In Michigan, there are 8.24 job seekers for each available job. Nevada is the second-toughest place to find a job, with 6.90 unemployed people per job. Mississippi, Idaho and Kentucky round out the bottom five.

The best place to look for a job is Washington, D.C., where there is less than one unemployed person per available job. Virginia, Maryland, North Dakota and Nebraska complete the top five least competitive job markets.

That’s not anecdotal, friends. That’s official.

I think there is some value in recycling “pre-owned” content (Ha! how’s that for a euphemism?) The stuff was good then and is likely good now. Mostly. Better check the freshness on each post. But at my Two Forty Group site I regularly post articles that were published in the past. I know these articles have legs because of the popular response (emails, verbal, projection to the masses) that they received when they were published. Same goes with blog posts.

I just “recycled” a blog post via my twitter stream. Back in March I made a “Love Glenn Beck as you would love yourself” post. That post got some link love from a few other sites. In thinking about this past weekend’s events in DC, as well as anticipating our national conversation between now and November 2 and beyond, I thought it appropriate to recycle this baby.

You’ve got some great stuff that people wanted before – you know because you have the web metrics and personal anecdotes to prove the “market.” You could do worse than reboot restart recycle your stuff.

I got some of this idea from Guy Kawasaki. Kawasaki has written about how he uses Twitter. One thing he does is post the same link four times in a 24 hour period. He does this because the people who follow him on Twitter don’t constantly follow him. Many may miss the initial tweet, especially if they are following lots of feeds. Hence his idea to post stuff four times, ensuring a higher engagement rate than if he’d only posted once.

Some of your greatest stuff never got traction because no one saw it the single time it was posted… think about it, Jefe.

That’s my personal background in recommending this event to you:

Acton Institute’s 2010 Toward a Free and Virtuous City conference will take place September 23-25 in New York City. This conference is specific to leaders in urban ministry – pastors, non-profit leaders, urban ministry volunteers and community organizers working and serving in America’s inner cities. Event details are here: www.acton.org/cityfavs. Meals, lodging and conference costs are included in the $125 registration fee. I’ll be there as one of the faculty presenters.

At Acton we have this tagline that I love:

Connecting Good Intentions with Sound Economics

This conference may be thought of as:

Connecting Good Intentions with Sound Economics in Urban Ministry

Though the policy may sound harsh to some, Executive Director Stuart Ray believes that to require nothing of shelter residents demeans their potential.

“Every individual, every man, has gifts and potential. As long as we are not out exploring life, we are not reaching that life potential.”

Shelter residents will have 30 days to register with Heartside Ministry, which will conduct assessments of individuals for their capacity to work or find permanent housing or whether they might have physical or mental disabilities that hold them back.

Men who stay 120 days or longer will have to demonstrate good-faith effort toward finding housing or they will be asked to leave.

Sounds appropriate. Some have capacity to do more. I also think this quote is important to keep in mind:

Kent Vanderwood, COO of Mel Trotter’s operations and programs, said there will likely always be a portion of clients resistant to such an approach.

“One size does not fit all. There’s always going to be a need for the chronically mentally ill and chronic substance users,” he said.

Brian Fikkert, co-author of When Helping Hurts, also weighs in:

“The people we’re trying to help need to participate in their own improvement. This is not a right-wing political perspective. It’s from a very loving perspective. It’s saying we’re going to walk alongside you. We need you to meet us half way.”

Read the whole thing.

Behind the events is a Manhattan-based nonprofit group, MobileActive, a network of people and organizations trying to improve the lives of the poor through technology. Its members hope light-hearted examinations of failures will turn into learning experiences — and prevent others from making the same mistakes.

“I absolutely think we learn from failure, but getting people to talk about it honestly is not so easy,” said Katrin Verclas, a founder of MobileActive. “So I thought, why not try to start conversations about failure through an evening event with drinks and finger foods in a relaxed, informal atmosphere that would make it seem more like a party than a debriefing.”

There is also a prize for the worst failure, a garish green-and-white child’s computer nicknamed the O.L.P.C. — for One Laptop Per Child — a program that MobileActive members regard as the emblem of the failure of technology to achieve change for the better. When Ms. Verclas held it up during last month’s party, the room erupted in laughter. (Jackie Lustig, a spokeswoman for O.L.P.C., said the organization did not consider its program a failure.)

Read the whole article. Here’s the keeper quote:

…”the private sector talks about failure freely and candidly,” while the nonprofit world “has to worry about donors who don’t want to be associated with failure and beneficiaries who may not benefit from admissions of failure.”

I learn great things from failures. My greatest urban ministry insights come via people who share openly about what did and didn’t work. When Helping Hurts is such a vital book because Fikkert and Corbett are transparent about the many failures of evangelical ministries in poverty fighting (the book opens with just such an anecdote). The Philippines chapters in My Business, My Mission contain open admissions of the problems that were encountered with the affiliate on the ground there.

My family sponsors children through World Vision.

Timothy Jokkene is irrefutable proof that even in the most inhospitable economic climate there is hope. That economic climate is northern Uganda, where anecdotal estimates place unemployment near 80 percent. Through a variety of business ventures, Timothy enables start-ups, creates jobs, provides cattle and plows for the impoverished, and cares for hundreds of orphans.

The road to becoming a financier to the poor, however, was far from easy.

Read the whole thing.

A note about My Business, My Mission: The book is now available in electronic format (eBook, ePub).

But corrections professionals have asked for revisions on the basis of expense (yes, the standards will cost money to implement) and the theoretical difficulty of implementing them in every detail (although well-run prisons use them already). But these objections are, at least sometimes, a cover for deeper problems. Particularly in the most chaotic prisons, turning a blind eye towards sexual abuse helps keep tensions between racial-supremacist gangs under control. In juvenile facilities, furthermore, a growing body of evidence of guards abusing their charges has some guards and administrators rightly nervous that tougher standards will reveal deeper problems. Finally, society’s refusal to take sexual abuse in detention seriously, combined with the utterly distasteful nature of the problem, makes it something that many would prefer to sweep under the rug. The slow pace of the process so far — for example, even though nobody openly opposes the idea of standards, getting Congress to approve exceedingly modest legislation took almost two years of work — shows that many would prefer that it remain sub rosa.

Unpleasant as it may be, however, sexual abuse in houses of detention is a serious social problem. Holder has a decent set of standards in front of him. He should end the delays and implement them.

I agree.

I have a great fear for the church. The West is fast becoming an unreached region. The Bible and history show that suffering is an essential ingredient in reaching unreached people. Will the loss of a theology of suffering lead the Western church to become ineffective in evangelism? The church in the East is growing, and because of that God’s servants are suffering. Significant funding and education come to the East from the West. With funding and education comes influence. Could Westerners influence Eastern Christians to abandon the Cross by communicating that they must be doing something wrong if they suffer in this way? Christians in both the East and the West need to have a firm theology of suffering if they are to be healthy and bear fruit.

from the Lausanne Global Conversation for August 2010.