My observation will be brief tonight since an email response to the Open Letter to Society of St. Vincent Paul Council (below) was responded to by a Vice President of the Council in a vague and general way not addressing significantly any of the issues I raised about an investment for a new store in the suburbs or any of the many questions about operations and budgets that I addressed to him and others before. Rather than reacting to his letter, I started to do research on other Society of St. Vincent Paul Councils in other areas, including major cities like Chicago.
St. Vincent De Paul elsewhere is not run as a social agency but stays true to its mission of person to person contact with poor and needy, serving them whatever way possible. The more I research the more convinced of what an abnormally the local Society is. I would not care so much if I thought it did not matter and hurt the mission of the society to the poor and marginalized.
But like the research I did on military departments at Marquette University, Jesuit Catholic University, this research is ignored by powers that be. They do not want to hear that 99.3 % of the two million plus of the five budgets of Central Office in Milwaukee go to compensation and operating expenses. This is like Marquette not wanting to look at what the military is teaching on campus at Marquette, killing without conscience.
Many Americans and organizations, like Archdiocese of Milwaukee and Society of St. Vincent De Paul Milwaukee do not want to learn from history and ignore research they do not want to hear. If history and research do not matter what does? Ignoring Research and History is not the way to seeking the truth. The Open Letter I sent to all 54 Council presidents, most will probably not ever see it, is below:
Open Letter to 54 President Council of St. Vincent De Paul Society of Milwaukee County
Dear Presidents,
Shortly before I made a recent journey to Guatemala to be in solidarity with the Mayan people I read in the SVDP National Frédéric’s E-Gazette that St Vincent de Paul Society of Milwaukee wants to open a 35,000-square-foot thrift shop at 4500 S. 108th St. Now I have heard that on March 5, 2014 the ‘Council’ voted to purchase the former Wal-Mart store. I am not sure who the ‘council’ is but if there is any way you can reconsider this purchase I ask you to do so. Here is why?
I was shocked but not surprised to hear about the new store in Greenfield. There had been rumors about such a move for over a year but I was shocked that a major decision was made before it could publicly be discussed by members of the Society and the people we serve. This major decision affects our mission of “women and men to join together to grow spiritually by offering person-to-person service to those who are needy and suffering.”
I was one of the co-founders of a St. Vincent De Paul conference at a church in Madison in 1992. Madison has less poor than Milwaukee. At the time, what we call here “central staff” consisted of one full time Executive Director who was also store manager and one part time person to take calls for home visits and distribute them to conferences. There was one store on the near North side, a poor area, to serve the conferences. We were limited of what we could write out with vouchers but the full cost of the voucher was covered completely by the profits of the store. When I left Madison in 1995 to take a position with SVDP in Milwaukee there were three stores, another one near the other poor area in Madison, South Madison, and one in the small working person small town of Stoughton, WI. There were one more central office staff members for the stores. There are now more stores but the purpose of the stores in Madison to support financially and with resources the home visits of conferences.
In 1995 I accepted a job as assistant General Manager for the three SVDP in Milwaukee. The executive director of SVDP at the time asked me to find out why the stores were losing money. After about six months and working at each position in the three stores I compiled my report. I concluded the major problem was a structural one in the Society in Milwaukee. SVDP in Milwaukee, unlike SVDP in Madison was focused on building a central office, an agency, not focused on serving the needy and conferences. SVDP during this time purchased St. Gall’s as an agency service center, had hired more social workers and was more and more becoming an agency. It was not what I experienced in Madison and my study of SVDP which included a trip to world headquarters in Paris. This is not what the Executive Director wanted to hear and I was fired, or as it was called at the time, ‘permanently laid off’. At the same time the central office was firing or lying off store employees and often replacing them often with W-2 workers which they did not have to pay. The reforms we started in 1995 at the stores and the closing of two stores have made the now one store profitable, but it relies on money from conferences, not financially supporting conferences.
The only budgets available by the Central Office were the very general five “approved budgets” controlled by central office. Although the five ‘approved budgets’, controlled by Central office, are for over 2 million dollars less than 1% was used for direct services, the 99% going for compensation and operating expenses. The store budget income includes income from the conferences, which unlike Madison, pays from 50% to 100% of the store price for donated or purchased items. The last available IRS 990 Tax pubic tax filing available is for 2011 and shows that $222, 234 of compensation was spent on two central staff positions, Executive Director (past and present) and Finance Director.
The proposed new store is located in an area, unreachable by W-2 workers, near an already established thrift store and will draw valuable donations and monies away from South side store, conferences, and most importantly the people we serve. It will cost us, Vincentians making home visit and the needy of Milwaukee, more than it could produce. If you ask the people we serve, where they would like to see a store they would clearly say the North side of Milwaukee, where a store could not only be profitable, as the other for profit thrift stores are in the area, but, more importantly, could serve the mission of the Society, home visits.
The Goodwill Store in West Allis is a good example of a store serving the mission. It is a smaller store than the present or future SVDP store but the clothing is of better quality, marked for size and offers a fresh and wide variety. Also the proceeds from the Goodwill store go to pay the workers a decent wage and for the mission of the store, training people with disabilities for jobs. Only a very small portion goes to the Central Office, not 99% like in the SVDP central office budgets, including the store.
In 1995 we saw a structural change of the Society in Milwaukee, centralizing power and money in the Central office not in the conferences and people we serve. This large acquisition would, I believe, be more disastrous that the purchase of St. Gall’s in 1995 and further remove the Society from its main mission.
In Madison there is a good meal program associated with the Society but independent. There is a St. Vincent De Paul group home for persons with mental illnesses, separately financed and operated. There are now a number of SVDP thrift stores whose main object is to serve the conferences and people we visit not to increase the Central office.
I am updating the three essays I wrote a few years ago called Catholic Churches in North Central Milwaukee, the third one called St. Vincent De Paul Stalled. The essays are about the segregation, poverty and criminalization, or some would say ‘racism’ of The Catholic Church in North Central Milwaukee.
Building a St. Vincent De Paul store in Greenfield I believe would contribute to the poverty and marginalization of the already segregated and criminalized neighborhoods of South and North side. Also, it would be, in my opinion, a serious violation of our main mission to serve those in need with personalized home visits. Please reconsider?
Bob Graf
Comments
Please send any comments on this post to . Let us know which day’s post your comments pertain to. If the comments are appropriate we will post them here for you.