According to local news outlets, the Angel Tree program helped between 9,000 and 30,000 children in the area this year - the wide spread in reported numbers depends on where you look. It is possible the article that quoted the 9,000 number meant “families” instead of “children” but that doesn’t really match up too well with the average number of kids-per-household I saw listed on the applications. I would say closer to two kids per family in the eligible age group rather than three or more. It is also possible that 30,000 tags were printed and 9,000 kids were actually helped. Maybe there is some confusion between the Angel Tree program and the closely related Toys for Tots program. Maybe the numbers were pulled out of thin air.
Regardless of the reasoning behind the huge difference in reported numbers, this is largely a paperwork-driven process.
Assuming each family had two kids in need that’s between 4,500 and 15,000 paper applications to be processed. From what I saw no computers were used during the interview procedure (although during the tag fabrication process they are - more on that later). Once a person was approved for aid their name was sloppily hand-copied from what could be deciphered from the handwritten application onto a piece of paper and a receipt of sorts was given to them. The receipt would later be presented to the SA when it came time to pick up their items from the distribution center.
The distribution center location was not confirmed until many of the interviews (a week’s worth, I believe) had already been completed. The best that could be done was to tell each of the applicants after their approval was to visit a certain website (printed on the back of their receipt) every day to see where they needed to show up.
Based on the level of need I saw in some of these folks and the deer-in-the-headlights looks I occasionally got when I mentioned that they would need to check an online address on the back of the receipt for the pickup location, I wondered how many of them actually had the ability (access- or knowledge-wise) to “simply go to a website” to find that information. On the other hand, they somehow found out where and when to be and what paperwork to bring with them in order to fill out these forms in the first place, so perhaps that same mechanism alerts these folks to where they need to go to pick up their stuff. In any case, many just nodded, thanked me (or grunted), and left.
Given the huge volume of paperwork that needs to be processed each year, I would have thought that computers or at least photocopiers would be used to streamline the process or make this critical yet extremely error-prone stage of the process more trackable. You could argue that computers and copiers are expensive to buy, expensive to upkeep, prone to failure, impersonal, and require at least some training to use while a pencil and paper are pretty much the opposite of those things and gets the job done well enough... and you would be right.
In fact, I would say the existence of this paperwork nightmare is one of the keys to getting this job done “precisely well enough”.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment