible collection of folks to decide the outcome of the process because they are the very artists who have received the TMA awards in the past.  Each year, the current class of recipients is added to the Honoree Board and will vote in all future processes.  Who better to decide than those who know what it takes to receive the award? 

The TMAs, then, are no contest.  They are simply a recognition for excellence in the recording of Texas music.  The structure, except for the voting, is constructed very much like the Grammy process, in that artists must be a member of the Academy, much like they must be NARAS members to seek a Grammy.  They must be listed with MyTexasMusic.com, much like they must be listed with allmusic.com to seek the Grammy. 

The entire process is complicated, structured, run by a non-profit board of directors, and for the past few years has culminated in a red carpet affair hosted by such celebrities as Gary P. Nunn and B.J. Thomas.  The TMAs have stated that this year, due to the economy and other factors, the show will vary from its format of having everyone travel to one location, pay big ticket prices, and hope they can get available lodging.  Instead, the TMAs are going to offer a world-wide Internet broadcast that will reach more fans than ever before. 

The TMAs will soon name the nominees in fifteen award categories and at that point, it will still be important for the nominees to get their fans to vote, but the fans will have an appropriately sized voice.  The TMAs are so proud of the structure they’ve created and how it rewards the best music in the best state in the union, that they have coined the slogan, “It’s about the music.  It’s about time.”  For more info, see www.texasmusicawards.org

My First Rant

Why does everything have to be so easy?  Oh, just click here, it's so EASY! Call us, it's so EASY!  Anyone can do it, it's so EASY!  Well, did you ever think that not everything in life was supposed to be easy.

If you read my postings, you'll get your share of cliches, some I've created, some I've heard from others.  I'm not sure where I got this first one, but here it is.

"Leaders in life do the little things well and the hard things bravely."

Yes, bravely, because when you attempt the hard things, there's always the possibility that you might fail.  Oh no, fail?  Yes, fail.  But we've been told by the media and Madison Avenue that 'anyone can do it' so we think failing is something we're immune to.  Not so.

So, my first rant is to complain that everyone seems to want an easy go of life.  Well, I have news for you, if you get anywhere in life, you did something that was hard.  I'll offer a good book for reading, "Storms Of Perfection."  I'm not telling you the author or where to buy it.  Look it up for your own damn self.  Jeeez.

Lucky Boyd
Yes, the REAL Lucky Boyd