Data and Depression
You know what makes me depressed? Well, depression, for one thing. Sometimes that fact surprises the people who I work with because when I’m not depressed I am super, super happy. I love the work I do, the people with whom I work, the missions I serve, the learning that excites me. If you were to examine the data of my life - the wife, the kids, the home, the career, the food, the drink, the music, the passion, the friends, the money, the support, the city, the clothes, the books, the education, the health - what conclusion could you draw other than “perfectly happy.” Well, at least this personal experience is one way I can know to always question what story I think the data we encounter tells us. Because despite my perfect-by-the-data life, I have depression.
During my most recent bout of existing in the darkness (which is still happening at the time of this writing, at the end of 2021), I have been rendered nearly unable to do the work that I love. That is a terrible thing for me, because falling behind in work and disappointing colleagues creates a slip-and-slide ride for me further into depression. Even as I feel blocked from being productive in any way, there are still a few work-related questions that have kept coming up again and again during this time. I’ve been incredibly scared to share these thoughts. But isolation and holding back my thoughts also sharpens the points of my depression, and so I feel I have almost no choice for my own mental health but to share these thoughts now.
(These questions are all related to data & technology in mission-driven work in some way, since that is the work that I am in)
1: What is this entire industry that has been built up around fundraising for our work? Are we seriously putting such huge resources into begging for money to feed people who are experiencing hunger and house people who are experiencing homelessness? The human capacity and time we put into technology meant to support the most complex of donation structures (split gifts, recurring gifts, corporate gifts, matching gifts, grants, soft credits, partial soft credits, etc etc etc) has become a factor in my personal depression. I have to be really clear and upfront with my colleagues in the future - I don’t believe that the way most mission-driven organizations are funded is going to be effective in actually achieving our missions and I won’t be helpful in trying to support that part of the work. I am sending appreciation to everyone in the world working to do the money things that finance our organizations and services, and of course pay my bills. But the day-to-day machinations of the data & technology managing the way we pay for our work makes me shudder, and those puzzles are better handled by others - not me.
2: Are we ever going to achieve our missions? My depression is often linked with an absence of hope. Data and technology initially represented a kind of hope for me. When I was in my early twenties and working in the private sector, I was volunteering with lots of different small nonprofits in New York City that had beautiful and important missions (such as, “end domestic violence”). But it didn’t seem like the activities that I was volunteering for with these nonprofits would ever go beyond the important step of making individual, local impact and get to the actual achievement of the missions. I went looking for knowledge and skills that I could use to help make moves toward mission achievement, and what I found was data & technology. If businesses were using these tools to achieve their missions then couldn’t NPOs use these tools to achieve theirs? Obviously I wasn’t the first person to think this, but it was a pivotal idea for me to discover. Since then I have been on a journey to learn how to use these tools for mission-driven work and how to help others do the same. This has given me incredible joy and connected me with the most special people in my life. However at this point in my career it feels like I am using these tools mostly to do the important work of making individual and local impact - not for systemic change. I have been getting lost in the details and losing that hope that I initially saw in data & technology as tools for mission achievement. That makes it hard to go to work every day.
3: If every single person working toward a mission could use data & technology with confidence and grit, would we see great change in the world? This is the story I’ve been telling myself for over ten years - that if everyone could go on the journey that I went on learning how to use these tools for good, then we would be able to disrupt the way we deliver our services and move astronomically faster toward actually achieving our missions. I guess you’d call this a classic kind of “existential crisis” question for me. It may be one that I just have to accept won’t ever be answered. As I try to regain hope in lots of areas of my life, this is one that I know will be incredibly important for me to tackle. I truly love working with individuals on their journeys and relationships with data & technology for mission-driven work. I get a special kind of joy when a colleague gets a sparkle in their eye at finding that they can do something in a spreadsheet or a CRM that they didn’t know how to do before. But (duh) I can’t personally be on the journey with every person in mission-driven work. Now I want to follow in the footsteps of others in this work who are making strides toward seeing that same kind of sparkle at the organizational level. If our organizations have strong and positive learning cultures and strong and positive data & technology cultures, then I think we’ll be far more likely to bring to scale those individual learning journeys.
In 2012 I had the life-changing opportunity to take part in an extraordinary community experience called StartingBloc. Of all the incredible parts of that experience, there is a singular learning that stands out for me, facilitated by Mitchell Wade (credit where credit is due). He taught me that the path toward lasting impact is in the building and strengthening of the relationships between the community (or constituents or people, whatever is right for the context of the situation) and the institutions that are deeply ingrained in their lives. When these relationships are working, when they are mutually beneficial, and when they are joyful, then the impact that is the aim of so many of our mission-driven organizations can be deep and lasting. That is why I don’t want to think of my work as “consulting” work. It is just a word, it can mean whatever we want it to mean. It often means coming into an organization (a community), and delivering a set of services. I think all consultants and consulting companies in the mission-driven landscape want their services to mean long-lasting change in the organizations they work with, but so often we see that this is not the result.
Long-lasting impact and change comes from facilitating the relationships between people and institutions. Consider NPO staff members as the community and the data & technology that supports our work as the institutions. Certainly the software companies that make the technology are institutions, but in fact the technology itself is an institution. The data sets we work with are institutions. They are deeply integrated in our work, whether we want to interact with them deeply or not. It has been my belief that by facilitating the relationships between our communities (staff members) and our institutions (data & technology) we can make deep and lasting impact on organizational structure and culture that will be major supports for achieving missions. Not just working toward missions - achieving them.
There are a few people and organizations I know that are working (or trying to work) on this goal of long-lasting impact through relationship facilitation between people and technology. I hope that I can follow in their paths and forge my own. I hope that I can learn from them and that I can share with others. And I hope that I can be a strong and productive person in this work again one day soon.
