When you read through the NEON plan presented to the Board, you begin to understand why the Bobby Burgesses of the world are up in arms over changes. It seems NEON wants to run itself as a real non profit agency that combats poverty. It seems likely that what Bobby and Mimi Burgess don’t like is the open transparency that the operating plan suggests.
Let’s take a look at what the NEON mission plan is:
The NEON Board of Directors approved a resolution in April that expressed full support towards efforts of supporting our state association; CAFCA (Connecticut Association for Community Action), and the state’s effort in the bold and innovative policy of reducing child poverty by 50%
by 2014. Toward this objective we have begun a Strategic planning effort where we are going to engage in the creation of an organizational strategic plan that will align our organization with CAFCA and the state public policy to reduce child poverty by 50% within 10 years.CAFCA’s strategic plan calls for all 12 CAAs to develop long-range strategic plans which commit to preventing and reducing child poverty by gaining new community commitments to reduce poverty. Several CAAs have already developed strategic plans or will have completed them by
December 2007.
So, naturally NEON has decided to hold an agency wide Strategic planning session (including all staff and board members) in November to discuss and recommend action items. In short, the type of things non profit agencies do, unless you are an embattled curator who refuses to attend staff meetings. But I digress.
DSS has a mandate that agencies such as NEON do a self assessment to analyze what practices work, what doesn’t and gauge how things are going. Naturally, NEON will be holding its first self assessment on September 10,11 and 12th. You can see how Bobby and Mimi Burgess would find this dangerous, as a self assessment might just throw some sunlight on the operations of NEON. Things like maintaining a database of cases. NEON has adopted a system now used by most CAA’s (community action agencies) to capture data on the clients, report on the progress made and measure the effectiveness of the service provided.
You can see how that might be challenging for Burgess and company to comprehend. But what they do comprehend is the recent changes concerning facilities management.
You will recall that I spoke in May and June about the changes we made regarding NEON facilities maintenance and management activities. We consolidated the several independent activities that previously existed and centralized the management of our facilities maintenance
operations. We are performing many tasks and jobs in house that were previously contracted out and the result is that we are already clearly seeing cost savings , efficiencies and improved responsiveness to many problems.
Well now, do ya think Burgess might be miffed that outside contractors are being cut off from the gravy train? Full disclosure of Burgess’ interests in these outside services might reveal a bit more than he wants. The NEON report is worth reading. The link is below.
