Diana R. Sieger is the president of the Grand Rapids Commmunity Foundation. For more information, visit Diana's President's pages or view her biography.

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President's Point of View: Dilemma or opportunity?

April 14, 2007

I am at a point in a variety of community change efforts where I just want to throw up my hands and say “forget it and all of you just swim in the muck and figure it out!” Every leader of community and social change has these times - in fact Marty Linsky and Ronald Heifetz wrote about it in their great book Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading.

Adaptive leadership requires time, vision and tenacity. When dealing with issues like the state’s economy, the inability of our state leaders - both executive and legislative - to get their act together, and the growing divide between cultures, it seems beyond daunting and that doesn’t even include world politics and problems!

Every time I meet with Rob Collier the president of the Council of Michigan Foundations, he enlightens (depresses?) me with more news about the situation in Lansing. He is one of the most optimistic people I know and is my barometer of things to come. The news is not good and likely will get worse before it gets better. (I chair the CMF board this year.)

… back to my original statement. This week I was heartened by the County Commission’s reaction to an evaluation study that they have invested in regarding the effectiveness of our community’s prevention programming relating to child abuse and neglect. The good news is that the programs that families and their children do make their way into are making a positive difference. However we are still experiencing spikes in the incidence of abuse and neglect but we also experienced a large jump in the level of people living in poverty in the past few years which is a fact that the general public may not be aware of as we look at the evidence of growth particularly downtown. Not to diminish the importance of the growth - it is what will fuel our efforts to address these problems! However, families are being missed and we have more work to do!

As a leader in the Kent County Family and Children’s Coordinating Council (a strong and effective organization of the county commission), I participate in many discussions that are continually looking at ways to address the needs of all families in our community. This foundation initiated a program entitled Perspective 21 in 1992 addressing prevention programming and many organizations and county governmental agencies are actively involved in funding efforts. The Grand Rapids Community Foundation is still hanging in there with money and human resources - we have expended more than $2.6 million in the past decade and countless hours of our time and leadership. We will continue to be a key player in this.

I was puzzled at a recent meeting to hear from one of the committee members that he felt that “this community” jumps from issue to issue and never lands on one. Whew! And this was after discussing the 15 year community collaborative working on prevention, early childhood issues and much more. Nobody is jumping around - we are focused and working hard. Made me wonder where that observation came from. It doesn’t mean that in other venues that we aren’t working on issues relating to education, needs of older citizens and environmental concerns.

More on this in future posts - we do not rest; we just keep pushing on!