Barbara Freiberga: trust and security don’t fit into an excel spreadsheet

Opinion piece
Barbara Freiberga, Administrative Manager of the Civic Alliance – Latvia’s “Safe Communities” Programme

There is a great deal of public discussion about funding for non-governmental organisations (NGOs), data, results, and whether the state gets enough in return for the money it invests. And you know what? I genuinely agree with the question itself. When public money is invested, we need to clearly understand what we are getting in return. We need to be able to assess results, be fair to taxpayers, and justify every euro invested – whether it is one hundred or one thousand.

Organisations are well aware of this and are already doing it. I know this because working with communities and various organisations has been part of my everyday life for the past ten years. Today, as I lead the “Safe Communities” programme – a state-commissioned initiative supported by the European Social Fund Plus to promote social cohesion – I have the opportunity to see these processes from a different perspective.

The programme’s methodology is based on developing neighbourhood communities and funding their initiatives. It has clear and publicly available performance indicators. But when I look up from my computer and meet with people, I see benefits that cannot be entered into any Excel column. And the story begins with the fact that the most valuable results of building neighbourhood communities can initially look very small.

Let’s imagine a simple situation.

People from a neighbourhood come together to discuss what to do in a crisis and what to put in a 72-hour emergency bag. There is a room. There is an expert on the topic. There is tea and biscuits. In an Excel spreadsheet, we can record how much the room cost, how much the expert cost, and how much was spent on tea and biscuits. We can count that 27 people attended. We could end the report there.

But in reality, that is where the most important part begins.

Over a cup of tea, one neighbour meets another for the first time. During the conversation, someone discovers that a medical professional lives in the neighbouring building. It turns out that one neighbour’s sister’s son is a carpenter. Someone else remembers the elderly woman living on the third floor, who will certainly need help in a crisis.

People exchange phone numbers and perhaps create a WhatsApp group. The next time, they no longer need a project to bring them together – they organise it themselves.

And now the question is: how much does that cost?

• How much does it cost for someone to know their neighbour’s name?
• How much does a phone number cost – one you can call when you genuinely need help?
• How much does the feeling “I am not alone here” cost?
• And, on the other hand, how much does it cost the state when none of these things exist?

It seems to me that we ask the last question far too rarely.

A community is not just a picnic in the courtyard, a shared celebration or a group of people on social media. A community is a safety net.

In a crisis, we naturally rely on the state, municipalities, emergency services and other authorities. However, until professional help reaches us, the person closest to us will often be the one behind the next door – and trust in that person cannot be built on the day when a crisis has already arrived.

That is why I believe it is dangerous to look at civil society only through the lens of budgets and formal performance indicators. Of course, funding must be transparent, and we must be able to demonstrate results. NGOs, too, need to be prepared to talk not only about the inspiring stories, but also about data and real impact. But we also need to be smart enough to recognise the other results.

That is where the conversation about the true return on public money begins.

We are not funding tea and biscuits – we are funding trust. We are not funding a single event – we are investing in relationships that will continue even after the project funding has ended.

Dalies: