MAKING GOOD WORK BETTER
How charitable groups can improve
The months since COVID-19 made landfall in Montreal have been a whirlwind of activity for Samuel Watts, the CEO of the Welcome Hall Mission.
As Quebec locked down and the city and province sprung into action to protect the high-risk homeless population, Watts went from operating one emergency shelter to running five. Matthew Pearce, his counterpart at the Old Brewery Mission, also found himself in charge of five shelters, Watts notes. Meanwhile, a number of day centres providing food, hygiene and support were rapidly deployed around the city.
“Within two weeks, the landscape of how we deliver homelessness services in Montreal changed dramatically,” Watts said. “The pandemic has really helped us understand and define what are essential services to the vulnerable.”
COVID -19 also proved a stark illustration of Watts’s own observations about the community-based non-profit sector he works in, which are outlined in a new book.
The treatise was due out around the time the virus hit Quebec, so publication was pushed back until this week. But this delay was fortuitous for Watts, testing the mettle of his arguments and giving him time to add an appendix reflecting on the pandemic’s impact. This coda was written on the fly while he was in the trenches of dealing with the public health crisis.
The result is that Good Work Done Better: Improving the Impact of Community-based Non-profits is even more timely and relevant.
The book poses a provocative question: are the usually small, often volunteer-run, governmentand donor-funded charitable organizations that do crucial work like feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless and protecting children doing the best job they possibly can? No, in Watts’s view, not always.
More to the point, with some reforms to their operations and governance structures, could they do better? Yes, he believes they can.
If a disruption of the current way of doing things was already in progress because of rapid technological advancement, the pandemic has accelerated this shift from a historic focus on compassion to a data-driven approach that seeks measurable results. These are ideas that Watts and like-minded colleagues like Pearce have openly embraced in recent years. But it’s nevertheless a message that is not always well received in Montreal.
Watts recently wrote an opinion piece in La Presse laying out the case anew, in light of the pandemic. It was met with several “scathing” responses.
Watts acknowledges that it might seem like he’s nitpicking or even picking on altruistic people who toil long hours for little pay in the service of groups that espouse noble causes. But therein lies the first issue he identifies in the book: criticism — even constructive — is taboo.
“We need to stop thinking that we’re as great as everybody tells us we are,” he said.
This only creates blind spots about the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of programs and stymies big-picture thinking that might help address the root causes of social scourges like food or housing insecurity.
Watts is already on the record saying the goal of organizations like the Welcome Hall Mission should be to eradicate homelessness rather than keep putting a temporary roof over people’s heads. He also thinks it’s entirely doable with smarter practices. Laudable though it sounds, this is a contentious view that has created a schism among community groups in Montreal.
“In a lot of cases, people who are deeply compassionate tend to work in the middle of a problem and they don’t tend to work on the problem or be able to take several steps back,” he said. “We need to focus on the needs of the people we serve. So often, community-based non-profits start out that way and then over time it suddenly becomes about the community-based non-profit and their own survival ... we get stuck in a rut.”
Watts’s detractors often dismiss his drive to do things differently as “entrepreneurial” or “conservative,” terms that may be a poke at his outsider status. Watts was recruited to head the Welcome Hall Mission in 2016 after a long career in the worlds of business and consulting.
But his record for innovation speaks for itself. Among other moves, he ushered in a supermarket-style food bank that allows users the dignity of choosing what they want to eat, and when data showed many clients were making the long trek to St-henri from Montreal North, he opened a facility there.
“I think to some extent people look at my bio and say, ‘Oh, he’s a business guy.’ And for somebody who has laboured for 30 years in the trenches of the non-profit world, that can be very off-putting. And I would be the first to say, with great humility, that I don’t want to come off that way,” he said. “I can’t help what my background is. I bring all the compassion that’s in my heart to the things that I do. I’m certainly not trying to run or suggest that non-profits run like businesses ... But I am saying, wherever good ideas come from, let’s take a look at them, evaluate them and say ‘Would that help the vulnerable people that we serve?’”
With Good Work Done Better, Watts seeks to further challenge the prevailing wisdom.
The pandemic has really helped us understand and define what are essential services to the vulnerable.