IBM and collective impact or always follow the money

In a previous blog I discussed the collective impact model in order to discover exactly what the term describes and discuss some of the weaknesses according to critics. Here I want to ask another question. How did this model get adopted in Rochester. When you are looking at a political or policy decision of this sort it is often helpful to ask who has the power in this situation to get policies established. Power doesn't always mean just persuading or coercing someone to do what you want. It often means the ability to set the agenda for a project. If a person or group gets to set the rules they have the power to direct a process or project. How was the decision made to follow a collective impact model? It certainly wasn't the case that community partners and social work agencies got together to adopt, the impetus came from outside the community,

I mentioned that much of the impetus for the adoption of collective impact models came from foundations who were quick to adopt these models. In the case of RMAPI it seems that an IBM Smart Cities grant was the source of the initiative. IBM has given these grants to United Ways in places like the research triangle in North Carolina when they adapt the collective impact model of community services. In 2015 the Rochester United Way also got an IBM Smart Cities Challenge Grant. As part of this grant the IBM foundation seeks to find ways to get cities to address the future by making unban services more efficient. Sometimes these grants  concern ways to create greener and more sustainable cities. In other cases, like Rochester, they concern improving social services. As part of the grant IBM "contributes the skills and expertise of top IBM talent" to study critical challenges facing communities. They made a three week visit to an area and meet with "key stakeholders" to determine areas in which the RMAPI project is held back. You can imagine who the key stakeholders were. They were most likely political and business leaders, not the people effected by poverty. Most of  these recommendations have to do with questions  of efficiency and implementation of collective impact principles. Their recommendations are detailed in the report Rochester, New York Smart Cities Challenge Report.

The first thing you notice about this report is its technocratic approach. Poverty is addressed the same way a business might approach a supply problem. There is little in the way of poltical economic or sociological analysis of problems. It never assumes that power asymmetries or forms of domination have anything to do with poverty. Rather, it assumes that the current arrangements are suitable to solve the problems of poverty. Thus, the problems of poverty have to do with misalignment between services. The report claims that Rochester has sufficient social services, the problem is the way they are delivered. Thus, using the same type of principles used by collective impact. the problems of poverty are going to be addressed through a reorganization of social services using a notion of central organization. Data services like those provided by IBM will give us a greater idea of where services can be developed more efficiently, and proactive services will address populations before problems arise rather than after. This means providing support and services. to support those seeking jobs like daycare and other services to make sure that there are fewer barriers to get jobs. Using data services, the they will not only be able to share services but be able to measure results with data and guide decisions on poverty.

Let's think about this project for a minute. It certainly seems to be a top down project that essentially imports a business/technological model onto a complex social problem. It assumes that we can measure al aspects of poverty with a common measure. But what if the problems causing poverty  are not just technical but poltical. Poor people notoriously are not well organized and not effective politically. They often have a limited understanding of poltical processes not because of any inherent ability but lack of access. They have little chance to set agendas or exert influence. What if the aim of a nonprofit aims to make people better more effective citizens who have political impact. How do you measure that with a data set? This raises a more general problem with the collective impact approach which emphasizes quantitative measures of impact. It is an open question whether a one size fits all approach to data driven solutions can measure all the impacts. Nor is it clear that if we subordinate all groups to a central czar and imposed common measures, that we will not lose some of these other goals values and impacts which are not measurable in the way collective impact theories propose.

There is a second set of related concerns that revolve around the sources of poverty. For some collective impact theorists, the problems of poverty stem from system complexity and not from the organization of social power. That is they stem from problems of coordinating an economy that has many segments and elements. Addressing poverty also is a problem of coordination to address the problems of complexity. OF course, the idea of recasting poltical problems as issues of systems complexity without looking at problems of power has little chance of succeeding on the scale that RMAPI suggests. If for example an unregulated market economy in which power is distributed unequally will always generate a degree of poverty, then it is hard to see how questions of coordination help us avoid poverty. Mostly the collective impact programs stress individualized solutions to poverty. But if larger poltical economic forces continue to generate poverty then how does greater coordination of services make an impact. What is really needed are redistributive processes that counter the concentrated power of some groups in our economy,

In America today, good jobs are at a premium. Wages are stagnant and job growth has often been in low wage jobs. Work has become increasingly casual and contingent with few benefits or health. care. Some analysts have adopted the notion of precarity or precariousness to characterize the new economy. It is no longer possible to Increasingly the worker is one her own with fewer of the social supports that we had just a generation earlier. Some economists and conservatives like to see this as giving the individual freedom she needs to cope with a rapidly changing economy. For most however, it just leads to greater insecurity. The gap between the rich and the poor is greater than it has been for a century. These are not really system problems of complexity but poltical ones.  I don't see how we effectively deal with the continuing generation of poverty without addressing these larger problems.