Leadership Needed to Actually Deal With Woes

Feb. 12, 2007
By David R. Fair
Vice president for community impact at United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania

There are a couple of ways to fight a forest fire. You can put it out, or you can set up a firebreak.

A firebreak creates a barrier around the fire so it doesn't spread. Then you wait for the fire to burn itself out. There used to be a time, mostly in the middle period of the last century, when we believed that the problems of poverty and despair that face so many of us could be solved. That energy still exists. But too many of us today believe that the social and economic problems of Southeastern Pennsylvania are just too big to solve. Too many of us have decided not to put out the fire, but to set up a firebreak and let the people burn.That belief is based on a big lie: that we've tried all the solutions possible and they have just not worked.

The truth, though, is that we've experimented with many solutions and have found many that don't work, but also many that would work if only we'd implement them on the necessary scale. Homelessness is an enormous problem - but with more strategic marshaling of the resources we have, and just a smidgen of political will, we could resolve the problems of homelessness for the few thousand people in our region who face it.

Youth violence and the culture that spawns it is a challenge that will take a nationwide effort to address, but we know who the 2,000 or 3,000 young perpetrators of violence are, and with a focused effort we can help them become constructive citizens. Thirteen thousand Philadelphia children stop going to school regularly every year, but if we can figure out a way to incarcerate 15,000 people annually, we can figure out a way to get 13,000 to stay in school.

What doesn't work is treating just the symptoms of these problems, or thinking that a small dose of medicine is the same as the full treatment regimen. We can't solve the problems of the world. But the Southeastern Pennsylvania region is not so big, and our problems are not at so big a scale that they are beyond our grasp. We know what to do. With more than 22,000 nonprofits, billions of tax dollars spent annually just in our region to address socioeconomic needs, a business community understanding better every day about how our tolerance of social crises undermines our economic viability as a region, we have the resources at hand to do it.

All it takes is leadership that is committed not to continue to contain the fire, but to actually try to put it out.