budget season

Had a wonderful time with y'all last week. Thanks for inviting me.

Since then, my journey from the warm, safe environment of the classroom led to an afternoon finishing up our plan for advocacy day in Albany on March 18th and trying to work out how the most recent havoc in the statehouse might impact our budget. Meanwhile, there are applications to make to city council for discretionary funds, grants to write, relationships to build and maintain, a press release i'm burning to get out, and Oh Dear, an event to plan.

I think here, in my 30s, is where i've really started to think about work as a career, and mostly the reasons have to do with personality (never was a careerist); but a contributing factor is the reality of this planet-like-in-size world of human services spanning issues of hunger, poverty, mental illness, the real estate market, policy, press, building maintenance, and government, to name a few. The emotional and intellectual investment goes waaaay beyond my days at Mitsubishi EDM where i took a beginning level engineering class to learn to work an EDM machine (metal cutting) or the days off-Broadway working until close to midnight at least a third of the year. There is no One Thing we're selling here. It is not a machine. It is not a play. We can't measure our success in dollars. Well, we could, but it would go against our mission and the natures of the people i work with.

But what we can do is experience true emotion from our work, sometimes sadness, sometimes joy. And i really get into that. That's not to say that NYC theatre artists don't experience it or machine tool engineer manufacturers don't (they do!), but this is a career all about people -not machines, not art. This is the work that in their twilight year retirees are referring to when they say, I'd like to volunteer somewhere and help people, or disillusioned lawyers up-and-quit their job and join the Peace Corp to be a part of. It's hard, but i like it.

Hope this bit of confessionalism isn't too off-topic for the blog. Thanks if you read this far.

On the question of illegals in supportive housing - sometimes, illegals do end up in supportive housing, which means they cannot get benefits to pay for their rent and the company housing them would either eat the cost or evict them. I would think that a company whose mission is to house the homeless would have a difficult time doing the latter.