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Project III
Project IV
Project V
Asignment III
Assignment IV
Captive People and Their Organizations
For a long time now I have had an interest in captive people and the people who take care of them; I guess it’s one of the reasons I became a prison Warden. Captive people can be classified in a variety of groups – prisoners, nursing home residents, students, mental health clients, the mentally ill, members of religious groups, Goodwill clients – but they all have one important common characteristic, they are dependent (in the most survival-based sense of the term) on the kindness of strangers.
Care-Giving Organizations
In modern Western cultures the relationship between captive people and their caregivers usually takes place in some form of organizational or institutional context, which is rather unique to Western cultures and pretty much absent in other cultures, particularly third-world cultures. This organizational/institutional context usually benefits the captives by providing them with a coordinated, consistent, array and level of services, and benefits the caregivers by providing them with career identification, employment, and a sense of social contribution.
However, I have noticed there is an important price to be paid in organizational/institutional settings by both the captives and their caregivers – the more control caregivers have over their captives, the greater the risk of physical, sexual, and mental abuse of the captives on the part of the caregivers. This is no small or tangential matter for these organizations or their greater cultures, for not one of the vast number of Western care-giving organizations and institutions has escaped the taint of abuse. Not one.
Learning from a Care-Giving Organization’s Web Site – the Case of Goodwill of Greater Grand Rapids
So what does http://www.goodwillgr.org/ tell me?
Well, first I know it is an organization because its home page graphic is a special kind of image map; it consists of a coordination metaphor that shows a central administrative function in control of an array of services. But it’s not a good coordination metaphor because it tells me nothing about how these services coordinated, or how they relate to one another. It is a metaphor designed to appeal to my emotions but not my logic.
I know this organization wants to be seen as caring about people: there are a lot of “feel good” images of people working, people instructing, and groups of people hanging out – and all of them are smiling and having fun. And these images are important to making anybody coming to this home page (be they donors, clients, buyers, or employees – both current and prospective) feel relaxed and good about dealing with this organization.
But what I don’t get from the home page is what this organization’s array of services is designed to accomplish. There is a mission statement, but it is not on the home page, nor is it prominent in the site. There is no real explanation of just what kind of training its captives receive, or how the caregivers are trained to give care and supervised to avoid abuse.
It does tell me how to seek employment, hire clients, donate things and money, and buy goods and coffee. It tells me a little bit about how it determines its success an organization, but it can take a lesson from the Goodwill International Web site on how to present meaningful outcome related information. And I see practically nothing on how it goes about taking care of people. In this regard I think it has missed a big opportunity to: educate me on what it does and how it does it; establish an organizational culture based not only on care, but also on accountability; and gently set a zero tolerance threshold for abuse – there is no stated policy on the treatment of captives.
The net effect is that, in its Web site, the organization has not established its credibility as a care-giving organization. Without this credibility the “feel good” nature of the site makes me suspect, and that’s a poor impression for me to have as I shut down my computer. In this regard, Goodwill of greater Grand Rapids can learn from its sister agency in Muskegon , whose Web site clearly lays out a mission, and, though it doesn’t state a captive treatment policy, clearly links its mission to individual captive worth, dignity, and empowerment: Goodwill of West Michigan.
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