In a true sign of the times, i was on Twitter when one of the users i follow posted a link to this San Francisco Chronicle Article. The article describes how SF is flushed with non-profit organizations (NGOs) who have contracts with the city to provide social services and how SF is considering cutting funding entirely to some of those organizations as a way to deal with their budget deficit.
The hard truth is there are far too many service providers for this relatively small city. They duplicate efforts, they don’t have enough oversight, and they spend hundreds of millions of city dollars.
Now – and here’s the tough part – with the city facing a historic $483 million deficit, some of them are going to have to go. Or, as the San Francisco Community-Based Organizations Task Force put it in April 2009, they need to be “encouraged to identify their placement within the nonprofit life cycle, and contemplate the possibility of closure.”
Close service organizations? Let the howls of protest begin.
