In response to Alison Sterling's postings (and currently at INET'96 in
Montreal where most of those in attendence represent organizations that
did not exist 5 years ago, and work on things that did not exist 3 years
ago) I would like to caution us about who has capacity to do what in the
area of on-line health promotion. There are groups that exist and have
excellent capacity, there are groups that exist and have terrible capacity
(call 'black holes' in the jargon, they can absorbe unliminted quantities
of resources and emit no light whatsoever). Much of what I have to do in
other areas -where money is starting to flow- is make sure that big
funding to older agencies doesn't kill the green shoots from those
start-up activities who understand what is to be done.

It is generally recognized with regard to the environment, but not with
regard to community level activities, that if one want's to preserve
butterflies as part of the environment, one maintains an environment in
which butterflies exhibit their life cycle, they grow, they breed, they
reporduce, and they die. Butterflies -as a group- remain. Individual
Butterflies come and go.

One of the strengths of work in the electronic environment is that it
depends on what people do and less on the institutional structures they
operate in. In fact, much of the progress made in this area -be it with
regard to the internet or to health promotion- has occured because it
could be done without requiring an institutional buy-in and could be done
with and by stakeholders without a large expenditure in capital for
overhead.

One of the things that is clear on this front is that -for much of the
funding- those who have received the funds have not delivered the goods.
Just where is the AIDS community and AIDS education in Canada in light of
the funding that has been sunk into that area? The cutting edge work is
being done by people, groups and institutes who have had access to the
smallest part of the funding pie. Even the 'big splash' activities have
arrived, presented a presence but not generating the animated activity
that was supposed to be the purpose of the funding in the first place.

What is to be done here? First, the funders have to be educated. There has
to be protected funding for those small, vibrant start-up groups to
protect their gains. I am not talking about venture capital here. I am
talking about operating funding for groups who are too small to 'play the
funding circuit' (in Ottawa, where ever) and too busy doing what should be
done to take time off to 'play' that circuit. Second, when the big players
arrive at the door - and they are arriving by the dozens in Canada, the
hundreds in the U.S. - funders have to have the right set of questions
(the means test - to use an old welfare phrase) for them to even qualify
to be thought about for funding.

As we have argued before, it is not enough to identify a problem, say you
can and ask for money to do something about it. What is their in-house
capacity? (can buy little of the existing capacity in this field - there
is
no President's Choice Health Promotion Community Pack at the local food
store) To whom are they already connected? ...and How? It is not enough
to
list a set of collaborating institutions with glowing letters of support.
What is the functional link w/r to the electronic space. [One would be
amazed as how quickly those who don't know what they are doing put their
literal foot in their virtual mouth in this area. Not knowing what you
don't know is dangerous. Being rewarded with funding is a compound
foolishness on the part of funders - but a good source of bad press for
all concerned, including unjustified bad press for the venue itself.]

Elsewhere we are working on an approach where all funding proposals become
public information from the day they are submitted to the funding process.
We expect, sooner rather than later, that for some areas (health promotion
is a prime candidate) the Terms of Reference for Funding will not only be
public -supporting open bidding- but that proposals will be public to
allow 'the community' to interact with proposals and proposers before the
funding decisions, and whether the proposals win or lose. Too many good
proposals lose because they didn't link well with partners. Too many bad
proposals get funded because the 'appeared' to be well positioned when it
was widely known that they were not. This open approach will not work with
all funding approaches but our approach will be to make it the norm and
require that less than the norm be justified with reference to the
specifics of the proposal or the funding area.


What is the lesson here? It is as much to funders as it is to agencies.
There are young butterflies and old bigfoots out there. Pick your partners
with care if you expect to fly. Fund your initiatives with care if you
don't want the bigfoots to not fly, but to stomp around on the butterflies
- at your courtesy and at public expense. New times call for new thinking,
including new ways of understanding that whose value is timeless.

There are real challenges here. Back to those 2,500 Inet'96 people in
Montreal, a growing number who are concerned with the challenges and not
the hardware.

 Sam Lanfranco
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