NCEA’s Unfilled Promises: Do They Matter?

NCEA has clearly advanced the elder abuse field over the past five years. It can be argued that the 2001 National Policy Summit on Elder Abuse helped give impetus to the Elder Justice Act that was introduced into the Senate in 2002 and the House in 2003. The Center has filled literally thousands of requests for information over the past five years, and staff members have conducted hundreds of workshops at various conferences. Helping underwrite the National Association of Adult Protective Services Administrators’ (NAAPSA) annual training conferences and regional meetings, plus providing funding for NAAPSA to have staff, has clearly helped mature APS nationally. We know more about how APS systems work than we did five years ago, and we have a number of well-regarded technical assistance manuals to rely on in certain areas. There is also far more information on elder abuse now available on the web, due in part to NCEA’s evolving websites.

So does it matter that such a high proportion of what NCEA has promised to do has not, in fact, been done?

Yes, it does. For several reasons.

1. The NCEA, while mandated by Congress, is administered by the AoA as a competitive cooperative agreement. A Request for Proposals (RFP) was issued by AoA in 1998, and multiple consortia responded. They were judged based on what was in their proposal: what they promised to do and how qualified they looked on paper to fulfill those promises. Thus, other consortia that might have actually delivered more to the field may not have been given the chance to do so because this consortium’s promises were better.
2. Budgets for NCEA were set based on the amount of work in the workplan. AoA knew from the beginning that the initial workplan was unrealistic, given the relatively low amount of funding. The consortium partners made some changes based on AoA’s feedback, but not many. However, the subsequent budget was doubled, and the budgets for Years 03, 04, and 05 were more than three times as large as Year 01’s budget. Some of the reason so much work was unfinished is that NASUA did not fill a budgeted, full-time position in Years 03 and 04. It is not clear whether AoA has paid NASUA the $132,497.04 that it had budgeted for this staff person’s salary, fringe benefits, space rental, equipment rental and maintenance, postage, supplies, and professional services, or whether that money will be available to finish up projects once AoA’s funding ends on July 31, 2003. Similarly, it is not clear what happened to the $35,000 budgeted for grants to Native American coalitions, $15,000 for nursing home risk profile validation grants, or other line items (like the management teleconferences) that were never carried out. Were these funds reprogrammed (or will they be?) in a way that benefited the elder abuse field as much as the original projects they were allocated for?
3. There are many projects that NCEA did undertake that are not benefiting the field because reports, follow-up workshops, and/or other efforts to disseminate what was collected and learned were never completed.
4. The credibility of the whole elder abuse field may be eroded when one of its leading agencies routinely promises things it does not deliver. NCEA year after year continuing to pledge roughly the same amount of work it had proven unable to complete in years before leads to the question: are there other ways in which its responsiveness to changing -- not just static -- conditions in the field is compromised? And if the field appears to accept and condone a subpar job from its leading technical assistance provider, does that say anything about how much the field values serving its constituents well?