IMPACT

An exciting dimension to working at the Survival Center is that past, present and future are all alive here. The present speaks for itself, loud and clear, with nearly 100 people coming through daily for food, clothing and community. Unlike many organizations, however, our long past is present as well, with volunteers who have been with us for 5, 10, 20 years or more. If you’ve ever been here, you’ve met David, for example, who for twenty-five years has been greeting people at the front door with a friendly growl of “Hi Grandma” and directing them where they need to go.

 

But what of our future? In the last tumultuous year, many predicted that the ASC, buried in tangled layers of its past, and under a cloud of controversy, was doomed. Having been at this now for three months, however, I can confidently say, paraphrasing Mark Twain, that “reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.” Our future is as secure and real as our vibrant past and present.

In coming to this understanding, I have first had to think about what it means to be a successful organization. Like many, I define success in terms of impact. I work with a rough framework that involves three degrees of impact, from lowest to highest:

1. Impact on Survival:
Help clients meet basic needs to get by in the short term

2. Impact on Self-Reliance:
Teach skills that provide greater long-term security

3. Impact on Community:
Empower clients to work together to effect positive social change

The framework is useful in evaluating our programs, and it helps identify future directions for the Center. The Free Store provides a good example of these ideas at work.

Impact on Survival

The Free Store’s most obvious impact is at the level of Survival: the store helps satisfy consumers’ basic needs for clothing and household items. In the past week alone, we’ve provided everything from dishes for a family who lost all their possessions in an apartment fire, to a wooden high chair needed by a struggling couple for their disabled infant, to a clean t-shirt on a hot day for a homeless man whose only other piece of clothing was an uncomfortably heavy sweater. The Survival Center has traditionally assessed only this level of impact, which at a distribution rate of about 350 pounds per day, is significant.

Impact on Self-Reliance

Impact on self-reliance has never, to my knowledge, been articulated at ASC. Yet through the many volunteer jobs available at the Center, clients gain valuable personal and job skills that should lead to better mainstream employment.

Consider a busy week in the Free Store. In the sorting room, a team of volunteers—primarily women, many of whom are also clients at the center—process a 15 foot pile of donations and display them for distribution in the store. It may sound easy, but the task involves many vital employment skills, not the least of which is showing up for scheduled regular shifts. Our volunteers welcome donors into the Center, make complex decisions about quality control, hang, fold and display clothes in an attractive manner, and monitor inventory to keep the store stocked. Moreover, working in the Free Store also requires the ability to work in a diverse cross-cultural environment. The sorting room this week included volunteers from places as far-flung as Moldavia, Iran, Ghana, China, and Venezuela. Many of these women do not speak English, but their language ability always improves through relaxed volunteer chit-chat. Good skills in these areas are key in Amherst’s tough job market. To the extent that people acquire them through their work at the Center, we are having a significant impact on clients’ ability to achieve self-reliance and economic security.

Impact on Community

In what way might the Free Store have an impact on the community at large? I believe that there is much more for us to do at this level. We have huge potential to further develop crucial leadership skills among our volunteer ranks whose effects will spill over to the communities in which they live.

Consider what transpired this week. For the last ten years or so, the Free Store has been primarily staff-managed, but this week the key staff member was on vacation. I had nightmares about our little Center stuffed to the ceiling with plastic bags filled with donations of all kinds, but an amazing thing happened. Volunteer leadership emerged to fill the vacuum, and suddenly every day there was a full team of sorters working steadily from 9-3. The 15-foot mountain of plastic bags was eliminated, the store looked beautiful, and the volunteers expressed great satisfaction with their accomplishment.

To me, this looks like the first step toward a volunteer led cooperative clothing program. This kind of transformation is one way to raise the impact of the Free Store to the level of the whole community. A coop structure entails building strong leadership. It is well known that workers who control management decisions feel empowered to take control of other aspects of their lives and communities, a crucial step in feeling empowered to advocate for broader social changes. ASC is already set up to foster volunteer leadership, so while a change in the Free Store structure will take thought and planning, it grows naturally from our existing programs and builds on our deeply held beliefs and current capabilities.

For all of our programs, impact assessment reveals agency strength at every level. There is no doubt that the state of the Amherst Survival Center is strong and healthy. Our broadest goal now is to maximize community impact. As we continue to grow, we will aim to achieve it fully.

Universal Laws

Physicists claim that the total number of atoms in the universe remains constant, that matter is neither created nor destroyed. Our Free Store, a “store” where donations of house wares and clothing are made available to consumers, free of charge, is a great example of the way in which universal matter is conserved. Donors bring in items they no longer need and feel satisfied that their old things are serving a useful purpose. Shoppers, in turn, have an opportunity to provide for their families in times of economic insecurity.

The slice o’ cosmic matter that passes through the Survival Center is broad, from clothing so worn that it falls apart at the touch to scarily persistent items that could probably survive a nuclear holocaust. One of my favorite examples of the latter is the wooden tie that came in April. It’s made of heavy, brown wood and looks like something Pinocchio might wear if he grew up to be a used car salesman. The tie hangs heavy, at about 8 ounces. To get a feel for the weight, I’d recommend wearing a large baking potato on a string around your neck to work one day. Believe me, this tie will outlast all of us, and possibly even the universe itself.


We do get many wonderful donations, though. In 2006, for example, we received an impressive 122, 599 pounds of clothing and household goods, the majority of which were put to excellent use. Yet I wouldn’t blame our volunteer sorters for fantasizing about alternative universes where perhaps there is a way for at least some of the more problematic matter to simply disappear. This is because approximately 50,000 pounds (41%) of what came in last year was either dirty, torn, broken, way out of season, or otherwise unusable. The Center is responsible for sorting and disposing of all of it. This presents a potentially expensive and difficult challenge, especially when you consider that our “sorting room” is the width of a single bowling lane, and a good deal shorter.

This problem is one I know that is shared by all of the local Survival Centers—see for example the recent article in the Hampshire Gazette—and is in some ways a small price to pay for the outpouring of generosity supporting the Center. I am looking, though, for a clearer way to communicate our needs that will help donors make decisions about what to contribute.

Someone recently suggested the simple guideline that if you wouldn’t give it to a friend, then we probably cannot give it out at the Center. This points in the right direction, but I’m not sure that it says enough. I worry that the more egregious dumping of useless or ruined goods reflects a profound misunderstanding of the people who frequent the Store and the situation that they find themselves in. This is an issue, of course, that extends further than old clothing and wooden ties. It highlights the need for our work at the Center to deepen, to move beyond just supplying basic needs and more toward engaging the community in understanding the realities that bring people into the Center and in creating a universe where the Free Store is no longer a necessity.