Occasionally I bump into someone, a group or organization, who is looking to start up a new program that sounds eerily familiar – identical with programs I’ve known in the past. More specifically, things like Board Development and Volunteer Management training, the kind of programs for which there is a continuous need, but programs come and go and come and go.
One wonders why we cannot sustain such things through ongoing development, especially when the core concepts remain virtually the same for years. It seems people new to the sector (and there will ALWAYS be people new to the sector) look for such things and don’t find local/regional/Canadian information. They quote US sources or corporate board training, resources they have found on the Internet, and decide these could be adapted to local non-profit use, to meet that ongoing need.
And so, I smugly tell them there are many Canadian resources in this area that they should know about, and head off to get the links to send them. Generally with the attitude that people just don’t know where to look.
It’s one of the pleasures of aging that one accumulates a vast info-hoard of sources of relevant community not for-profit sector knowledge and resources. Many are those I’ve been directly involved in, like Leadership Vancouver or Citizen Advocacy. Others I’ve simply linked to over the years.
But as I checked into my links, I noticed an alarming thing: although their web links remain, many of the pages and organizations have disappeared. Without a trace. Others still exist but are very out of date, or require so much knowledge of what one is looking for that even Google is of little help in finding them.
Given my advanced age, I know much of information and material pre-dates our common use of the Internet, and many organizations came late to the web because even dialup access and computer equipment were much too expensive for most nonprofit groups. (Though I do know some of my early handouts were prepared on a Gestetner machine for copying, digital copies do exist for the last couple of decades at least. They could be uploaded for sharing, if we knew about them.) But this article is really about finding what actually used to be online.
As organizations shut down and offices disappear, where do the files go? When nobody keeps the website alive, what happens to the information there? Voluntary Sector Knowledge Network, www.vskn.ca – so many sites link to it, but the site itself, other than a fragment on a different URL, has disappeared. My belief that resources are available ‘out there’ (and will help inform us through this downturn) is crumbling. No wonder people think the wheel needs to be invented.
I expect that the attrition is due to the combination of financial and political challenges the sector has faced over the past number of years, with major national and regional organizations losing support. In some cases, these have found other groups to ‘hold’ their treasures and keep them available online, and have communicated that to us. Others haven’t been so lucky, which means WE are losing out, as well.
Indeed, research and development have been areas hardest hit, not only in the community sector, but for Canada’s data overall – Statistics Canada, the long form census being the most obvious. If the old adage is: “What can be measured can be funded”, this is a very dangerous trend. As we have all been distracted trying to find acceptable ways to measure the unmeasurable, there’s been a chipping away at the hard data behind our backs: quantitative publicly funded measurement and neutral data-gathering has stopped or is so diluted (or skewed) as to be meaningless. Where does that leave us?
Well, the impact of our sector’s work in community, the environment, education and culture is ever more difficult to measure. And our role in identifying negative trends in community, the environment, education and culture, to develop programs and illuminate the need for policy change is diminished, undermined and ignored.
So, I’m following all those links in my web files, and in my memory, tracking down old programs, reports, organizations and, yes, old people, looking for where they may still hold the gold. Google isn’t much help if people don’t get online, so I’m also becoming the Miss Marple of old-fashioned investigative research into missing BC nonprofits, networks, research reports and program materials. And history.
I hope others can help with this ‘historical’ material. It doesn’t have to be old to be lost. If you are someone who has a basement file box, a head full of memories to share, or some direction to send me, please let me know.
Not only to save reinventing the wheel over and over, but to stop spinning it and get on with the work. From a position of strength.