We’ve heard about COMPASSION ’10, but what actually took place?
    About 90 leaders from nonprofit groups, church ministries, governmental agencies and schools got together at the McSwain Center on Feb. 25 for our second-annual community roundtable to improve human services in Lee County.
    What we’re trying to do is get everyone working together, so we can be more effective. Our ultimate goal, of course, is getting our neighbors the assistance they need and helping them improve their lives for the long term.
    The event opened with a presentation on fire safety by Shane Seagroves from Lee County Emergency Management, but the main presentation, by Susan Pennock from Communities In Schools of North Carolina, was titled “Understanding Poverty.”

Doesn’t everyone pretty much know what poverty is?
    Everyone knows it means not having much money, but what many of us didn’t fully grasp is that not everyone without money faces the same challenges.
    Susan talked a lot about the differences between “situational poverty” and “generational poverty.”
    Situational poverty is more like a temporary setback, when someone loses a job. It’s serious, but people usually have family members who can help out financially, more education to fall back on and other benefits to help them recover fairly quickly.
    Generational poverty is when a family has been poor for two or more generations, and it’s far more difficult to escape because it leads to a different way of thinking and acting — a way that can make it hard to recover.
    The two have some things in common, but they’re not the same.

So how does understanding poverty help nonprofits?
    It’s all a matter of being effective. It’s like anything else in life — running a restaurant, teaching children in school or even being editor of a newspaper — you need to understand the people you’re trying to serve.
    That means knowing how your customers think and what motivates them to act in certain ways. We do it all the time, but it’s easy to lose focus, even on important things, in the daily rush.
    For nonprofits — and I’m including ministries, governmental agencies and schools in this, too — losing focus can mean becoming ineffective. One reason is that most of our organizations operate from a middle-class mindset and that’s very different from the perspective of most of our clients.
    The goal is to take what Susan taught and use it to change the way food pantries, homeless shelters and all other service groups operate in our community. 

That sounds awfully ambitious for one conference. Will it make any real difference?
    We sure hope so. But COMPASSION ’10 wasn’t only the one afternoon. What we did at the McSwain Center was just the beginning.
    Last year, we set up working groups to tackle our five biggest problems, which were providing food, employment, financial help, dropout prevention and housing. Already they’ve made a lot of progress.
    Some of that was simply bringing all of the organizations together, so they knew each other. In some cases, we had community groups providing the same services, but they didn’t know each other existed.
    And, they’ve made some practical changes, as well. Food pantries, as an example, began sharing freezer space, and that allowed more families to receive a free Christmas turkey last year.
    Over the next few months, Susan will be coming back to Sanford to meet with some of these working groups and help them apply the information about poverty to change the way they operate.
    The point is that COMPASSION ’10 really is a long-term effort, not just a one-day event.

We’ve already had COMPASSION ’09 and COMPASSION ’10. Does this mean we should expect a COMPASSION ’11?
    Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves! We still have a lot of work to do this year. But I guess that’s the plan.
    The United Way of Lee County coordinated the roundtable this year with Communities In Schools, but it takes a lot of people working together to make this kind of event happen.
    Now that we’ve held it twice, though, we’re beginning to know what our clients for this roundtable want and need. (You see, we’re all trying to understand our clients better!) So, as long as this COMPASSION roundtable is helpful, we’ll certainly plan on holding it again.