Measuring Contributions of Joy: An In-the-Moment Logic Model

My roommate from my first year of college, with whom I haven't spoken in person since but who, I gather, now works with some sort of youth-serving nonprofit, recently crowdsourced the PR objectives of her fundraising department on Facebook:

If you were deciding to fund or not to fund a youth-serving program, what would you most want to know about the program or the agency providing the program?

The responses were the typical relatively ungrounded concepts: measurable results, effectiveness, impact, maximized efficiencies...

Having worked at a major granting institution focused on youth-serving programs, I figured I probably had some ideas to contribute. I prepared to ponder it for a couple minutes, as is my custom with serious FB surveys. I looked up from my computer and propped my head to one side, but by the time the comment box was open, I was off typing an idea I'd never heard before anywhere, and certainly not at WKKF.

Well, to be honest, I did manage to pull it around and relate it to their logic model (inputs, outputs, outcome). And, I think the initial inspiration came from the pictures the Foundation had hanging in their stairwell. But generally speaking, what I had to say was not the talk of bureaucracies. After all, she had asked what I would want to know, not what Kellogg would have wanted to know. But then again, I thought, they're probably the same.

What I would want to know, and what I think other people might consider wanting to know, is how much joy the youth add to society.

Too often we think of youth-serving programs as exactly that: youth-serving. We wise and well-researched adults serve the kids what is best for them, the aim being to make them into wise, well-researched, serving adults. But is that really what we want our communities to be about? Today's world, both youth and adult, is permeated with depression and loneliness. Too many kids grow up seeing themselves as a burden: expensive, distracting, and service-requiring.

It seems to me that what we really need is to let youth serve us. With their abundant energy, curious spirit, and fun-loving nature, I can't think of a demographic that could better help us slog through the day with a smile on our face. Really, it's such a perfect pairing, you'd almost think our species evolved with generational interdependencies as habit.

Okay, so, maybe my idea is completely obvious, but that doesn't make it bad.

So, in case you haven't gotten it yet, what I'm saying is that we should measure the value of youth programs by how much good they allow kids to do. It's good for the kids; makes them feel appreciated, which is absolutely imperative for them to grow up continuing to do good. And it's good for the rest of the world. Good is good.

To balance out the equation (don't want to get carried away with all the good), we subtract what the youth take out of the world: the inputs in the logic model. Namely, of interest to me in our current agricultural climate, is what they eat - hopefully sustainable harvests that add good jobs to the economy. Also, maybe I'd want to know what kind of space they consume. Do their buildings inspire awe or do they make parents want to run to the outskirts as blindly as freeways will let them?

Well, hmmm, maybe it's okay to get carried away with the good afterall. Or maybe it's just that when we don't have to look so far into the future to find it, we make sure that that which we take from the world gives back. Win-win, they call it, and, no, I don't think it's too optimistic a thing to aspire to. Unfortunately, future-looking assessment systems that focus on one subject over a process don't even have a mechanism for measuring themselves against that aspiration.

The older I get, the more I think the idea that we should be enduring hardship for the future is fundamentally flawed. I don't have near the philosophical chops to explain it, but I think we want to be adding more in-the-now analyses of value, and it seems to me the most clear-cut place to start with that is recognizing that youth have something to give, now, as youth; it's pretty darn hard to argue with the fact that youthfulness is too great a thing to keep locked away in receipt of service.

We need to start demanding that nonprofits measure their value to society as a whole, in terms of joy, in the now. The way the math works out, the amount by which their youth are actively making the world a happier place is going to factor into that calculus significantly. And for the time being, as long as I, misguidedly, I suppose, have a chunk of happiness stored away in some cold, hard cash, that calculus is going to be what I approximate when I decide "to fund or not to fund a youth-serving program."

He bound his soul to his music, and what a good soul it was

The comeback tour was scheduled for early July in London, with expectations of endazzlement beyond what the world has ever seen. But instead it came Thursday afternoon, in tight black pants and white socks moonwalking their way across impromptu vigils the world over.

My generation, and maybe yours too, was bombarded with Facebook posts, "MJ is dead, and so is a part of my childhood." "The soundtrack of a generation," the media calls it, and they're right. The white glove and the crotch grabbing made both MTV and our own garage band experiences the memorable joys that they were, feeding hungry little souls across the nation's suburbs with the energy and ingenuity every child needs to grow. So in the stunning hours after the King of Pop was pronounced dead, there was really nothing we could do but unite in celebration of the music and dances that had come of his talent, hard work, and relentless pursuit of innovation.

It was a party the likes of which the world will probably never see again. A global economy, doubled over in self-doubt and insecurities, stretched gloved hands to the sky and thrust belted hips to the future, focusing rampant neuroses, for a moment, on the realities of physics and the uniforms mankind can wear to bamboozle them. From one street corner to the next, shrieks of Michael Jackson's signature "Ow!" flushed away the pain and stress of an economy that seeks to but cannot yet appreciate the contributions most of us have to make.

It was in those hours and the days that followed, spent huddled around ancient technologies broadcasting Michael Jackson marathons, that the public, for the first time it seems, discovered the true contributions of the person behind the music. The soul Michael had worked so persistently to bind to his music, that had been branded and marketed so successfully bit by bit, finally took on a holistic shape that even most Americans were willing to welcome into their living rooms.

YouTube views of the world's best selling album skyrocketed, and so did views of a lesser known and almost unbearably sensitive 26 year old in the making of "We Are the World" and also of the reclusive and reviled Wacko Jacko in "Leave Me Alone." For those who have grown accustomed to being spoonfed their worldviews between ninety second commercial breaks, back-to-back tributes on all the major networks drew the conclusion: the super-star who had reconstructed himself so many times, through his music, his image, and through plastic surgery, was, in fact, one coherent loving, caring, and incredibly unique human being.

Only that he is no longer. Michael Jackson, the man, will never have the opportunity to show his children how he can defy gravity in a live performance. His brilliant ear and creative eye can no longer push without encumbrance at the boundaries of sound and video. And Michael, to the relief of his attorneys, can no longer share his bed and home with the young boys he so sweetly and philanthropically read stories to and tucked in at night.

But the soul we all heard in little Jackson's soaring voice - that love and spirit that never had a chance to play ball with the other kids, that was instead bottled up into perfect performances and fantasy lands and sent out to the world and its children, tragically, to be ridiculed into shopping and prescription drug addictions - that love and spirit has found a new home: in the hearts of a generation that can now, for the first time, understand what a truly good man the world has lost.

So while MJ's B-rated horror movie, along with the hundred million copies the soundtrack souled, will forever remain ingrained in the dance moves of the ten-year-olds each of us usually keeps tucked calmly away, we can now also appreciate a deeper contribution from the Man in the Mirror. Dead at 50, the Lost Boy, who had too much love and spirit to ever grow up, forces us to ask ourselves in what ways are we bottling up our own souls for export. Have we been working all these years, negotiating demands on our resources and reputation, in order to bind our souls to our work? And even if we have, is that enough? Can the people of the world really live in peace with each other if they can't figure out how to drink from the source?

In these past few days, we have drunk of Michael Jackson's sincerity. When the beating stopped, the world turned to a man who spent his life trying to win our love through his music, and we gave it to him because of who he was - an offering his upbringing probably never even let him think to wish for. Hidden to most of the world behind shimmering costumes and scary masks, his sincerity, and the discovery of our love for it, will forever remain an inspiration to those who have come together to mourn the pop icon in recent days. But it's now up to us to defy the personality-imploding laws of society in order to structure our surviving brilliance to shine outwardly into a bastion of appreciation.

Thank you, Michael, for daring to show us our own cruelty. May you now rest in peace, for you are a martyr to a global good in which your children, and mine, will someday thrive.