Accountability for Change
by Jonathan Lancaster, CFO
Most organizations were founded by people who were passionate about a specific cause; they rally people around an issue to make a difference. Our communities need these organizations to point a finger at problems that may have been overlooked. A lot of times, there seems to be a struggle to move beyond the inspiring idea. There can be a comradery around talking about issues; we plan lunches, dinners and events around poverty, crime, education gaps, and infrastructure problems. A lot of money is spent on events and organizations that are good at explaining an issue, but there is often a lack of accountability about solving the issue.
There are complicated problems that do not have simple, quick solutions, but a lot of the issues facing our communities have tangible solutions that organizations should be held accountable for addressing. The reason I got into the nonprofit space was that I wanted to work for an organization that held itself accountable for the change they set out to create. Over the last four years of working at We Will Go, we have taken a step back and said, what is a measurable change we want to see in our community? We began to ask hard questions like, “Does this program really help people or do we just like the idea?”
If we are not careful, we can fall in love with the way we solve a problem and lose sight of actually solving the problem. What if organizations were better known by people in the community impacted by the program rather than by donors that liked the proposed solution? We realized that we were going to have to stop doing certain programs to focus on creating a measurable impact.
For well over a decade, We Will Go took clothing donations and gave out clothes to those in need. This in itself is not a bad thing, but we ran this alongside our food pantry. We stepped back and said, what is the biggest need and where are we spending the greatest amount of time? The greater identified need was groceries for families, but sorting and processing clothing took up most of our time. We decided to take a big step and stop taking clothing donations. When we last gave out clothes in 2020, we provided food for 7,500 people. Last year in 2023, we provided groceries for over 20,000 people and processed over 334,000 pounds of food. In three years, we saw a 267% increase in the number of people served, and last year we moved into a grocery store because we outgrew our space.
It is challenging to set a difficult goal and hold yourselves accountable to it, but I feel it is scarier to waste resources instead of focusing on measurable change. We want to be a place where saying “Jesus loves you” actually looks like something. If you are at all like me and tired of just talking about issues, come and join us in being a part of tangible change in our community.