CfGF Founder

The Center for Government Functionality

Is Founded By:

My name is James Tierney. I am the founder of the Center for Government Functionality. I am a social worker who spent most of my professional career in public child welfare. The Center began as a retirement project and has evolved, in fits and starts, over the past five years, during which I have been exploring ways to communicate with government, primarily at the state and local levels, here in Maine.

When I retired from my work in child welfare I came away believing there is great potential in government that is going unactualized. We, in the USA, and others around the world, invest substantial societal resources in government and it is difficult for the average citizen to see what returns we get for that investment.

I believe some fairly simple steps can be taken to better connect government and the governed and thereby draw, more effectively, on the potential inherent in those who are governed rather than waiting, often in frustration, for government to be responsive to our individual needs.

Jonathan Schell in '''The Unconquerable World", pg 387 states, "In our age of sustained democratic revolution, the power that governments inspire by fear remains under constant challenge by the power that flows from people's freedom to act in behalf of their interests and beliefs". He goes on to say that that power needs to be channeled and controlled by acts of restraint. He refers to that channeling and constraining of power as Social Work. Many of my colleagues may think of that description as a bit grandiose. On the other hand, it seems to me quite consistent with the community organization component of social work. That responsibility of social work, the building of community, might well need to be resurrected as the function which our founders saw as the underlying purpose of the profession.

I came to social work via the route of a physically handicapped sister and strongly believe, as she did, that we all have to make do with what we have been given, we all have a contribution to make and the society we reside in has the responsibility to draw out and maximize that contribution.

This is the basis on which I pursue the development of the Center for Government Functionality.

Feel free to contact me via snail mail at:

J Tierney, POB 235, Brownfield, Maine, 04010. Or at: postmaster@thecfgf.com.

Thanks for your interest.