Paying it Forward: Help or Enable? #119
Are you the problem or solution? Give and give yet others continue bad habits, saps enthusiasm, causing some to stop helping others. Don't compromise your character. Many need your uplifting efforts.
Jack Browne, Wichita Falls Times Record News, Sunday June 8, 2025
“What problem are you trying to solve,” our CTO would challenge as I asked for a new product.
Help or enable, is a challenge when volunteering to serve others. Helping someone through a tough patch is noble. Assisting someone who keeps making the same wrong decisions is enabling bad behavior.
Why does this matter? Only 1% of a business’s customers die, while 68% go away as they feel taken for granted notes research in an opinion piece published in northwest Montana-based flatheadbeacon.com owned by celebrity Maury Povich and wife Connie Chung at https://flatheadbeacon.com/2009/04/22/why-68-stop-being-your-customer/.
Every organization has a “flywheel” cycle of activities that attract, engage and retain volunteers and clients. At nonprofits, some do the work; some write the checks. Will they come back, again and again, if their need to be appreciated is never satisfied?
Single parents who own a home have different problems than single parents who are homeless. Leaders of an organization probably have far different lifestyles than those we seek to serve.
With our fridge and pantry full, we don’t understand the agony of choosing to pay two of three bills for food, rent, and transportation.
What will we stream tonight is the decision in one household versus can we get across the railroad tracks for food.
With over 40,000 homes in our city some are less than 1,000 square feet, many several times larger with a bedroom for each person and every convenience one could imagine.
Raising prices because leadership can afford it — when volunteers and clients cannot — may not yield the desired increases in fundraising.
Life is different for each of us, but we are all connected. Some of us are too busy to see others, or only see people like ourselves.
Are we the best we can be? Some answer “This is who I am,” when they are really too lazy to change.
“I’m not hurting anyone,” others answer.
But someone is always watching — your child, your neighbor, the person in the car you just cut off to get ahead at the next stoplight.
Yesterday, when I thought my column was done, I received a call. A good person, who does great things in our community, has been ravaged on social media by many. Why? A client, needing services, didn’t receive the fix they wanted for an addiction.
Unhappy with the provided alternative prescription for pain relief, the client ranted, gathering others. Like a boiling pot overflowing, many attacked the provider who serves our community selflessly.
Leave things better than they were. Character is the greatest investment we can make.
Problem or solution, which are you?
Steve Sparks, CEO at Faith Mission recommended “When Helping Hurts,” by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. I’ve checked out the book from our library.
Jack Browne is a community activist and former technology engineer, sales and marketing executive at Motorola and other top tech companies.