This is the way of the world for those who ply the social services trade. The game is that you work in the field for a couple of years to gain some credentials and credibility. You then write a grant to get money from the government or from some charitable organisation to start your own centre. Once you succeed, that centre becomes your life, your baby. The organisation is just an extension of your vision and you use it for your own purposes.

If you’re an honourable person and you’re able to maintain your idealism and stay true to your goals, the centre is likely to do some good. You’ll likely hire well-meaning people who bring additional ideas and programmes to the table, and with whom you’ll share the credit for the good you do. You’ll likely surround yourself with an advisory board that represents the community and which contains people who have a legitimate interest in the clientele which you serve. You’ll expand your services and spin off “daughter” agencies as appropriate as you get larger. You will maintain a salary package that bears some relationship to the size of your total spending budget and which rises slower than the salaries of your staff.

If, on the other hand, you’re a less honourable person, it’s likely that you’ll use the centre to further your personal agenda. The staff you hire and the volunteers you attract learn early on that they work at your pleasure and your discretion. You’ll find ways to co-mingle the assets, resources and even the money of the centre for your own personal use. You will very likely find ways to abuse the very population you’ve set out to serve, either directly as sexual abuse, or indirectly by using their upaid or sub-minimum wage labour to reap gains for yourself or the centre. The point here is that the centre, in becoming an extension of your personality, has reverted to an Dark Ages fiefdom, the staff and clientele reverted to your vassals and serfs, and much in the same vein as a Dark Ages king owned the animals in the woods and clouds in the sky, everything you see reverts to your control.

I worked in the Mental Health/Substance Abuse sector long enough to know that this is a common scenario and could supply plenty of stories of what I’ve witnessed as bona fides. The real surprise is that the director of the Another Way shelter was only paying himself $95k – my experience has been that they usually aim higher than that – usually in the $120k to $150k range, plus a car and some other perks. He either didn’t start the agency and couldn’t subvert his Board of Directors to pay him more, or he was hopelessly incompetent at grant writing.

Social service programming is right up there with community organising and street ministry as covers for flim-flam men and women with strong personalities and expansive egos. Chances are good that if they didn’t work in this type of endeavour, they’d be flat out criminals who either deal drugs, pimp prostitutes or run illegal gambling operations. It’s only the availability of government or charitable sources to bilk that keeps them off the streets themselves.