Got it—I have lots of thoughts here! Overall, the team has been wanting more contact people for a long time, and I’m definitely in favor of some versions of that (subject to considerations of tractability and prioritization). I still think there might be a few things you mean, but here are some thoughts.
You might mean something like “a different team doing the same work but with different funding and institutional affiliation”.
This might be good. It does bear coordination costs, and for instance it might mean we don’t see problematic patterns as easily. I’m not sure what us setting this up would look like; it takes a lot of trust to vouch for someone to handle tradeoffs and a variety of situations with sensitivity; in general if we found someone with the same skillset as people on our team who had free time, we’d want to hire them! (And this would allow syncing up on approach and process; with more separation, we might put ourselves in a position of vouching for someone where we couldn’t mentor or observe their process; that seems potentially problematic). This would take the kind of work and effort where likely we’d have to be quite sure it was the top priority for our team.
2. You might mean something like having people who aren’t connected to Community Health but pass on information to the Community Health team, perhaps to allow for:
Greater anonymity
Wider variety of people so that more of the community has someone they know and feel comfortable with
Non-CEA support, but still having important information about concerning behavior passed on.
Passing feedback to the Community Health team
Some considerations:
To some extent this exists in the form of contact people for city and university groups, and to some extent in the form of friends—if you have a friend who tells you a concerning story, and they’d rather you convey it to Community Health with some details anonymized, that is just fine by us (and happens pretty often)
We were already looking into programs to allow real-time textual anonymous communication before this incident; that might make some people feel more comfortable talking to us and seeing what thoughts, advice or ideas we have before or instead of deanonymizing themselves
Something I wish more people knew is that contact people are happy to just give advice about sticky situations; not every call has to be a “report”
If we pay people, they do have a connection to Community Health, so supporting this financially may undermine one of the goals. That said, it’s not a blocker; it could still be a good idea on net or we could try to get outside funding
It can be hard to convey stories with enough detail to make it clear why we should take certain actions without deanonymizing people
See the point above about trust required for vouching.
I’m not yet sure how many more people would get support via doing this, despite it seeming good—seems like we’ll learn from this situation
The strongest case for #1 is cases in which CH is conflicted out, either because the subject of the report is a friend of everyone in CH, is in their chain of command, or there are other reasons the reporter might reasonably conclude CH has a disqualifying conflict. Not only is that a bad situation for the reporter, it’s a bad situation to put people in CH in.
I could also argue for at least some sort of external involvement in any case involving alleged significant misconduct by a very senior leader.
Got it—I have lots of thoughts here! Overall, the team has been wanting more contact people for a long time, and I’m definitely in favor of some versions of that (subject to considerations of tractability and prioritization). I still think there might be a few things you mean, but here are some thoughts.
You might mean something like “a different team doing the same work but with different funding and institutional affiliation”.
This might be good. It does bear coordination costs, and for instance it might mean we don’t see problematic patterns as easily. I’m not sure what us setting this up would look like; it takes a lot of trust to vouch for someone to handle tradeoffs and a variety of situations with sensitivity; in general if we found someone with the same skillset as people on our team who had free time, we’d want to hire them! (And this would allow syncing up on approach and process; with more separation, we might put ourselves in a position of vouching for someone where we couldn’t mentor or observe their process; that seems potentially problematic). This would take the kind of work and effort where likely we’d have to be quite sure it was the top priority for our team.
2. You might mean something like having people who aren’t connected to Community Health but pass on information to the Community Health team, perhaps to allow for:
Greater anonymity
Wider variety of people so that more of the community has someone they know and feel comfortable with
Non-CEA support, but still having important information about concerning behavior passed on.
Passing feedback to the Community Health team
Some considerations:
To some extent this exists in the form of contact people for city and university groups, and to some extent in the form of friends—if you have a friend who tells you a concerning story, and they’d rather you convey it to Community Health with some details anonymized, that is just fine by us (and happens pretty often)
We were already looking into programs to allow real-time textual anonymous communication before this incident; that might make some people feel more comfortable talking to us and seeing what thoughts, advice or ideas we have before or instead of deanonymizing themselves
Something I wish more people knew is that contact people are happy to just give advice about sticky situations; not every call has to be a “report”
If we pay people, they do have a connection to Community Health, so supporting this financially may undermine one of the goals. That said, it’s not a blocker; it could still be a good idea on net or we could try to get outside funding
It can be hard to convey stories with enough detail to make it clear why we should take certain actions without deanonymizing people
See the point above about trust required for vouching.
I’m not yet sure how many more people would get support via doing this, despite it seeming good—seems like we’ll learn from this situation
The strongest case for #1 is cases in which CH is conflicted out, either because the subject of the report is a friend of everyone in CH, is in their chain of command, or there are other reasons the reporter might reasonably conclude CH has a disqualifying conflict. Not only is that a bad situation for the reporter, it’s a bad situation to put people in CH in.
I could also argue for at least some sort of external involvement in any case involving alleged significant misconduct by a very senior leader.