Monday, April 20, 2015
Balancing Biases
As our site visit presentations approach, I have been think about how to balance my obligation to be the conveyor of facts for both the organization and class, without letting my own emotional biases interfere. Fortunately, I felt as though the the site visit was very successful in providing me with a deeper understanding of The Rescue Missions goals and needs within this community. However, I am hoping that this broader understanding does not become debilitating when it comes to representing and choosing organizations. While I saw tremendous value in the idea of a site visit, I personally could not help but think that their must be two main outcomes/ emotions that formulate as a result. In my opinion, I can see one either walking away impressed and pleased by what they witnessed or disappointed and underwhelmed. Of course these are not the only two reactions, it is just an assumption of what I believe to be common.
That being said, how does this affect our presentations and representations of the organizations? Through out class discussions we have come back to the idea that looking at facts and results are crucial in our decision making. But what happens when the facts do not match with the feelings we experienced in the site visit? What happens when you where blown away by the visit but the facts do not back it up enough (or visa versa). Even more so when we each were limited (mostly because of time and practicality) in how many site visits we could attend. Therefore, making it harder to avoid these possible biases or conflicting emotions, when they only exist strongly for one organization.
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Rena, thanks for the post! I agree that our site visits can have a huge influence on how we perceive the organizations. Also, this is great timing as I just got back from my group’s visit to Fargnoli Farms for Southern Tier Alternative Therapies and am excited to share my thoughts on the experience!
ReplyDeleteIn your post, you express the worry that groups will leave their site vests feeling either incredibly optimistic or incredibly underwhelmed. I understand how this could happen, but neither of these scenarios was the case for me. I entered my site visit with certain reservations. For example: are the iPads really necessary? Is this program really effective? Can our money be used elsewhere to improve the organization? I was relieved to be able to ask these questions and have them answered clearly by the owner of the farm (Linda), the speech pathologist we met in class (Tina), and even a client who was there with his grandson.
When we readdressed the iPad situation, we learned that each (with the language app and the case) would cost about $600, rather than $800 as Tina had predicted in class. We also discovered that the program doesn’t have an age limit, and that 8 students are enrolled for the summer, which differed from the initial grant application’s prediction for 6 riders this summer. Most importantly, we learned that the actual riding lessons are paid for through Strides scholarships, so really iPads are the only thing that the program needs to change lives. On a more emotional note, the grandfather we spoke to was highly impressed by the progress his grandson had made after just 4 lessons, which was very exciting to hear. I left feeling confident about the organization, but not disillusioned from the reality of our class’s situation. Even though we understand the importance of the iPads now and can explain it to the class, we still may not be able to remove the stigma against donating for technology. Also, the fact remains that Southern Tier asked for $5,000 and the class may see this money, half of what we have, as better used elsewhere.
I approached my site visit as an opportunity to learn more, not as a chance for the organization to win me over. I think this is the best way to handle the situation, as it allowed me and my group members to absorb information while remaining critical. The horses were beautiful and the rider we saw was possibly the cutest child in the world, but I do not think my emotions overwhelmed my ability to analyze Southern Tier’s facilities and to ask important questions to the representatives we met with.
During the half hour ride home, my group discussed our predictions for the final class decision, using what we knew about the other organizations and what we had learned from our site visit. While we were all excited about Southern Tier, we still understood that our wonderful experience would not account for every flaw that class can find with the organization. Every class member will have an opinion. It may be for the organization they visited, or it may not be. These site visits were a great way for us to solidify our conceptions of each finalist, and I believe that the presentations on each will be very influential on our final decision.
Rena –
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed this post and think you brought up some interesting points! Although I’m sure not everyone is feeling like this, but I do agree that while doing site visits we are left with only two choices. It’s interesting to think about because earlier in the semester I did a site visit to Family Planning and left extremely satisfied after hearing about where our grant money helped out last year. As my group planned for our site visit to the very same Family Planning last week I went into the situation with ease. I had assumed everything I hear would be the same as the first visit and I would leave feeling equally satisfied. However, this time was a bit different. I have been a silent advocate for Family Planning through this entire process, but left this time feeling as though perhaps our money should be going to a different organization. As you will hear in our presentation today, there were a number of questions that we had that the representative from Family Planning couldn’t answer for us. Personally, this was a huge turn off. Of course it is difficult for organizations to be fully prepared for everything we are going to ask, but it came off as unprofessional and definitely weakened their case for me.
I understand why you believe the site visits open up a difficult discussion of biases for our class, however I also think they have value. It is important for presenters to bring these issues to the surface because they are the ones who truly experienced it. Although the site visits prevent challenges they also allowed each member of each different team to come out of it with a different experience. I think this round of presenting is most important for making our decision and everything that we have said in the past is just backup to what is being said today. The site visits play an important role in deciding how important this grant truly is to the organization and without seeing the organization running it is difficult to know what a difference the money is going to make.
Great post Rena!
ReplyDeleteThis is definitely applicable to today's presentations and having just come from our class, I'm excited that this is fresh on my mind. Honestly, during our discussions in class prior to our site visits, I feel that we romanticized the organizations that we chose to present on. For the most part, I think people got to be in the group that was either their first or second choice and it was clear where everyone's passions lied. However, actually going to the organization and seeing its staff in action; being in close contact with the people they serve and setting foot in their facilities can change your perspective immediately. As I am in Jen's group for Family Planning, I have to say that I experienced a similar disappointment in the lack of information and data that was provided for us. Even after multiple questions, the Family Planning representative simply kept saying that she didn't know. It's easy to rag on her and the organization for this, especially since we are providing them money and we deserve to have our questions answered and answered properly. With this in mind, I have to say that I think our site visit just happened at the wrong time and ultimately in the wrong place. We should have visited the Sidney location to get a real feel for what needs help in the building and experience how their operations work there, however it was a far drive from Binghamton and not feasible for our entire group to get over there during a school day. We also visited their facilities during a time where all of the educators, the people who I'm sure know more about what we were asking, were out actually performing programs in the community. The health care rooms were also being in use so we were not able to take a look up there and learn about more of the procedures they do. Because of all these reasons, including the lack of proper information online, we couldn't get a full understanding of their effectiveness and I think that definitely showed during our presentation. This is all very unfortunate because I do believe Family Planning is an effective and much needed organization not only for Binghamton, but for Sideny as well, and it's a shame that we couldn't support them further. I hope that people are not completely put off by them now and hopefully we will have more constructive discussions in the future. In relation to the point Rena brought up in her post, emotions and personal biases are unavoidable when talking about our finalists and who to ultimately give our grant to, however, we should try to only base our thoughts on information and on our class discussions, rather than bringing in unsupported "facts" and stark opinions that don't contribute to the learning process or our discussion.
Rena, at first I was feeling that the site visits would give us biases, which in turn would ruin the objectivity of this process. We'd either form an emotional connection or disconnection, depending on what impact the site visit had. I thought that this would prove to be a detriment. Wouldn't each person be much more likely to advocate for the organization they visited? Obviously from the other comments here, that wasn't the case for every group. In fact, it became the opposite for the Family Planning group. A poor site visit, which doesn't necessarily reflect the organization, made them weary to give them money.
ReplyDeleteForming these biases, whether good or bad, is an inevitable fact. It doesn't matter how much information a group reads off about an organization; those who didn't experience it firsthand can never have the same impression. So every group feels a different way about their organization, and we end up with 5 distinct groups with unique views on the organizations. No two people from differing groups can ever feel the same way about all 5 choices. What does this mean for the process? To be honest, I don't know for sure. Should each group put emotion in their presentations so that everyone could understand how everyone else feels?
Definitely not. The point of the site visits is that we don't want to all feel the same way about the organizations. Then we lose all objectivity. Each person has the ability to see 4 organizations with no biases (lack of biases is not guaranteed with these 4, just more likely to avoid). Each person, most likely, already decided whether or not they wanted to fund their organization at their site visit. So now everyone has 4 options on an equal playing field. They must compile the other groups' experiences to decide. So effectively, every person learns all the information they need to know about all 5 organizations, but only 1 of those choices is emotionally "compromised." Had each person visited every organization, we'd all be completely compromised by biases for every organization. In this way, biases are comparatively limited.
Honestly, I don't know if this is true for all the groups. I know that my entire group became convinced of Kopernik at our visit, because we all had a great time observing and talking to the public. I think that if anyone else were at our site visit, they'd also form a bias for Kopernik. I consider myself to be good at leaving biases out of decision-making, but I feel it's impossible for me to block out my bias for Kopernik now (obviously volunteering there is a huge factor, but seeing my other group members enjoy the visit validated my biases completely).