Skate-ramps and Mysterious Acts of God

 
Sometimes I get these surges of energy where I am absolutely unstoppable--nothing can stand in my way. If it were possible, I would see a project through completion in one day without stopping. Unfortunately, other people are required to participate in the process, and business hours operate only eight hours a day.
 
Only three kids came to leadership training today, but it was a great meeting. We planned our field trip, we're going to have $50 left over, and we came up with a bunch of great ideas for service projects. The biggest one is that the kids want to go ahead and raise money for a half-pipe skateboard ramp--and then they want to build it. Can it be done? Sure.  If it were up to me I'd go ahead and do it. But the city is planning on building one in the next three years or so, and they are going to want to decide where it goes and what it looks like and micro-manage every detail.
 
My program is a slave to the city.  When did this happen? I heard through a reliable source that the city manager is in love with the program and thinks it's the greatest thing since soapbox speeches. This is good news, but I'm afraid he's going to somehow "steal" it from me. In his attempt to get a glorified piece of the pie that I created, he might mangle the whole thing and ruin the entire recipe.
 
Is it a good thing to be associated with the city or a bad thing?
 
The only relationship that leadership training has with the city--as far as I can tell-- is that we use the city hall to meet in on a weekly basis. But suddenly, the city officials are poking their noses into all of our business. They want me to deposit the money we earned from the car wash into a fund controlled by the city. They told me so today with suspicious and accusing looks on their faces:
 
"Melissa, where is the money that you earned? You need to bring it down here and give it to K----- so she can put it in a city fund."
 
"Oh, good idea. I didn't even think that you guys could do that for me."
 
"So you'll bring it tomorrow?"
 
"Yeah. It sounds like a better idea than keeping it in my sock drawer," I joked.
 
Nobody laughed.
 
Then C----, a city secretary whose children came to a few sessions of leadership training and participated in the car wash, started telling me what I need to do with the money we earned and how I had to take all the kids who participated in the car-wash on the field-trip. I told her that some of the kids had become disqualified because of behavior problems, but we appreciated their help (one of these kids was her son). Then she made a snooty comment that I need to get off my chest--she said "Well, some people know how to control children, and other people don't." And I told her that I am trying my best and learning more everyday, and that in a few months perhaps those kids who are disqualified could re-apply and try again, at which point she informed me that it would really be unfair if her kids weren't allowed to come since they worked so hard all day at the car wash. At this point I felt bad for my obvious lack of planning and procedure in this regard, and I told her that her son can come if she comes, and that her daughters are welcome to come, but they failed to attend today's meeting and they knew about it, which is discouraging to me, and that in the future the program will have criteria that must be met such as good attendance, yadda yadda yadda. And then I was overwhelmed by a sense of failure from a sense that I did not deal with her in the right way, and a larger sense of failure from my lack of planning and anticipation of these kinds of situations.
 
And I became more suspicious of the city since it seems like she is a force from within the city hall building, and she was obviously displeased with me. I also happen to know that her son has a reputation for being a terror, that she has little control over him, and that she is active in the area boy scout troop. All these factors set her up to be a potential advocate for our program, or to see our program as a threat and become an active enemy. As soon as I got home I called her, but she had already left the office.

I don't mind being closely related with the city, as long as they don't interfere with what I'm doing.  At the camp, everything I did had to be approved by the city manager first. Consequently, I was paralyzed in action, because he never approved the things that needed to be approved in order to run the camp. In the end, he sort of shut us down because we could never really get our ideas off the ground.
 
Some benefits of being related to the city is that it might be easier to apply for non-profit, we could use some of the city's funds, and we could use the city's lawyer and insurance coverage.
 
On the down side, they could completely undermine everything I am trying to do with all their bureacracy &*%*@#.
 
Maybe I'm just being pessimistic. Maybe the city will be overjoyed that we want to take over and pay for this project. Maybe they will give me the reins I need and support me in all the ways I want to be supported. But for the record, I'm a tad suspicious.

What is my fear of the city? As I think about it more, it seems silly. What it ultimately comes down to is that I am afraid that my people skills are not as great as I think that they are. All these years, I've thought I had good people skills because I look people in the eye and people seem to like me, smile at me, and talk to me. But I am beginning to learn that people frequently smile at people they hate, talk to people they can't stand, and act like they like people they don't. When you need something from someone, people skills take on a whole new meaning. I'm afraid that these people are more powerful than me and are going to try to tell me what to do. I'm afraid that I might succumb to them in an attempt to be agreeable, and then I'll wake up one day to realize that the entire program is jeapordized. 
 
If my program becomes incorporated with the city, I'm going to have to work with them a lot more than I would like to.
 
Heck, even if the program doesn't become incorporated with the city, I'm going to have to work with them a lot more than I would like to.
 
Or... the kids and I could go ahead and construct a skate-ramp in the middle of the park in the cover of the night, and explain it away as a mysterious act of God.
 
 
And now, because I promised one with every entry, a poem in the form of haiku:
 
 
Fear, like an oil
brightens and expands, fire
for the coward's soul.