For as long as I have been working in Hawai’i there has been an effort underway to start a ferry service between Oahu, where most of the state’s residents live, and the neighbor islands, particularly Maui. The effort to initiate super-ferry service has consumed years of planning and arguing, $80M in public funding, and endless local newspaper column inches.

People are opposed to the ferry for a variety of reasons.

Its high speed could cause it to collide with whales, which are plentiful in the channel. The project was exempted from environmental impact studies. Fishermen from Oahu will bring their bigger equipment to the neighbor islands and out-fish the locals. Ferry terminals will harm sensitive landscapes. You get the picture. Lawsuits have been filed, but, finally, the super ferry recently began its runs between Honolulu and Maui.

There is just one really important factor the planners of this huge venture forgot to consider, the channel itself.

Recently, one of our clients from Maui, the Boys and Girls Club, took a bunch of kids on the super ferry to visit Oahu. By the time the three-hour journey was over, half the kids and a good number of the staff were, well, puking their guts up. It turns out the channel is really wild for a good part of the year and the state-of-the-art super ferry could not cope with it.

Who would have thought?

In the end, the super ferry may be killed not by EIRs and lawsuits, but by lack of people wanting to ride it. It is unthinkable to me that the planners didn’t bother to ask about the heavy swells in the channel, which they could have learned about from any of the local fishermen who deal with it every day.

As we all struggle daily to find the funds to build the organizational capacity we need, one fact may have missed our attention, I know it missed mine until today.

Funding for organizational development has grown dramatically over the past decade, despite the dotcom bust.

According to an unimpeachable source, The Foundation Center, in 1997 the field of "Management Development" accounted for some $60M in grants nationwide. By 2005 that number had grown to $340M.

This was not just inflation either. As a percentage of total grant funds, management development doubled in that period.

This is good news.

It means many more nonprofits are able to build their boards, strengthen their accounting systems, learn how to raise more funds, and undertake strategy processes. It also means that the capacity of the capacity builders, consultants like me, must have grown so that nonprofits are now able to spend nearly six times more money on their services.

What we don’t know, the $340M question, is what difference all this investment is making.

Field building work has come to a near standstill, even amidst this growth in direct service capacity building. So the sector-wide research we would need in order to assess the impact of all this effort is not available.

Oh well, maybe in the next economic up-cycle we can grab some funds for this as well.