What If We Funded the Cause, Not Just the Outcome?
Why funding food banks without addressing root causes perpetuates the cycle of hunger and poverty.
Addressing the Causes, Not Just the Outcomes
Grants, private organizations, and government agencies all seem to find funding to combat food insecurity. Instead of looking at system-wide failure points and starting with the causes, so many continue to throw money at the outcome: hunger.
Organizations continue to create new programs, initiatives, and campaigns, I believe, for one main reason: doing anything else is outside their capacity. Fixing the system requires a system-wide, coordinated effort.
An organization or institution may track how many households received food this year and compare that number with the previous year. If more food reached more families, they may consider that a success. And it is a success, specifically in terms of what they're measuring.
However, if more food went to more families because more families were in need than the previous year, the metrics are only measuring the response to a larger failure.
The facilitators—or, more accurately, their funders—who authorize many "public good" initiatives and programs have expectations to reach specific, measurable goals: households served, programs completed, meals served, beds filled. Those are excellent goals, and the programs they refer to are certainly for the public good.
But what if, instead of simply funding such an endeavor, funding institutions asked: With extended capital and resources, what issues can be addressed upstream to prevent the need for such programs in the first place?
In addition to the metrics funders already measure, it would be wise to also measure what reduced or added value occurred on the other end of the equation because of the program. For example, instead of only measuring that 1,000 households received meals, also measure the impact serving those 1,000 households had on reducing their future need for the program, using the same population as the basis for comparison.
When Does Helping Become Changing?
When asked when helping an individual becomes different from changing the conditions affecting thousands of people, I'd answer from two different perspectives.
First, we fund kids without genuinely fixing the foundation they're being raised in. We want to intervene early, create better opportunities, and improve outcomes for children. But if the conditions inside the household and community remain the same, we are still asking the child to overcome the foundation they were raised in instead of changing that foundation, too.
We already fund education, entrepreneurship programs, technical assistance, grants, and pathways toward ownership. The problem is that creating a resource does not mean people can actually use it.
Night school is great if you can get there, have childcare, and don't have to work a second shift to cover the light bill.
So, then, we work on those barriers.
Instead of only finding people a temporary job, we can work toward giving them the pathway, education, resources, relationships, reduced barriers, and access needed to create ownership. The programs to support business creation already exist. The question is whether someone can realistically access them and whether the conditions surrounding them allow them to use the opportunity once it becomes available.
If the barrier is transportation, then transportation becomes part of the problem. If it is childcare, then childcare becomes part of the problem. If someone has to work a second job just to cover basic expenses, then that matters, too.
Availability is not the same thing as access.
Changing Conditions Requires Systems Thinking
The second perspective is how difficult changing the conditions affecting thousands of people actually is. Cooperation, systems thinking, determination, the ability to share wealth, knowledge, and resources, and the ability to operate within ambiguity are all necessary even to begin changing social conditions that are systemically built into our society.
That also means there is no universal answer for what a community needs more of or what it already has enough of. Communities are not interchangeable. In some communities, the limiting factor may be knowledge, capacity, money, resources, or food production. In others, it may be something harder to quantify, such as kindness.
If kindness, cooperation, and a willingness to help were more universally distributed, communities could accomplish more with the resources they already have.
The first question should be: What exists? What is missing? And what is preventing what already exists from being useful to the people who need it?
That is also why I don't think we should decide what a community needs before we understand what is actually producing the problem there. The intervention should follow the evidence, not the other way around.
Start With the System
If I had $1 million to address a community problem, I would not start by looking for programs to support.
I'd use data to discover the sources of the problem I chose to focus on. Then, I'd use that information to identify which parts of the system could improve with additional assets and resources and invest there to impact the output—the problem I was actually trying to address in the first place.
Because if we want different outcomes, we have to be willing to examine what is producing the outcomes we already have.
Don't just fund the response. Understand the system. Find the cause. Change the conditions.
