I took a trip to Washington DC last week and had the opportunity to meet with Kathryn Bayer, the author of the excellent Poverty and Policy blog. Kathryn’s focus is on, as the title of her site suggests, policy, whereas my focus is on direct service providers. The commonality between me, Kathryn, and anyone reading this site is poverty.
Our conversation centered on the relationship between social policies and service provision. On face the connection might not seem obvious. Direct service providers deal with people in need in their communities every day, whereas policy, particular federal policy, is crafted at a high level and often far away from the people it is designed to support.
Last Friday I wrote a post questioning whether blogging, particularly my own writing, has any value in the social sector. I received a lot of great comments and examples of blogging leading to actual social change. I’ll first share some of those comments and then further clarify my own thinking and evolving position on this topic.
Carey Fuller shared some of her blogging successes, writing “If it hadn’t been for blogging, I wouldn’t have been able to raise funds to put a homeless vet dying of pancreatic cancer into a motel or collect camping gear for homeless youth to survive through winter.”
Professionally I do two things; I help organizations make high impact data-oriented decisions, and I write. As 2011 draws to a close, I reflect on another year helping a lot of great organizations increase their social impact, and a pile of blog posts that I hope help advance the social sector toward lasting change.
Obviously I believe writing, and the exchange of ideas that comes with it, is important to the growth of our sector and advancement of solutions. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t write anything. But as someone who prefers evidence to anecdotes, facts to feelings, I’m at a loss for much evidence that blogging (at least my blogging) helps move the needle even a little bit.
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