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The race to CAN
11/1/07
Kathleen Johnson is a long term full time volunteer who has been working in Waveland, Hancock County, Mississippi, since just after the onset of the storm. She currently operates her own disaster relief agency serving a growing list of 1500 clients. Her fiscal arm is the Waveland Citizens Fund - a registered 501 (c) 3. Website: http://www.reliefvolunteers.com
It has always been a foot race – the race to get residents names into CAN. What is
CAN? According to their website "CAN, Coordinated Access Network, is an unprecedented, multi-organizational
partnership among some of the nation’s leading nonprofit disaster relief
organizations. Working in tandem with state and local relief agencies - CAN is
forging a new model of disaster recovery and preparedness for the United States".
And the race? Why the race? Because some of the Disaster Relief
Organizations make grant applications using number of cases they have registered
in CAN as the justification of need for that organization to receive grant
funding for Case Mangers and other funds for reconstruction. Once registered as
the “Case Manager” these organizations will not relinquish that title despite
the fact that other organizations are actually doing the work on the home that
is registered to a Case Manager under that original posting organization’s name.
And to become registered – there is no requirement that they intend to do any
work at all. It is just a statement that the poster is now the Case Manager. It becomes analogous to a “marble” collection.
Some Long Term Recovery organizations require that the case be registered in
CAN before assistance can be given. Some organizations refuse to use CAN at
all. In the past it has been a cumbersome program to use and can be unreliable as
the software had glitches and the site was up and down or out of service. It was that way a couple of days ago when I was trying to log in.
I was approached by an organization not too long ago with the same premise. “I
will provide you with Case Mangers” they were saying. Pushed for further information
it became plainly obvious that all they wanted were the case files to put into CAN. They did
not have the volunteer workforce to complete the tasks at hand – nor any
intention to start a campaign to solicit the volunteers or complete the work in
a timely fashion. It was all about the “numbers”. “We are going to write grants”
they were telling me. Yes, to get more Case Mangers and they needed case files to
bolster the numbers.
Perhaps it is time to ask that Case Mangers registered in CAN to be actively
working on the cases that are registered? Weekly reports of progress would
help. Since the residents use multiple organizations to accomplish the task in
hand, in part driven more recently, by the dwindling volunteer pool – maybe it is
time to change the system so that there is a primary resource provider and
others contributing become partners in the project with a requirement of
progress percentages to be filed in a timely fashion.
But the practice of running around collecting “names” so they convert to
dollar figures down the line for an organization’s office overhead – that really needs to stop. It is a false “positive”.
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