A NEW CHALLENGE TO TACKLE

My internship through school is on a project my school has been working on for about four years, which is to improve the performance measures by which the city’s foster care system and its partnering agencies are evaluated. This notion of performance-based contracting is currently en vogue in public management, and it makes perfect sense to me: people and organizations should be held accountable to and compensated based on their performance. Even and especially when it comes to something as important as children in danger, children in transition.

Easier said than done. Any time you institute incentives, you create unintended consequences, for there are no incentive structures that perfectly align incentivized performance with what people and organizations really want. And any time you take agencies who are used to working and getting paid one way, and fundamentally change the way they are to work and get paid, you’ll need to do some pretty good selling.

The nice thing is that we’ve got some very good people involved here. The people in the city’s agency genuinely care about kids and about making sure they get taken care of in these times of endangerment and transition. And the people at my school join them in that concern, and desire to be excellent in bringing what they’re good at to make that work even more effective.

So after applying my personal principles and business skills to a non-profit setting in which I sought to accelerate minority entrepreneurship, for the next several months I’ll be applying those same skills to a new challenge. I’ve got a lot to learn but good people to help me and a bank of experiences to draw from. So let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.