SF pays big bucks to nonprofits, fails to properly monitor them | Hacker News Reader

SF pays big bucks to nonprofits, fails to properly monitor them

sfstandard.com

since moving to SF, I have been seeing a lot of people wearing "Urban Alchemy" jackets. I looked into who they are and they're a nonprofit that hires formerly incarcerated people to stand on street corners and "keep the peace", including stopping people from shooting up, etc. Most of the time they're just standing there on their phones and I question the efficacy, especially considering the organization has received over $12M in two years just for working in Tenderloin[0].

[0]:https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/urban-alchemy-1718845...

What would you suggest that is more efficacious?

I guess SF can't afford the Pinkertons.

$12M affords numerous more-efficacious possibilities

Such as?

Creating economic opportunities for people, people don't want handouts, people want opportunity

I agree! What sort of opportunities?

Education that allows a path for meaningful employment nut also doesn't require people to take on crippling debt.

Lots of church groups have been buying people's medical debt for pennies on the dollar and releasing people of their medical debt, that would be a great use of funds.

Universal Basic Income programs

Simple social safety net programs like food banks, non-predatory small loan and grant services to help people get over a rough patch.

Public programs that create jobs while using the purchased labor to build infrastructure that benefits us all (think TVA).

If you want more examples look at the French government and the many ways they reinvest in their people and economy.

Focus on creating economic opportunities like housing/construction.

The Doe Fund in NYC is a much better version of this, it's a fantastic organization.

Cops I see in the subway stations in NYC are also just standing around and chatting.

Sounds like they are there as a _reactive_ force meaning they act on something happening but they don't seek out issues. They are likely lightly trained and their presence is half the battle. As another commenter mentions, cops are sent to problematic BART stations but constantly end up gathered in a bunch and mostly paying attention to one another.

The deeper you look into Urban Alchemy the weirder it gets.

They aren't licensed private security. They not only hire formerly incarcerated people but actively seek out people convicted of "murder and attempted murder". They're run by a white woman who identifies as a member of the Black community. She has a budget in the high tens of millions. She got her start under the mentorship of an sF official convicted under federal corruption charges.

They refuse to accept responsibility for the actions of their employees. One example I find particularly striking was their response to an employee attempting to murder someone with a gun on break.

> That incident didn’t have anything to do with Urban Alchemy. That [was] a personal beef that existed before he was employed. He had just been hired two months ago.

If you actively hire former murderers I'd expect you to have a proactive plan to prevent this sort of thing from happening, not just say it was a preexisting beef.

https://sfstandard.com/politics/the-confounding-life-of-the-...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/urban-alchemy-sa...

Reminds me of the BLM Global Network Foundation that raised tens of millions of dollars which the founders used to buy real estate and pay their family and friends: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/business/blm-black-lives-...

I don’t donate to charities.

It’s not that I don’t want children to not starve, it’s that I have a very high confidence that the vast majority of donations one way or another just end up in a sociopath’s bank account

I’m never surprised when I hear good will turned into theft. I am surprised how many people are willing to give so much of their money to scams

(granted, the SF money wasn’t an optional donation)

ProPublica has been by far my most satisfying donation. Their work has helped expose a ton of corruption and, as you say, sociopathy. They're transparent about where the money goes (mostly to the salaries of journalists).

Even theft and grift aside...many charities are just bad at achieving their goals. They think they're helping but end up causing more problems, e.g., food aid destroying the local farming industry.

For instance, the Red Cross raised $500 million for Haiti relief and ended up achieving virtually nothing due to extensive mismanagement and arrogance (trying to apply Western methods in a third-world country) [1].

Similarly to you, I detest all non-profit organizations. Rather have a for-profit organization or the government solve issues...but these still have their own issues.

1- https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...

Even beyond that $13.5B was raised from various sources for a country of 11.45M people and not much came out of it.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/01/12/3761388...

This is the best charity working on how research in the arctic and around global warming is done much more efficiently and cleanly:

https://www.oceanresearchproject.org/

Matt is a great guy and a modern explorer, you can hear his story here:

https://explorerspodcast.com/matt-rutherford/

This is the movie about his first solo nonstop circumnavigation of the Americas:

https://reddotontheocean.com/

Or you can listen to his podcast as well here:

https://www.singlehandedpodcast.com/

Trailer for the movie

https://youtu.be/5fszrvpoa9o

The movie itself

https://youtu.be/n12nnrEGWXQ

Enjoy!

Amnesty International (tho I really don't like their fundraising tactics) and Doctors Without Borders don't send money to sociopath's accounts. They pay for housing for board certified medical doctors who decided to make $0 and heal people while being bombed on.

I also like Animals Asia which saves bears from captivity and sends me cute videos of the bears swinging on the swing I donated to them!

If you have low confidence in large orgs, donate directly to small orgs near you like a little league team in a rough part of town.

I don’t know their specific economics but typically the money-into-sociopaths funnel isn’t through the charity program itself, but through the administration. Eg 30% of funds goes to admins, 30% to marketing and fundraising, 20% to overhead, 20% to the actual stated program kind of thing

Unfortunately, same here. I too seen this a lot. I wish I could donate to EFF though. )

Patronage networks are a powerful force in the US so it's unsurprising that they're giving money to their political allies.

SF is Rube Goldberg device of juice boxes feeding juice boxes. Works great until the Feds can't print juice.

Some people call this the homeless industrial complex

SF monitors them, the problem is the board of supervisors is in on the take

Surely it's more cost-efficient to treat the root cause of homelessness (likely 'high rent prices': See charts in https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housi...).

Yes, but what about street parking and neighborhood character? Surely a few thousand homeless people is a small price to pay for easier parking!

Not to mention, I've heard a rumor that tall buildings occasionally produce something called "shadows", which sounds quite unpleasant!

There's a very predictable cycle.

1. "Small government people" demanding that the government stop providing services, because the private sector is better at everything.

2. Government services get outsourced to vendors, NGOs, non-profits, etc.

3. These vendors need to justify that they are effective at their job, producing mountains of paperwork.

4. Government offices fill with beurocrats to review all that paperwork.

5. Some of those vendors turn out to be doing a bad job.

6. People complain about how the private sector is incapable of providing these services. <--- We are here.

7. Government pulls funding, starts providing these services itself.

8. Go to step 1.

At least, that's what happens when everyone's operating in good faith. When people are criticizing in bad faith, step 7 is 'Pull all funding for services with no replacement' and step 8 is 'Complain about tent cities and people sleeping on benches.'

I don't get the impression that small government people have a lot of say in SF, this looks like typical big government graft and mismanagement that turns people paying attention into small government types.

There are some types of services where it's straightforward to monitor private vendors: if you contract out trash pickup, and the vendor doesn't pick up people's trash, you will immediately get many loud, angry complaints from the populace. You hardly even need to proactively monitor them, really, it would just be instantly obvious if they did nothing.

In contrast, if you give non-profits money to help the homeless population, the feedback loop is more...ambiguous. If they just blow the money instead of helping anyone, who's gonna complain? The people that should've been helped won't even be aware of some random contract, and are used to different government and private entities failing them anyhow. The lack of clear impact from non-action means it's easier for organizations to get away with doing nothing, or at least doing nothing useful.

Now I'm sure there are some organizations doing great work, but how do you separate them from the grifters?

Bare minimum? An accounting of how money is spent and who is interacted with. Homeless people aren't faceless people, most have SSNs, names and histories.

If small tech companies have measures around their arbitrary software goals surely SF government has a handful of metrics to monitor the state of the homeless population.

Speaking of garbage pickup...there was that whole scandal about the public workds department taking bribes:

https://sfstandard.com/politics/scandal-ridden-sf-garbage-co...

Who are these "Small government people" in San Francisco? Here is a much simpler description of the cycle in SF:

1: Govt funds vendors, NGOs, non-profits

2: Vendors, NGOs, non-profits fund politicians

3: go to step 1

> Who are these "Small government people" in San Francisco?

That would be your run-of-the-mill weed-smoking, I-have-dozens-of-lgbt-immigrant-friends yuppie, who immediately goes to 'Get the government hand out of my pocket' when you ask them to actually fund social services.

In short, socially liberal, fiscally conservative 'progressives'. Very open to nice-sounding things, as long as they don't cost anything.

Lots of them post here, and all of them feel completely justified in their views.

Yeah mostly agree, why do government programs always result in so much misuse and fraud? I don't really agree with how you portray the Govt. as a helpless participant that is just responding to peoples complaints.

It is a failure of the government to me, giving away billions with no oversight is an invitation to bad actors. Exploitative people will always appear anytime an opportunity to make money springs up, the Govts job is to prevent that. This is literally a fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me scenario but the people being fooled are govt officials we trust billions of $s to.

> Yeah mostly agree, why do government programs always result in so much misuse and fraud?

* Inefficiency from steps 3, 4.

* Money going to advocacy groups who are really good at advocacy, but not actually good at execution.

* Impossible to build execution-focused groups when funds appear one year, and go poof the next year.

* Lack of economies of scale. One group can manage 800 housing/shelter units for vastly less money than 80 different groups managing 10 housing/shelter units each.

Most of these problems are actually solved by having the government provide these services in-house, instead of subcontracting to 80 different non-profits, with each of them having a ton of overhead, waste, lack of continuity of mission, etc.

You also have direct democratic control of this, because council has direct influence, and can be held accountable for how the city's departments run.

Republicans have lobbyists and Democrats have activists.

Republicans want to outsource government to businesses and Democrats want to outsource government to non-profits.

Republicans don't want excessive regulations slowing business down and Democrats don't want excessive oversight slowing services down.

Republicans want to fund businesses through tax cuts for taxpayers and Democrats want to fund non-profits through tax write-offs for taxpayers.

The Overton window of our times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com