Food for thought

When designing sales territories, an analogy of approaching the territory like a pie has often been suggested. In other words, do you believe there are only a certain finite number of slices in the pie, so you need to protect your slice (share), or is the pie so large collectively you could never eat the entire pie. The size of the slice doesn’t matter.

I posted this on “When a child goes missing” concerning the number of reported missing children. The NCMEC receives approximately $40,000,000 annually from the Department of Justice and donations.

A quick search of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) will provide the following information for the period 07-01-06 thru 07-15-06.

Endangered missing 2
Endangered Runaway 10
Family abductions 0
Hague cases 0
Lost, Injured, missing 0
Missing 0
Non Family abductions 1
Unidentified 0
Unknown 0

There are according to Department of Justice statistics, over 800,000 reported missing children every year. That would be @67,000 per month. If the cases reported to NCMEC have been resolved, may be they should add a category. There is a major discrepancy between @67,000 per month historically reported missing and so far this month, 13 missing children, all between the ages of 14-18 years old?

Based on these statistics, how should the funding pie be sliced? Would the DOJ funding be better distributed locally or statewide or charities/organizations directly involved with finding missing children? It appears that is where the cases are being resolved. Do statistics exist to indicate otherwise?