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Social Entrepreneurship:Capacity Building AmongWorkers in Public HumanService AgenciesRivka Savaya PhD a , Pnina Packer MSW a , DoritStange MSW a & Ora Namir MSW aa Bob Shapell School of Social Work , Tel AvivUniversity , IsraelPublished online: 11 Oct 2008.
To cite this article: Rivka Savaya PhD , Pnina Packer MSW , Dorit Stange MSW &Ora Namir MSW (2008) Social Entrepreneurship: Capacity Building Among Workersin Public Human Service Agencies, Administration in Social Work, 32:4, 65-86, DOI:10.1080/03643100802293840
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Administration in Social Work, Vol. 32(4) 2008Available online at http://www.haworthpress.com© 2008 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1080/03643100802293840 65
WASW0364-31071544-4376Administration in Social Work, Vol. 32, No. 4, July 2008: pp. 1–30Administration in Social Work
Social Entrepreneurship: Capacity Building Among Workers in Public Human
Service AgenciesSavaya et al.ADMINISTRATION IN SOCIAL WORK Rivka Savaya, PhD
Pnina Packer, MSWDorit Stange, MSWOra Namir, MSW
ABSTRACT. This paper describes a pioneering project developed in aschool of social work in Israel to train and actively assist professionals inpublic human service agencies to initiate, design, and implement innova-tive social programs. The focus of the project was on the field worker,rather than on the management or organization, as is customary in theliterature on entrepreneurialism. The paper provides an overview of theplanning, structure, and contents of the project; a discussion of the difficul-ties that arose in the planning, construction, and implementation stages ofthe new programs; an outline of the project’s evaluation component; and abrief description of the programs that were developed. It ends with a sum-mary and recommendations for improvement.
KEYWORDS. Human service agencies, innovation, social entrepreneurship
Rivka Savaya, PhD, Pnina Packer, MSW, Dorit Stange, MSW, and Ora Namir,MSW, are affiliated with the Bob Shapell School of Social Work, Tel AvivUniversity, Israel.
The authors are grateful to Ashalim for supporting this project. Ashalim is anon-governmental organization devoted to improving the lives of children at riskand their families in the context of the communities where they live.
Address correspondence to: Professor Rivka Savaya, Bob Shapell School ofSocial Work, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv 69978, Israel (E-mail: [email protected]).
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INTRODUCTION
In recent years, there has been increasing recognition of the need forinnovative social programs to meet the growing—and changing—demands for social services stemming from the anomalous conjunction ofincreased poverty and social distress, along with reduced governmentsocial spending and mounting expectations that society assume responsi-bility for the health and welfare of its weaker members. To the extent towhich this need has been met, it has been filled largely through non-governmental endeavors (Gidron, Bar, & Katz, 2003; Sharir & Lerner,2006). NGOs have proliferated in every imaginable field, offering inno-vative services to meet the needs of a range of populations (Dineros,1992; Kattan, 1996; Lyons, 1992; Mills, 2002) for whom governmentprograms have been insufficient or ineffective (Anheier & Benner, 1997;Miranne & Amato-Von, 2001; Schmid, 2004). NGOs have been able tolaunch such innovations because of the vigor and dynamism stemmingfrom their being outside the state bureaucracy and, in many cases, theirclose familiarity with the populations they serve (Miranne & Amato-Von,2001; Osborne & Kaposvari, 1998; Yechezkeli & Shalev, 1994).
Public social service agencies have not matched the innovation of theNGOs. With few exceptions, they tend to be hidebound bodies, which,like other large bureaucratic organizations, do not encourage the genera-tion and implementation of new ideas on the part of their employees(Cohen, 1999). They offer few rewards for innovation and lack thecompetitive pressures that provide the business sector with incentive forinnovation. Generally short on resources, they are risk aversive and waryof investing in new ventures which may, after all, prove unsuccessful(Sharir, 1996). In addition, the managerial levels of public bodies tend toview innovation as properly coming from the top down (Beer, Eisenstat, &Spector, 1990) and feel threatened by innovation from below (Hasenfeld,1983; McGrath, 1985). The result, as has often been noted, is stagnation(Drucker, 1985; Tropman, 1989) and the failure of public human serviceagencies to meet the needs of the populations they were created to serve.
This situation has led to scholarly calls for fostering innovation in thepublic services. Following the business model for encouraging entrepre-neurial innovation (e.g., Drucker, 1985), most of these focused on theorganizational and managerial levels (Borins, 2000; Boschee, 1995; Keys,1988; Menefee, 1997; Moon, 1999; Osborne & Flynn, 1997; Pearlmutter,1998; Rouillard, 2002). Some, however, focused on the need to promoteinnovation by field workers in human service organizations (Tropman,
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1989). Cohen (1999), for example, calls for drawing on staff experienceand unleashing staff creativity to redesign the way services are delivered.Sharir (1996) urges social entrepreneurship to close the perpetual gapbetween the services the social welfare organizations provide and theneeds and opportunities in the surrounding environment. The situationhas also led to certain concrete efforts to encourage innovation byemployees in these organizations (Cohen, 1999; Gummer & McCallon,1995). The belief behind these calls and efforts is that just as in business,in social agencies, too, the individual is the source and drive propellingconstructive innovation.
This paper describes an ambitious educational project based on thisconviction.
Project Aims, Background, Guiding Assumptions, and Overall Structure
The project was aimed at training and assisting professionals workingin government social services to be social entrepreneurs. More specifi-cally, it aimed to improve their capacity to initiate, plan, and implementinnovative social programs within their agencies, not for profit-making(Bent-Goodley, 2002; Drucker, 1985), but as a means of dealing withcomplex social needs (Peredo & McLean, 2006), alleviating social prob-lems, and catalyzing social transformation (Alvord, Brown, & Letts,2004; Dees, 1998). The project was developed at the Bob Shapell Schoolof Social Work at Tel Aviv University in the center of Israel, in responseto the same circumstances of changing conditions and reduced fundingthat have led to major changes in social service delivery in the Westernworld (Cohen, 1999).
The starting point for the project was the twofold conviction that(1) innovation is very rare from within a government human serviceagency, and (2) that the professionals who work in these agencies, byvirtue of their direct client contact, are in an excellent position to identifyunmet needs and unsolved problems and to come up with practical solu-tions. The assumption was that the potential for creativity and innovationexists among agency workers, but is consistently thwarted by their heavyworkloads, the bureaucratic discouragement of innovation, and their lackof skills and know-how needed to turn their ideas into viable programs.
The project was underpinned by two theories. One is the theory of socialentrepreneurship, based on the paradigm of business entrepreneurship(Dees, 1998; Drayton, 2000; Mair & Marti, 2006; Sharir, 1996). Social
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entrepreneurs, like business entrepreneurs, are characterized by the abilityto identify needs or opportunities, to translate a general idea into a modelfor action, and to mobilize resources to implement the model. Like busi-ness entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship must introduce some basicchange, whether by developing or providing a new service, augmentingthe effectiveness of an existing service, adapting or developing a new tech-nology, identifying a new client group, and so on. Evidence is beginning toaccumulate that applying the strategies of business entrepreneurship mayhelp improve social service provision (see for example: Boschee, 1995;Keys, 1988).
The second theory is the theory of learning organizations. Weapplied Nonaka and Kono’s (1998) view that a learning organizationcan be created in a neutral environment outside the organization inwhich the individual works. The project was designed as a learningorganization, which would provide the participants with opportunitiesto learn.
The project was conceived as a “social incubator,” on the model of abusiness incubator, in which the university would provide the knowledgeand personal support that would enable practitioners to bring their ideas tofruition (Tropman, 1989). The idea was to take practitioners withrudimentary ideas for innovative social programs and to help themdevelop and implement the programs within their agencies. The approachconceives of an expanded role for social work education from the tradi-tional focus on intervention strategies and social policy to include roles,knowledge, and skills needed for the social work profession to meet theneeds of the twenty-first century.
We envisioned a two-phase process. The first focused on programdevelopment outside the agency. Our conviction was that given a safe andnurturing environment away from the pressures and constraints of theirplaces of work and in the supportive atmosphere of a university class-room, practitioners would recover their dormant energy and free up theircreativity. The second focused on program implementation from withinthe agency. Our plan was to help the project participants take their pro-grams back to their agencies for implementation. To this end, we plannedto work also with the agency directors: to bring them to the university soas to make them aware of the importance of innovations and of creatingan organizational environment in which the workers could implementtheir programs. This paper focuses on our work with the practitioners,since our plans for the directors did not get off the ground. More will besaid of this below.
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THE PROJECT
This paper is a general introduction to the project. The first part focuseson key aspects of the project: the planning, the recruitment and selectionof the participants, and the curriculum, instructional format, and evalua-tion. The second part presents key issues that arose in the course of theinstruction, program development, and early implementation stages, aswell as a brief description of the project outcomes and the programs thatwere developed. The paper ends with a short discussion of the key fea-tures of the project and recommendations for improving future versions.Throughout, our concern is more with the principles that guided thesematters than with the details of how they were executed or what theyconsisted of. A minimum of detail is thus provided for the purpose of pre-senting the main features of the project and the principles behind them.
Key Aspects of the Project
Planning
As stated above, the actual execution of the project was preceded by ayear of planning, during which we recruited partners in the project andcreated its foundations and infrastructure. The project was planned as ajoint endeavor in which academics and human service professionalswould work together at all stages.
Planning was carried out by what we termed the Professional AdvisoryCommittee, which consisted of university faculty members, representa-tives of our key funding agency, and senior professionals in Israel’s socialservices network who had firsthand experience in developing socialprograms and who were in key positions in Israel’s social service bureau-cracy. These attributes were important to supplement the knowledge ofthe academics who had conceived of the project and to help us navigateIsrael’s social service bureaucracy so that the programs that the partici-pants developed would actually be implemented in the field and not die aquiet death on paper.
The Professional Advisory Committee was actively involved in plan-ning and decision making all through the project. During the planningyear, it created the outlines and boundaries of the project, established thecriteria for the recruitment and selection of the participants, and devel-oped the project’s instructional format and contents. Once the project wasunder way, it met regularly with the project heads, the first two authors,and when problems arose, it engaged in troubleshooting. The committee
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incorporated into its workings the principles of flexibility and openness toinput from outside. It was understood that committee decisions could—and should—be modified in accord with practical demands that arose andwith the feedback of the participants and instructors in the project.
During the planning year, the committee actively solicited externalinput, in the form of two focus groups, to assist it in the design of theprogram curriculum. One focus group consisted of welfare clients whohad previously received services though either of two innovative socialintervention programs provided by social service departments in Israel.They were asked what, if anything, in the program in which they hadparticipated had helped them. The other focus group consisted of socialentrepreneurs (doctors, psychologists, nurses, and social workers) whohad been involved in the development and implementation of an innova-tive social program in Israel. They were asked what difficulties they hadencountered in the development and implementation of their programs,how they had resolved them, and what knowledge and assistance mighthave facilitated their work.
The points made by the two groups were incorporated into theprogram. The welfare clients emphasized the importance of continuedcontact with the program teams, a holistic approach to their problems, andinstrumental assistance with advocacy and navigating the governmentbureaucracy. These points were later relayed to the program participantsby the teaching team. The professionals stressed the importance of muster-ing the cooperation of the organization in the implementation of their pro-grams, of the support they received from their colleagues, and of advicefrom other social innovators, as well as of instruction in fundraising andmarketing methods for their programs. These points were integrated inthe content and format of the training, as described below.
Recruitment and Selection of Participants
In selecting the participants, we sought professionals who (a) would beable to develop and implement an innovative program within their placeat work, and (b) were skilled and experienced in their fields—so that wecould concentrate on instruction in entrepreneurial skills. Thus, all thecandidates had to have at least five years of experience and all had to sub-mit an idea, even if vague, for an intervention program that they wanted todevelop. They also had to commit in advance to a three-year program andhad to submit with their application two letters of recommendation,including one from the head of their service that rated them on originality,
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leadership, entrepreneurial behavior, independent and systematic think-ing, and team work. For reasons related to the funding of the project,recruitment was restricted to those who worked in an agency servingchildren at risk and their families.
In addition, candidates had to obtain a signed pledge by the head oftheir agency agreeing to four conditions: that he or she would (a) permitthem to take paid time off to participate in the project; (b) allocate person-nel to the implementation of the program that they developed; (c) helpraise funds to keep the program running; and (d) attend workshops deal-ing with the problems involved in the introduction of new programs. Weregarded the directors’ active support as crucial because, as stated above,we wanted real programs that would be used with clients and not justpaper programs.
Candidates for the project were solicited from 500 government socialservice agencies. From the 55 applications that were submitted, 21 wereselected. In the end, we had a heterogeneous group of well-educated,highly experienced, and well-qualified participants, consisting of twochild psychiatrists, one nurse, and 18 social workers from 21 differentpublic agencies from all over the country, who had an average of 14 yearsof professional experience.
Instructional Format and Curriculum
In this section, to avoid repetition, we conflate description of theplanning of the curriculum and instructional format with discussion of theactual curriculum and format.
The project was designed to take three academic years: the first to pro-vide the participants with the knowledge and assistance they needed todesign/develop their intervention programs; the second to help them toimplement their programs; and the third to monitor the program imple-mentation by the project staff. Instruction was most intensive in the firstyear, with weekly five-hour-long meetings, and then decreased to fivehours once every three weeks in the second year. No instruction wasplanned for the third year.
The instruction was organized along two axes: (a) conveying theknowledge and skills needed to plan and implement innovative programsin a logical, systematic manner, and (b) practical problem solving and theprovision of nurturance and support. The topics covered: creativity andinnovation, logic models for intervention planning and assessment, orga-nizational dynamics and change, documentation, marketing, fundraising,
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budget management, and others. In general, these contents were conveyedto the participants in a single large group, mainly by the project facilita-tors (discussed below) and external experts in relevant areas. There werealso several meetings with successful social entrepreneurs to learn fromtheir personal experiences.
Although the topics and their order had been broadly planned inadvance, we made sure to maintain flexibility to meet the participants’evolving needs. For example, instruction was provided in searching theInternet when it was discovered that most of the participants did not knowhow to do this. More time than had been initially planned was allocated toteaching marketing and fundraising.
The work of the second axis, problem solving, nurturance, and support,was conducted in small groups (three in all, with seven participants ineach), with each group led by a facilitator. Here, the participants weregiven the opportunity to hone the knowledge and skills they learned in thelarge group and to apply them to their specific programs. They reportedon their programs to the group and received from them help in conceptu-alizing and planning their programs, and in handling the many problemsthat arose along the way. The small group thus served as a resource inwhich the facilitator and other members helped the participants to focusand sharpen the various components of their programs and to anticipateand resolve problems.
The small groups also provided the participants with nurturance andsupport from their facilitators and peers, in an atmosphere of trust andsecurity in which they could raise sensitive issues and problems related totheir programs. The importance of integrating nurturance and support intotraining for entrepreneurship in the public sector cannot be overstated.The unleashing of creativity and development of new ideas require ahospitable environment to enable the individual to take the emotional andother risks that are inevitably involved in introducing anything new anduntried (Cohen, 1999; Jaskyte & Dressler, 2005; Tropman, 1989). As willbecome apparent below, both the development and implementation of theprograms entailed tremendous frustration and required a great deal ofemotional energy. To be able to proceed fruitfully and to overcome theemotional hurdles, the participants needed a supportive and nurturingenvironment. The fact that they were well educated and highly experi-enced professionals did not reduce this need.
The instruction in both forums was carried out mainly by three facilita-tors, all of who had extensive experience in the field, in teaching andsupervising professionals, and in developing innovative intervention
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programs. Each facilitator had her own special field of expertise: one ingroup processes, another in documentation, and the third in the develop-ment of programs for families and children at risk. This combination ofexperience and expertise served the facilitators in carrying out both theirinstructional tasks—teaching content and skills, giving assignments, anddemanding performance on the part of the participants—and the emotion-ally demanding task of containing the participants through their many dif-ficulties and frustrations.
The facilitators worked as a team. They ran the large group jointly,with all three of them present at every meeting. Then, at the end of every“school” day, they met together to plan subsequent sessions and to obtainfrom one another the support and holding that they themselves neededafter their meetings with the participants.
Evaluation
Evaluation was an integral component of the project. Evaluations werecarried out during each phase of the project. In the design phase, wecarried out an evaluability assessment (Smith, 1989; Wholey, 1987) toensure that the planned activities were relevant to the needs of the poten-tial participants and had a reasonable chance of enabling them to developand implement innovative programs within their agencies. The evaluationalso determined that sufficient resources were available to carry out theactivities.
In the project implementation stage, we carried out ongoing evalua-tions of the curriculum to determine whether its contents conveyed theknowledge and skills that the participants required. Monthly meetingsconducted with the project staff and participants enabled us to makeregular evaluations and real-time changes in the curriculum to addressproblems as they arose. At the end of the first training year, individualinterviews were carried out with each participant, querying what they hadlearned over the year, how relevant the course contents were to theirneeds, and how much the skills and knowledge they acquired had helpedthem in developing their programs. Their responses resulted in changes inthe second-year curriculum.
At the end of the second year, a questionnaire combining closed- andopen-ended questions was administered to the participants in order toidentify changes in their knowledge, skills, and ways of working, and toascertain their satisfaction with the project. In the third year, the monitoringstage, telephone interviews were conducted with all the participants.
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Structured questions tapped the components of their programs that theyhad succeeded in implementing, the difficulties they had encountered inthe implementation stage, how they had coped with these difficulties, andthe factors that had facilitated or impeded their program implementation.The information obtained from the second and third year evaluationsenabled the facilitators to assist the participants over some of the hurdlesof implementation.
All of the evaluations provided knowledge and understanding that maybe used to improve future versions of the training project. Their findings,too extensive to be presented here, will be elaborated in other papers.
Issues that Arose in the Training
Information obtained from the facilitators and our evaluations revealedissues that arose in the instructional and program design phase of theproject and issues that arose in the implementation phase.
Issues in the Instructional and Program Design Phase
The main issue that arose in this phase was the participants’ reluctanceto commit themselves to their projects. Since the participants were allcarefully chosen, well-educated, and highly experienced professionalswho had submitted an idea for an innovative program, we expected themto quickly throw themselves into the work of developing their ideas. Thisdid not happen. In the first few weeks of instruction, the focus of the trainingwas primarily on the participants: on their professional vision and oncreating group cohesion. Workshops were devoted to topics such as “theentrepreneur as an agent of change,” “developing creativity,” “role analysis,”and “identifying one’s professional vision.” The participants wereenthusiastic, involved, and clearly glad to be part of the project. At thesame time, some of them seemed to be work shy and to view the day atthe university mainly as a break from work at their agency and an oppor-tunity to recharge their batteries. A few told us that they had not knownwhat they had gotten themselves into, even though the project had beenexplained to them in detail before they started.
The situation deteriorated dramatically about two months into thecourse, when new demands were made on the participants and conceptualdifficulties arose. The emphasis of the workshops shifted from the partic-ipants themselves to their program plans, and the content of the instruc-tion became more task-oriented, covering such subjects as “developing alogic model,” “systematic planning,” and “program monitoring and
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evaluation.” In addition, the facilitators began to ask the participants forwritten documentation—of the program idea and program components, oftheir progress and the difficulties they encountered, and so forth.
At this point, the participants’ enthusiasm and involvement diminishedsubstantially, and many appeared to be burned out, anxious, and unre-sponsive. Attendance dropped. Those who did attend often came unpre-pared, without doing the homework assignments. Many were unwilling totalk about their programs in the small groups.
As we see it, these behaviors had three possible sources. One was theemotional risk inherent in putting one’s program in writing and sharing itwith others. For the participants, the act of writing—and to a lesserdegree, of speaking—about their programs seems to have been tanta-mount to a public declaration: “This is my program. This is what I plan todo.” It exposed the nature and the quality of their ideas, and opened themup to possible criticism. It was also a public declaration of their commit-ment to their programs, which would draw in its wake future expectationsand responsibilities.
The second source of their behavior seems to have been the conceptualdemands that were made at this point. One of our basic principles was thatdeveloping and implementing successful programs was not a hit-and-miss,work-out-the-details-as-you-go-along process. We firmly believe thatprograms have to be systematically planned from the very beginning,with the desired outcomes carefully and precisely articulated, the steps toattaining those outcomes formulated in advance, and the causal connec-tions between interventions and the desired outcomes clearly articulated.This does not mean that there can be no changes, but that the goals of theprogram must be clear and the connections between the goals and thesteps taken to achieve them spelled out. In other words, a good programmust have a “logic model” that guides its development and enables thedeveloper and others to monitor its progress (Alter & Egan, 1997; Alter &Murty, 1997; Mclaughlin & Jordan, 1999; Savaya & Waysman, 2005;Wholey, 1987).
The logic model was thus introduced early in the course in a workshopfollowed by practice sessions. The concept proved to be extremelydifficult. It is an abstract concept, and the detailed, methodical planning,analytic thinking, and articulation required to produce a logic model dif-fer radically from the way of working that the program participants wereaccustomed to in their day-to-day work with clients. That work oftenrequires rapid, unplanned actions and tends to be based on tacit, unarticu-lated knowledge. Some of the participants had difficulties in all the stages
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involved in the production of the logic model for their programs. Forexample, asked to describe the features of the population their programswould serve, some described the problems. Asked to articulate the desiredoutcomes of their programs, some told about the interventions. Many hadgreat difficulty detailing the inputs into their programs (e.g., labor, equip-ment, rents, and maintenance) and their costs, and indicating theirexpected sources of funding (e.g., government, contributions, payment bythe beneficiaries) and their amounts. For a good part of the year, many ofthe participants simply avoided doing the required work on the logicmodel.
These difficulties created tension in the classroom. Taking out theirfrustrations on the facilitators, some of the participants sunk into a kind ofhostile, demanding passivity. They claimed that the small groups were nothelping them, that they were not “getting” enough from the facilitators,that they wanted more “theoretical” information, that they did not feellike coming to class, and so forth.
The atmosphere began to change and the participants to forge aheadwith their programs about three quarters into the academic year. Thechange was led by a few participants who began to progress with theirprogram plans. This seems to have stimulated the others, who suddenly“switched gears.” Two things seem to have contributed to the switch. Onewas the facilitators’ combination of nurturing and containment with task-oriented demands. For all the participants’ lack of cooperation, thefacilitators continued to insist on performance, even as they permitted theparticipants to express their anger and frustrations. The other, we believe,was a workshop shortly before the change, in which we showed theparticipants, step by step, how to create and examine a logic model for asample program. This seems to have suddenly simplified what hadseemed like an abstract requirement and enabled the participants to com-plete their own models.
This brings us to the third source of the difficulties in the classroom—namely, that the initial instruction in the logic model was probably tootheoretical. It did not adequately convey the relevance of the concepts tothe participants’ work, did not include enough concrete examples of howto operationalize the concepts, and did not allow the participants enoughguided practice in doing so.
As a result of the various difficulties, the process took much longerthan planned. We had expected that the participants would be able tobegin introducing and marketing their programs at their places of work inthe last third of the first year. Most of the programs were not ready even
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by the end of the year. Although most of the participants had presentedinitial logic models of their programs by then, most had not yet conductedthe feasibility assessments and made the changes that had to precede theintroduction of the programs to the agencies.
The unexpectedly slow pace of the instruction and program designwould take their toll in the implementation stage of the project. Because ofthe extra time and energy that the project team had to invest in the programparticipants, only two workshops were held for the agency managers.
Issues in the Implementation Phase
The first signs of difficulty in the implementation phase actually arosein about the middle of the first year, when the participants started thinkingabout establishing infrastructures for their programs. It is at this point thatthey were confronted with the difficult realities of public social serviceagencies: the scarcity of resources, the slow pace at which the wheels ofthe bureaucracy turn, the inter- and intra- organizational politics andpower struggles, and the unpredictability of their work environment. Theybegan to experience a conflict between their desire to be social entrepre-neurs and their loyalty to the agencies that sponsored their participation inthe program.
As part of the instruction, the participants were taught that to success-fully implement their programs, they would have to create partnerships:that is, to attain the cooperation of their colleagues, the management oftheir agencies, and bodies in the community. As they started to try to mar-ket their programs and to build teams and coalitions, many of themencountered the hostility and opposition that are so typical when attemptsare made to introduce innovation into hidebound bureaucracies (Hasenfeld,1983). They began to comprehend the limitations of their current modesof professional practice and the deficiencies in their places of work. Someof them spoke aloud about changing jobs to some place that would putfewer obstacles in their way. Some, frustrated as well by the emotionaldemands of self-exposure and the conceptual demands of producing asystematically planned program, began to question the wisdom of theirenrolling in the project.
Further difficulties arose in the second year of the project, when theparticipants encountered two chief hurdles. The main one, reported by allthe participants, was a greatly increased workload resulting from themany details that they had to handle by themselves. These ranged fromsuch things as making phone calls and arranging meetings to the work
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involved in forming and attending committees and raising funds. The par-ticipants reported draining conflicts between the ongoing responsibilitiesof their jobs and the demands stemming from their efforts to implementtheir programs. They complained bitterly that there was little understandingon the part of their agency heads—or their colleagues, for that matter—ofthe simple fact that developing and implementing a new program requiresthe allocation of substantial time and resources. Some worked on theimplementation of their programs in their own time; others “stole” timefrom their ongoing agency work.
The other hurdle was a general lack of cooperation, sometimes vergingon obstructiveness, on all sides. With their colleagues, their introductionof their programs intensified the competition and power struggles that arepart and parcel of working in any bureaucracy. As one participantdescribed it, “You move the rock, and all the snakes come out fromunderneath.” Participants told of jealousy and hostility on the part of theirco-workers. Some told of losing friends. They said their coworkers weregenerally unwilling to help the program along and resented the extra workthat it created for them in addition to their already heavy workloads.
The agency managements were not as cooperative as we had hoped for,either. Despite the written commitment obtained from the agency heads toactively promote the implementation of the participants’ programs and toraise funds for them, almost half the participants reported that theiragency administrations contributed nothing at all to these ends, and asmall portion stated that they actively thwarted the programs. Oneproblem was that while we obtained pledges from the agency heads, theparticipants had to go through a thick layer of middle managers. They hadto get authorizations from one person after another, each with different,and sometimes inappropriate, demands, variously stemming from thatindividual’s personal views of how the program should look, and/or fromhis or her political interests or ego requirements. Moreover, several par-ticipants reported that managers took credit for the program and co-optedit to further their own interests.
Similar hurdles arose when it came to getting the cooperation of otheragencies and services, each with its own interests and agenda and oftencompeting for the same funds. Funding bodies also posed a problem here,in that some of them demanded input into the programs without necessarilyunderstanding their logic.
The problems of cooperation were intensified by organizationalfactors: strikes and personnel turnover, which delayed implementationand the endemic shortage of resources common to social services. These
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not only forced compromises in some of the programs, but also made theinnovative programs competitors for scarce resources.
Some of the obstacles were overcome with the help of the facilitators,who did on-site intervention in several instances. For example, in one casethey helped to bring disparate services to cooperate in a single project. Inanother instance, one of the facilitators used her personal ties with a servicemanager to persuade her to authorize a program she had intended to prevent.
The obstacles to the implementation of the programs turned out to bemuch greater than we had expected. We assumed that as experienced pro-fessionals who had worked for many years in the system, the participantswould be able to handle the organizational difficulties that arose. Weassumed that if they acquired the skills needed to develop and implementinnovative programs, they would be able to go ahead and do this. Just tomake sure that they would be able to, we signed on the heads of theirservices. Neither assumption bore out.
We had not sufficiently prepared the participants to anticipate and meetthe obstacles. The participants reported feeling frustrated, let down, andemotionally and physically exhausted. Some felt that they were not cutout to be entrepreneurs—that they were too yielding, not persistent ormanipulative enough, not political creatures, not fighters.
From the participants’ feedback, we are now coming to realize thatvery different skills and personality features may be needed to develop aprogram and to implement it. The first requires a capacity for identifyingproblems and for creative and analytical problem solving. The secondrequires doggedness, political skills, and perhaps a thick skin. Trainingpairs or teams of innovators may be one way of increasing the likelihoodthat both sets of traits will be available. More intensive training in suchthings as circumventing obstacles and opposition, and rallying coopera-tion and building coalitions, may also be of use.
The feedback also brings home Gibson’s (2005) caution against tryingto implement change through those at the top and the bottom of a hierar-chy without the middle system—that is the management—being ade-quately persuaded or involved.
THE PROGRAMS: A BRIEF OVERVIEW
The difficulties notwithstanding, at the end of the second year 13 out of20 programs were in the process of being implemented. By the end of thethird year, seven of the 13 were providing full services; three were
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providing some of the services that they had planned; and three were con-tinuing to build their infrastructures. Four types of programs were created.
One consisted of structures, either physical centers or organizationalarrangements, for the holistic treatment of children and families. For exam-ple, the psychiatrist in our group was concerned that children with psychiat-ric problems and their families were often treated by several differentcommunity agencies, with the result that the diagnoses and treatment wereoften poorly coordinated and that the children did not get the treatment theyneeded. To address this issue, she set up an interdisciplinary team consist-ing of professionals from different agencies to carry out joint diagnoses andto decide together on the treatment and the agency best suited to deliver it.
Another type of program was the “adoption” of struggling persons byvolunteers. For example, one program established a nationwide “bank” ofdeaf people to help other deaf persons integrate into their communities.Another program in this category mobilized well-functioning families toadopt and assist families with children at risk.
The third type was a prevention program. The single example of thistype is a home accident prevention program established by a nurse in aDruze community.
The fourth type consisted of a variety of community support centers foradolescents in distress. One such program was a “therapeutic café,” in whichthe “waiters” and “waitresses” would be social workers and psychologists.Another addressed the difficulties of parents who had adopted olderchildren whose adolescent rebellion was so extreme that the parentssometimes asked the agency to take them back. This program provided athree-month, out-of-home shelter for the children, along with treatmentfor the children and parents for the duration.
The programs vary in their innovativeness and entrepreneurship. Theholistic services in the first category and the round-the-clock service inthe fourth category both entail fundamental changes in the way social ser-vices are delivered in Israel. The other programs were new to their agen-cies and communities. All the programs, however, address problems thatwere not being addressed by the social service agencies, or anyone else, inthe community where the project participants work.
DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Most of the literature speaks of changing the organization to make it moreamenable to creativity and innovation. Because we saw the organization as
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an environment that discouraged growth and innovation, and whichwould be virtually impossible to change from within, we decided to focuson the individual workers—to remove workers from the disabling organi-zational environment to a supportive and enabling environment outsidethe organization where they would be able to develop their ideas. Weviewed the worker as the agent of change, both within the organizationand within the community.
The project was characterized by a combination of a firm structure,created by very careful and detailed planning, and a great deal of flexibilityand constant change. We noted above some of the curriculum changesthat were made in response to the participants’ needs. In a similar vein,the direct intervention of the facilitators in overcoming some of the obsta-cles in the intervention phase had not been planned in advance. In fact, inthe course of the project the role of the facilitators expanded considerablyfrom their jobs as instructors and providers of advice and emotional sup-port. When the need arose, they became involved in such activities asreferring the participants to possible sources of funding and meeting withother people involved in the programs. The hands-on involvement thatdeveloped expanded the traditional cooperation between the universityand the social services from one that focused primarily on field training toone in which the university became an active partner and promoter ofprogram development. The flexibility that the project incorporated, andespecially the active troubleshooting of the facilitators, changed the natureof the project from a simple training project to a joint endeavor betweenthe university and the field for the creation of new social programs.
The ability of the project to change to meet the evolving needs of theparticipants stems, in part, from our creation of a learning environmentwithin the project. This environment consisted of three circles: the Profes-sional Advisory Committee, the project staff, and the participants. Theproject was a learning experience not only for the participants, but for theplanners and instructors as well. The three groups were in constant interac-tion so that the learning that occurred and the ideas that arose in each groupimpacted on the work of the other groups. This close interaction made itpossible to identify needs as they emerged and to act to meet them.
At the same time, several recommendations may be offered to addressthe problems that arose in the course of the training and implementationof the programs.
1. Risk aversion, making participants reluctant to commit their ideas topaper. This problem arose when experienced practitioners with well-formed professional identities had to cope with the new and unfamiliar
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challenges of the course. Their attendant uncertainties threatened theirself-image as knowledgeable and competent in their fields. To tackle thisproblem, it is important, first of all, to anticipate it and to understand itsunderlying dynamic. From here, a two-pronged approach is recom-mended: continued support and containment for the course participants,along with the clear message that the task they undertook may requirethem to think in new and unaccustomed ways about their professionalpractice and program development. Legitimization of their anxietiesshould be accompanied by active assistance, at least until they attain themastery and self-confidence to handle the tasks on their own.
2. Difficulty grasping the requirements of program planning as con-ceptualized in the logic model, with the result that participants could notreadily use the model to guide them in planning their programs. A keysource of this problem was probably that the cognitive requirements stem-ming from the abstractness of the logic model and the analytic thinkingand articulation required to execute it differ substantially from theimplicit “practice wisdom” employed in the helping professions. Part ofthe solution would thus seem to be the same message that we recommendto help overcome the participants’ risk aversion—the need to changehabitual ways of thinking.
Furthermore, certain changes in the way we taught the logic modelmight be desirable. In the workshop where it was initially introduced, thelogic model was taught in conjunction with an exercise in which the par-ticipants created a program in class to address a hypothetical social prob-lem. The purpose of this exercise was to bring home the idea that goodprograms cannot be created off-the-cuff, but require systematic planning.The logic model was taught on their impromptu programs. In retrospect, itseems that while the need for systematic planning was adequately con-veyed, the many details of the logic model were lost as the participantswere absorbed in their impromptu programs. We thus recommend teach-ing the logic model separately on an existing program.
Finally, the facilitators should anticipate the conceptual difficulties ofthe logic model even where participants do not actually speak of them,and actively try to identify and help participants who are stuck or con-fused. Once they have introduced the logic model, they should employ itsterminology when discussing the participants’ programs and actively helpthe participants to think about and construct their programs in accord withthe model’s terms and requirements.
3. The slew of problems participants encountered with their agenciesand other partners. Given the nature of bureaucratic organizations, it is
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highly unlikely that the obstructionism and lack of cooperation stemmingfrom envy, self-interest, and politicking can be eradicated. Nor, given cur-rent economic realities, is it likely that opposition stemming from scantresources will be much alleviated. However, steps may be taken both tomake their environment somewhat more friendly to innovation and tohelp the entrepreneurs-in-training to better cope with the environment.
With respect to the environment, we suggest including agency manag-ers at all levels and other partners in the university project, with the aim ofencouraging greater openness to innovation, familiarizing them with theprocesses of social entrepreneurialism and the resources required for it,and giving them a stake in promoting the participants’ projects. The inclu-sion might be effected by separate lectures and workshops for managersand other partners, as well as by joint sessions with the project partici-pants. In addition, the role of the facilitators might be expanded frommanaging crises on an ad hoc basis, as occurred in our project, to helping,on a regular, ongoing basis, to promote understanding and resolve con-flicts between the aspiring entrepreneurs and their various partners.
The entrepreneurs-in-training may be helped to better cope with theobstacles to innovation in their environments by greater attention todeveloping skills and strategies that we found to characterize the creatorsof the successful programs. These include: a) understanding of the organi-zations they work in; b) patience and tolerance for the organization’scumbersome dynamics; c) ability to create partnerships, both in theagency and the community; d) formulation of the program aims in a posi-tive way so as to increase its attractiveness; e) holding fast to a few basicprinciples of their programs, enabling work with partners without sacri-ficing essentials; and f) creating low-budget programs, including bybuilding on existing infrastructures.
It may also be worthwhile to emphasize the personal qualities that char-acterized the successful entrepreneurs. The two main ones are a) motiva-tion to devote the necessary effort and readiness to take full (but not sole)responsibility for their programs; and b) mental flexibility, manifested inopenness to new concepts, readiness to change their conceptual schemas,and ability to adapt their ideas to the limitations of reality. In addition,greater attention to the tools of financial planning (e.g., knowledge of costsand how to obtain information) should be useful, so as to enable the partic-ipants to understand and adapt to the economic constraints of their agencyand to design programs whose costs suit the resources available.
The writers hope that this overview will encourage other experimentsto develop social entrepreneurship in public human service agencies.
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Such efforts should fill an important social need, while enabling thedevelopment of a hitherto unavailable body of knowledge regardingcapacity building among human service workers in the public domain.
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