"Just 54?"

Thoughts on our obsession with numbers

Sometime last year, a wonderful IFT volunteer here in New York invited me to speak at her synagogue.

As long as my schedule has availability, I’m a big believer in showing up, whether it’s as a speaker at a national rally or a small, local fundraiser. Honestly, it’s all the same to me because magic happens everywhere.

**

But it’s not all magic. At almost every event there’s that one person: the one who either flat out doesn’t like you or what you’re doing, or the one who would rather tell you about how you could do it (whatever the “it” is!) better. They may be well-meaning or they might be malicious, but most often, they’re just projecting their own sense of helplessness because it’s easier to criticize and question another person than it is to make decisions and take action.

**

As I was giving the talk at Temple Tikvah, I was aware of someone in the back of the room who didn’t seem to be as taken with the story of IFT as most people in the synagogue. Their arms were folded — defensively, I thought — across their chest. Their posture was slouchy. Their expression: something between a smirk and a sneer.

I wrapped up my speech and invited the members of the synagogue to share their thoughts and questions. The person in the back raised their hand immediately. I might have grabbed the podium with both hands to steady myself. “Yes?” I asked, dreading what was to come.

“JUST 54?” they said. “You’ve only posted bond for 54 people?”

**

I don’t always have a range of responses at the ready. In fact, I’m usually the person who only thinks of the right response hours or days after the moment in which it was necessary or would have had greatest impact, has already passed.

My first (unspoken) response: “ONLY 54? Are you kidding? We haven’t even been doing this work for a year, so our average is better than one person per week!”

The exasperated response, however, is rarely the useful one, and, in fact, I had a better one this time. What the commenter couldn’t see right away unless I found a way to explain it to them, was that IFT was better than the starfish story! Posting bond for one person — or 54— is never just about a single person being “saved.” That person’s freedom touched upon the lives of so many other people — five to ten of them at the very least. Their freedom made the security, safety, and success of several other people’s lives more likely, and so those 54 people were, conservatively speaking, actually having an impact on more than 500 lives. “Not too shabby when you think about it,” I said cheerfully.

**

I felt confident in my answer at Temple Tikvah because I knew it was true. I’d seen how the act of paying bond for 54 people rippled outward. And it wasn’t just the families of the folks for whom we’d posted bond who were affected. It also included folks who were inspired by IFT and who’d taken actions to help still more people. If the person wanted to continue their line of questioning — and they did, pulling me aside for more interrogation during the coffee social following the service — I could handle it… and I did.

**

Just 54.

A couple days before January 1, 2020, IFT paid its 102nd bond. In the big scheme of things, I’m sure the person from Temple Tikvah would still find cause to raise their eyebrows. All things considered, 102 is also a small number.

And, in fact, they haven’t been the only one to wondered whether we can do better. Each time I talk with a funder, their words of praise are typically followed by a word I’ve started to dread: scale.

“How can we help you grow?” they ask. “We want to help you to scale,” they say.

The intentions, of course, are well-meaning and understandable. If an all-volunteer group of mostly moms who also hold down full-time jobs can get so much done in such a short time with limited experiences and resources, imagine what we could do if we just had the support to scale! Why wouldn’t we want that?

**

One of the reasons I left the field of social work nearly 16 years ago was, in large part, because of the false assumptions involved with economies of scale. Most agencies and most of their staff members, tried to do too much. It wasn’t because they wanted to, necessarily, or because they thought it was best for the people they were serving. Instead, it was because they were beholden to a funding source, which was providing an infusion of cash (usually for a very limited period of time), and that funding source defined success not by long-term qualitative outcomes, but by quantitative ones… namely, how many people were served in X period of time. Meanwhile, programs that could have had powerful impact, often didn’t — not for clinicians’ lack of effort, but for the lack of time they had to implement those programs… and for the lack of privileging qualitative objectives over quantitative ones.

**

After our first few bonds, I realized that raising money and paying for bonds was the easy part.

It was everything that came after that was hard.

Bringing traumatized families back together after a harrowing experience they never expected; in a geographical, social, linguistic, and cultural context that was unfamiliar to most of them; with limited supports extended to them… that was the tough stuff. And very quickly, I understood that if these families were to have a real shot at two things — (1) building a safe and stable life and (2) pursuing their asylum claims — it meant that we would need to marshal resources, both human and financial, to really support them for an extended period of time. It was comprehensive case management, and it was intensive.

What if it wasn’t about doing more of that — by a magnitude of thousands — but, instead, doing it really, really well?

**
When I left the field of social work, I was disillusioned. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I was devastated. As I sat on my kitchen floor and cried on my last night as a social worker, I realized that the reason I was crying was because I’d believed so wholeheartedly that “changing the world” was possible. What it took me still longer to learn was that changing the world actually happens by creating change in the smallest circles that are closest to you, and then, bit by bit, letting that change ripple out into ever-widening concentric circles. It happens when you’re focused on quality and depth of care rather than a simple tally of numbers.