It’s been a week since the NOLA Coalition was established and received an overwhelmingly positive response across the city. Like others, I was initially skeptical because similar efforts have been made in the past, and have failed. NOLA Coalition member and GNO Inc President and CEO Michael Hecht told me what makes this time different is the focus on execution - and that effort isn’t specific to one community or group. This effort is for all of New Orleans.
Do you anticipate the NOLA Coalition taking a look at the linkages between the great work done by these non-profits that have joined the coalition and their availability to the juvenile justice system to leverage alternatives to incarceration to keep these kids from committing crime?
The NOLA Coalition’s platform explicitly states that it is looking at intervention
programs that identify high risk juveniles through their schools and their friends, and then get them into alternative programs so they don't become incarcerated. We’ve already talked to some of these kids who are dealing with this. A lot of them say with the proper mentoring, the proper attention, a proper role model, some hope and structure, they can take a different path. The problem is there's no shortcuts. This just takes resources, so we want to put more resources into those interventions.
Do you feel like you're getting the necessary buy-in from the Cantrell administration thus far?
We get asked about that by everybody - we’re seeing political leadership across the board buy into the NOLA Coalition’s mission. The Cantrell administration and the City Council are all on board. We’re seeing this acceptance for two reasons. One is that this coalition represents the whole city. You can’t dismiss it as being just one special interest group… also, a lot of the things we’re talking about in our platform were in the Cantrell administration’s transition report. The $15 million we're investing according to the city's youth master plan is the NOLA Coalition just trying to execute on what really everybody in the broadest sense has been trying to do for years now.
I don’t think Cantrell’s office has been very transparent in the juvenile justice area about much of anything. I would hate to see the coalition miss this opportunity to create an environment of transparency, and dig down into the data and see whether we're collecting the appropriate data.
I'm a total data geek, because I think you can get incredible insights from it, and you can't succeed on what you don't measure. I think somebody once said there's lies in statistics, so we have to be careful when we say we're following the data. We have to ask whose data it is. Tracking this stuff and tracking efficacy and return on investment is fundamental. We have to marry the quantitative with the qualitative. The Metropolitan Crime Commission puts out these outstanding reports and dashboards on what's happening. More people need to see them, so part of it is just us promoting what's already being done.
Secondly, We partnered with the United Way because they were very explicit about measuring and quantifying the results in the spending of the $15 million investment. We just don’t want to see how much money we raise, but how that translates into impact for the individuals that go through their programs and how that results in economic benefit and savings for the city. And finally, if we come through this and we feel like there are blind spots, then we’re going to do our own analysis on publicly available data and make sure it’s easy for everyone to understand.
