All posts by James W. Breckenridge

Other Writers, Poverty

Businessman – altruist

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IN 1990, Steven T. Bigari was running a string of McDonald’s franchises in Colorado Springs and spending most of his working hours thinking about the big bad wolf at his door, otherwise known as Taco Bell, which was killing his business with a promotional menu of items costing only 59 cents each

One day, the restaurants’ owner, Brent Cameron, who was also his mentor and friend, sat down with him over breakfast at one of the franchises, just off Highway 83. “O.K., Steve, what’s your plan?” he asked.

Mr. Bigari outlined the situation, and it was dire: their operations were hemorrhaging cash. Then he presented a plan to cut costs by eliminating, among other things, paid vacations for crew members. What happened next would change Mr. Bigari’s life.

“Brent politely asked me to step into the vestibule and he stuck his finger in my face and used a foul word for one of the three times I ever heard one cross his lips,” Mr. Bigari said. “He said, ‘You can afford to give up your rizzing-razzing vacation, but they can’t, so I hope you have a better plan than that.’ ”

Mr. Bigari said he got the message: take care of your people. It was a message that stuck with him even after Mr. Cameron died and Mr. Bigari became a top McDonald’s franchisee himself — eventually owning 12 stores, three patents and a reputation for clever ideas, like letting customers pay with credit cards and outsourcing the drive-through. Even as his business grew, he kept Mr. Cameron’s crew benefits in place, and began adding to them.

Indeed, over time, he went much further. He created a system to help resolve the problems of the working poor who staffed his restaurants by pulling together or creating an array of services, from arranging day care to organizing transportation to making small emergency loans. The goal, he said, was to keep his employees on the job and focused on customers.

Now he is trying to persuade others to offer this kind of help to their workers, not as an act of kindness or charity but as a way to reduce employee turnover and increase profit — as, he said, it did for him.

This is a major challenge. After all, American business culture tends to focus on employees at the top, not at the bottom. And many don’t want to be told that they pay workers poverty-level wages. Mr. Bigari says he thinks that they will see the light when they see the return they can get from helping the working poor, both as employees and as customers.

MR. BIGARI, 47, is an unlikely candidate to save the working poor. He is a millionaire who lives in Colorado Springs, a politically conservative city that is far from the coastal enclaves of most social entrepreneurs, the catch phrase for people who come up with innovative, nongovernmental ways to address social problems. He has the no-nonsense short hair and straight back of a West Point graduate. (He was in the class of 1982.)

He acknowledged that his employees’ pay scale — an average of $7 an hour in 2006, when he sold his stores — was less than a living wage in Colorado Springs, which he estimated at $12 an hour. He said that competitive pressures and overhead costs, including loan payments and licensing fees, prevented him from offering more, though he said he paid 25 to 75 cents an hour more than other local fast-food outlets.

It is true that Mr. Bigari is relentlessly upbeat. The only time he recalls taking failure personally was in high school, when his football team, which had not lost a game in the three years he was a player, was crushed in a state semifinal. (He still remembers the name of the opposing player he could not block.) He was traumatized, but he eventually realized he had learned a great deal from this setback. He has created in himself an ability to see beyond failures, which he says he has all the time, and treat them as lessons learned.

Over the last three years, he has moved his life in a different direction to help achieve his goal. He spent one year on a social entrepreneurship fellowship, sold his McDonald’s franchises to devote himself fully to his nonprofit organization, America’s Family, and received backing from a venture philanthropy fund.

He had no such plans a decade ago, when he decided to continue Mr. Cameron’s practice of making small, short-term no-interest personal loans to his employees to help them pay their rent, buy tires or meet other immediate needs. (He says he lent about $30,000 a year for 10 years, and only $960 was not paid back.)

Back then, his goal was not to be a high-minded social entrepreneur or even an old-fashioned do-gooder. He just wanted to reduce employee turnover — the rates could hit 300 percent a year — by easing some of the problems that led so many of his workers to miss shifts or to quit.

He did more than lend money: he worked with a local church to set up day care, and he educated employees about public services available to low-wage workers — in some cases, available to those whose incomes are up to 200 percent of poverty level.

Reliable transportation was a near-universal problem for workers, so he started sneaking out to police auctions during lunch on Saturdays, the busiest period in his restaurants, to look for cheap and dependable cars. At first, he resold them at cost to his employees, then experimented with renting them to workers. He has tried other approaches, but has settled on having the foundation take in donated cars, then sell them to a local dealer who fixes them up and resells them to employees.
By 2001, Mr. Bigari was calling his collection of programs McFamily Benefits, and it worked well, for his employees and for him. So well, in fact, that three professors at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs studied the program.

They found that from 2000 to 2002, turnover rates fell sharply at all of Mr. Bigari’s restaurants; three had rates at or below 100 percent. All of the employees who used some part of the programs said they felt motivated to work harder. In the same period, his profit margin rose more than three percentage points.

Debra Powell, a divorced mother of five who managed one of Mr. Bigari’s restaurants, said the program helped many of her crew workers, which in turn made her job easier. She herself had money problems, and Mr. Bigari found a budgeting course at a local nonprofit agency; it worked so well for her that she required all the managers in her store take it, partly because many of them had never had checking accounts.

She used Mr. Bigari’s program in 2003 to get a loan for a personal computer and in 2004 to buy the first car she had ever purchased, a used Chevrolet Cavalier she still drives.

She says she misses Mr. Bigari at work, though she receives bigger bonuses now that the McDonald’s Corporation runs her store. (Franchisees pay rent and licensing fees to the corporation that can total 16 percent of gross receipts, Mr. Bigari said. Company-owned stores do not have to pay, so they can be more generous to employees.)

“I would trade the money to go work for him again,” Ms. Powell said. “He’s not in it for himself; he’s in it for the people.”

Inevitably, some of the people he helps suffer setbacks and cannot honor their obligations. Keeping track of them began to consume more and more of his workday, and those of some of his store managers. “That’s when we knew we had to change the model,” he said.

In 2002, the same year he remarried (he and his first wife divorced in 2000), Mr. Bigari morphed McFamily Benefits into an independent nonprofit group called America’s Family. He chose the name because the goal was to offer the working poor the kind of guidance and support that traditionally came from families.

He arranged for a local car dealer to create a used-car warranty program for participants, and persuaded a local credit union to make loans for things like cars and computers, and to make small, short-term loans so that employees could break free from rapacious payday lenders.

America’s Family had to guarantee the loans, but it was helping employees to build credit histories, even though many of them had never before used a bank. He also began working more directly with local charities and government agencies to ensure that employees who needed services got them, sometimes even persuading government offices to change their operating hours to help meet workers’ needs.

HE also began talking to local businesses about using America’s Family. His first takers were two business owners who went to his church, Springs Community Church, part of the mainline Reformed Church in America. But, as even he has acknowledged, his plan needed a lot of work.

“Steve is a rah-rah-everything’s-wonderful-here’s-what-we’re-going-to-do type of guy, and he’s got this vision in his head, but it was difficult to get it boiled down for business owners,” said Rebecca Kolb, who sells and supports janitorial franchises for a company called Jan-Pro.

Ms. Kolb says that Mr. Bigari has refined his message and expanded America’s Family’s offerings in the last five years, and that she can now see clearly that it helps her franchisees retain employees. When Mr. Bigari is ready to expand America’s Family nationally, she said, she will ask Jan-Pro to adopt it.

He was spending more time on his charity efforts, but Mr. Bigari said he had no thought of selling his McDonald’s franchises until he became an Ashoka fellow in late 2004. “This would’ve just been a cool hobby if Ashoka hadn’t come along,” he said. Ashoka International finances social entrepreneurs worldwide.

Trabian Shorters, a co-director of Ashoka U.S., said the group was drawn to Mr. Bigari by the unabashed scope of his dream. “Steve wants to fix working poverty, period, for everybody,” Mr. Shorters said. “That’s audacious, but he means it.”

Barbara R. Kazdan, Ashoka U.S.’s other co-director, credited Mr. Bigari’s nonprofit group with devising a systemic rethinking of how to help the working poor. “He looked at the whole system that low-income people were caught up in and wanted to create a different kind of system to give them the support they need,” she said.

As an Ashoka fellow, Mr. Bigari stepped aside from his franchises for a year to focus full time on his foundation. After his fellowship ended, in early 2006, he returned to his business. At one point, he told Mr. Shorters that one of his McDonald’s outlets had bested a rival franchisee’s record for serving customers at a drive-through — 371 in one hour. Mr. Shorters congratulated him, then asked, “How do you top that?”

That got Mr. Bigari thinking about what he was doing with his life. Last February, at Mr. Shorters’s urging, he went to a social entrepreneurship conference called the Gathering of Leaders, organized by New Profit Inc., a philanthropic venture fund. He left the meeting convinced that he should become a full-time social entrepreneur, and by June had sold his McDonald’s franchises.

That kind of speed reflects how Mr. Bigari likes to move. He jokes that he operates on Bigari Standard Time, which is a bit like life stuck in fast-forward. He is a consultant and a motivational speaker. He wrote and self-published a book about his ideas, “The Box You Got,” in three months, after a conference organizer asked if he had a book that it could give to those in attendance.

When Mr. Bigari got a too-good-to-be-true deal on a headquarters building for America’s Family in Colorado Springs, he bought it in spite of the fact that it was 135,000 square feet too large. Then he brainstormed with friends and associates to build a mini-theme park called Mr. Biggs Family Fun Center, complete with laser tag, Go Kart racing and other diversions, and had it up and running in less than six months. (Biggs is his nickname, and he likes to talk about Bigg ideas; a sample: “If you are afraid of failure, get over it. Everybody fails.”

Mr. Shorters says it is not unusual for social entrepreneurs to juggle several projects that may seem unrelated. Tom West, an investor who is chairman of Exit41 Inc., a point-of-sale software company that has worked with Mr. Bigari, said in all seriousness: “You don’t want 100 percent of Steve. Ideally, you want maybe 12 percent of him.” (Exit41 helped him develop a call center that saved money by consolidating the taking of drive-through orders from his McDonald’s outlets.)

Mr. Bigari notes that he is using the restaurant in his amusement center to train chefs and other food-service workers, and that his speaking gigs can motivate businesses to pay attention to low-income workers, whom he calls “the invisible people.”

Mr. Bigari says that he is at a starting point for the foundation, with a long road ahead; Ms. Kolb and others who know him said he has to prove that he can make the ideas work at businesses where the owners aren’t part of his social network. He is using a $250,000, two-year investment from New Profit to expand his staff and develop his foundation’s business model. He recently hired a sixth employee at America’s Family, which has an annual budget of about $500,000.

HE is also starting to sign up celebrity advocates who can help build his foundation’s profile. His first is Daryl Simmons, a producer and songwriter, whom he met while negotiating a real estate deal. Mr. Simmons said he, too, had helped employees to buy cars and to learn about financial management. But, he added, “I’ve only done a crumb of what he’s done.”

For his part, Mr. Bigari says he is inspired by people like Joseph Johnson, who had to drop out of college after a family emergency. After working for a time in Phoenix, he sought a job at a McDonald’s in Colorado Springs where Mr. Bigari was then the operations manager, becoming operations manager himself when Mr. Bigari became an owner. Today, at 37, Mr. Johnson owns his own McDonald’s, one of the franchises that Mr. Bigari sold in June. (The McDonald’s Corporation bought the rest.)

Mr. Johnson says that Mr. Bigari is a genuine leader, one who had no compunction about pitching in alongside minimum-wage workers at a fry station or behind a counter. “The one thing we could all appreciate about him was he wasn’t just the guy who would vision up something — he’d be the guy who was there to execute it, too,” he said. “You weren’t calling him in his timeshare in Hawaii; he was right there next to you.”

Mr. Bigari says he knows he is tackling a far bigger problem than a McDonald’s franchise has to face — a point he illustrates with a story about a beach strewn with starfish. A boy is throwing them back in the ocean, one by one, when a man comes by and says: “What are you doing? You can’t possibly make a difference here.”

Without looking up or pausing, the boy picks up another starfish, tosses it in the ocean and says, “Did for that one.”

Daryl Simmons, a producer and songwriter, said he, too, had helped some of his employees to buy cars and to learn about financial management.

Debra Powell, a mother of five who manages a McDonald’s in Colorado Springs, used the America’s Family program to get a loan to buy a PC and a car. She said the program also helped many of her crew workers.

Homeless, Other Writers

Homelessness

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a speech by Bobbie Breckenridge

It’s the worst storm of the year, you’re scrambling to find shelter away from the cold. As you run down the street feeling the frost bite spread through out your body, you look up and see the house you used to own. You pause for just a second to see the happy family sitting around the fireplace warm and toasty so innocent and wonder What would their parents do if their little girl was homeless?? (pause) Good afternoon/morning Mr.T and fellow classmates today I will be talking about the very sad but realistic growing problem in today’s society “Homelessness”. Many people suffer from homelessness each day. You may see them on the streets of Toronto begging for money. What you might not know is that 5052 people are homeless in Toronto alone. Across Canada is an estimated 150,000 people who are homeless. Now think all those people have families and friends who love them. You might be wondering why these people don’t turn to their family and friends for help. Well there are many reasons that people don’t go to there relatives and stay homeless for long periods of time. One reason is that a majority of homeless people are mentally ill. Another reason is that a lot of the homeless are alcohol and substance abusers. The other reasons are: Unemployment, poverty and low paying jobs. The vast majority of the homeless are not living on the street. Many are sleeping in church basements, abandoned buildings and vehicles and in other places away from the public.
Here’s an eye opener 1 in 7 people who are in shelters are children just like us. They unlike us suffer from lack of education and physical abuse. Most of them will grow up to be nothing but there are an odd few that become very rich and have great lives. The pursuit of happiness is a great example of this. This amazing life changing film has a significant meaning and shows that if you work hard enough it will pay off. If you’re saying to yourself right now yeah this all may be true but why don’t they go get a job? Well if you think about it, when you go for a job interview the necessary things needed are: good hygiene (you don’t want to smell bad), proper clothes, a resume (which needs a computer), a phone (so they can call you back) and an address. Even if you do get the job you need five days worth of clean clothes, you need to be rested and be fed in order to concentrate on your work. Plus it will take a couple of months before you have enough money to rent affordable housing. By the end of all that you would probably be fired. Here are some facts on homelessness: Children under 18 make up 27% of the homeless, people from the age of 3 to 50 make up 51% of the homelessness, here’s a scary one 50% of the homeless are women and children running from domestic abuse. So next time you see someone on the street think about everything I’ve said. Think everyone has a different story another tale and all you have to do is take the time and try to think how can I help the on growing problem??? What can I do???

Municipal

Re: Moe Gill

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Will wonders never cease? Or – one councillor down, eight to go plus the senior staff. After a moment of revelation Moe Gill has come to realize that money that comes out of the pockets of taxpayers and is spent on Plan A is part of the cost of Plan A. This realization of basic financial reality has already added an additional $12 million to the cost taxpayers will incur on Plan A.

Now if it were only possible for the other members of the Abbotsford City Hall glee(fully spend taxpayers money) club to comprehend that money taken from taxpayers and spent is a cost. This includes the hundreds of thousands (a million+?) spent on consultants, business trips, advertising, parties, staff wages and bonuses for Plan A.

Although it occurs to me, after watching $12 million appear out of nowhere for items related to Plan A that Abbotsford City Hall want to hide as not a Plan A cost; the least costly out-of-pocket solution for taxpayers on Plan A maybe to declare Plan A will cost nada/nothing/nil. That way we just have to wait for the $85 million to magically appear, or be found lying around, as was the $12 million for other non-costs such as land and a parkade.

Personally I would really like to know where all these millions come from and how much more is sitting hidden in limbo awaiting council’s convenience. Property owners may be curious as to why it was property taxes took such a jump when there was at least $12 million, plus who knows how many millions more, just lying around for incidentals like land or parkades. Maybe it is time citizens demanded the city Auditors make a thorough public report to and answer questions from those they have a duty of care to – the taxpayers of Abbotsford.

Provincial

MLA gold diggers.

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So our MLA’s are once again trying to chow down deeper from the public trough. This time they have concocted a very clever scheme to cover their posteriors with the public. We now have a “independent” triumvirate appointed to apply whitewash to the MLA’s quest for salary increases.

Two points to keep in mind about this so-called independent review. The first is that they are chosen by the government, not through a random or “blind” selection process. I do not see anyone on the review that is known as being anti-raise to represent the “they are already overpaid” point of view. Why am I not surprised? Second, where is the ordinary citizen represented on this committee or is the salary issue “to complex” for them to understand.

Salary raises should be earned by accomplishment. Have you needed medical services lately? Health care system crisis; growing homelessness and poverty; people being squeezed out of homeownership due to astronomical prices; a growing crisis of affordable housing – people who even with full time employment who cannot afford housing; the list goes on and on. Address or better yet come up with innovative solutions to these issues THEN talk to me about deserving a pay raise.

I see nothing from ANY of our provincial politicians that suggests they deserve or are worthy of a pay raise.

If they find it to tough to live on their $83,000, perks and benefits let them do what many of those whose tax dollars pay their salary are forced to do when faced with needing extra money – get a second job. Wal-Mart, McDonalds are always looking for people which would both put them in up close and personal contact with the citizens and deliver to them a reminded/sharp lesson on real life for the non-privileged politician.

Homeless

What is/who are the homeless?

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We throw the term homeless around without stopping to think about exactly what the word homeless means. The way we view the homeless issue, the policies we design to deal with the issue and the effectiveness of these policies in reducing homelessness and its related social ills is directly affected by the definition of homeless. Defining homeless incorrectly will disguise the cause of these social ills resulting in misdiagnoses, with the result that your course of treatment or action will have no effect, may in fact worsen or perpetuate these ills.

Let’s frame this in terms of something we all have experience with: the common cold. Colds are viruses but many people run to their doctors demanding antibiotics to “cure” them in the mistaken belief antibiotics will cure a cold. The antibiotics have no effect on the cold, but as we have learned to our grief using antibiotics in this way has led to the development of super bacteria which many of our overused medications no longer affect.

If we look at the common cold as to what its true nature is, a virus, we know that frequent washing of hands and an awareness of how viruses spread is effective in combating the common cold. Similarly we need to define or see homeless in a way that reveals its true nature before we can begin to “cure” it.

Stop and consider for a moment: what is meant by homeless and of far more significance what should be meant by homeless. The definitions below are from Webster’s dictionary. Unfortunately for both the homeless, who remain homeless, and the taxpayers, whose money is wasted in ineffectual manners, politicians and policy makers focus on or use “sleep in the streets, parks, etc.”

Homeless: adj. having no home; without a permanent place of residence.

**the homeless: those typically poor or sometimes mentally ill people who are unable to maintain a place to live and therefore often may sleep in the streets, parks, etc.

The result of this is programs and actions such as the current focus on outreach programs designed to get the homeless into housing. Get them a place to stay and you have success right? Wrong. Placing somebody into housing when they are “unable to maintain a place to live” is a pointless exercise. It gives the appearance of doing something and taking action but accomplishes nothing. The only real things this type of approach, getting someone into housing for a month or two before the true nature of their illness causes them to lose their temporary housing, achieves is to waste the resources expended while allowing the homeless to multiply.

The important parts or concepts in the above definitions are “without a permanent place of residence” and “unable to maintain a place to live”.

The first portion “without a permanent place of residence” allows us to better see and appreciate the scope and the progress of this social ill. In many ways the visibly homeless are the tip of an iceberg of homeless. With a fluid, moving population that is motivated to remain out-of-sight and out-of-mind of the authorities it is impossible to count this population with any accuracy. This is reflected in the recent assertions that the actual number of those without shelter is 4 – 5 times the “official” numbers. Before we get bogged down in a fruitless, since you will never be able to count the homeless accurately enough to determine the actual number of “outdoors” homeless, arguments let us consider an important and very large group most fail to consider in their definition of homeless.

This group would consist of those with a place of residence but whose place of residence is without permanence. There are several residential treatment facilities in the Abbotsford, BC area. Among these clients some will be returning to family, jobs, homes etc. However a significant portion of these people have no permanent place of residence to return to. Are they not effectively homeless? Once they are out of treatment they are on their own and on the streets.

Think about the growing population of those who have lost their jobs, cannot afford their rent and will in the near future be evicted. Or those who cannot afford to pay their debts will soon face foreclosure and being on the streets. Do not forget those with mental health or addictions issues that will soon see them on the street. Consider the plight of the working poor who even though employed full time cannot afford the sky-high cost of housing in the Lower Mainland. Are not all these groups of people effectively homeless?

The object of this thinking exercise is not to run up the homeless count as high as possible. Rather it is to frame the true extent of the problem facing us. The Homeless population is growing and in looking at homeless in its most broad terms we can see the potential for a tidal wave of homeless pouring onto the streets, swamping the system with the potential for crime, violence and an escalating crisis.

This looming social crisis with its inherent possibility of disaster demands that we take effective action to begin to reduce the homeless population. We can no longer afford the practice of continuing to repeat, over and over, policies and programs that have demonstrated they do not work in the hope that by some miracle they will work THIS TIME. That is an insane way to behave and while this is normal government behaviour we can no longer, as a society, allow government to practice this insanity. The cost, the potential for disastrous consequences, has become too high.

We need to look to and consider the second point that flows out of the definitions for direction in creating an approach and programs to avoid the potential disaster. The second “unable to maintain a place to live” points us at what it is, the virus as it were, that we need to focus our efforts to affect a “cure” on. Sticking them into housing over and over and over again will accomplish nothing unless we address what it is that renders them “unable to maintain a place to live”.

Our programs must therefore be designed to allow the homeless to make the changes they need to make in themselves in order to be able to maintain their housing on a permanent basis. We know that this population has problems and issues that render them “unable to maintain a place to live” such as addictions, mental health challenges, behaviour problems, personal issues etc. We need to acknowledge that these are not easy difficulties to deal with and frame our terms of reference in a realistic manner.

The most important, overriding feature is the need for a realistic view of the time and support that is required to accomplish what must be done in order for the homeless to bring about the personal changes they need to make in order that they will be able to “maintain a place to live”. Only once they are capable of functioning in a manner permitting them to have a home on a permanent basis will they cease to be homeless.

My personal experience with mental illness and pursuing mental health has taught me just how much time, effort and support is required in this change/journey. Unless we begin to design our programs to address the homeless based on the reality of the critical need to invest time and support to bring about the needed personal changes the numbers of homeless will only continue to grow and accelerate until they spiral out of control.

We like to claim to be an intelligent species. If we wish to remain masters of our own fate on issues such as the homeless we need to stop business as usual and start acting in an intelligent manner on this and other pressing social, environmental and economic issues.