Welfare reform initiatives in several states, including Michigan, Mississippi, Wisconsin, and Virginia, involve deliberate efforts by governmental agencies to woo churches and religious nonprofits into heightened activity on behalf of poor families. While some faith-based groups have responded eagerly, others are suspicious of such public-private collaboration in social welfare. The reluctant ones cite instances where bureaucrats have hogtied Good Samaritans working on the frontlines in urban America.
Consider the case of Carol Doe Porter. This Good Samaritan in Houston makes thousands of sandwiches at home and then delivers them to the city's homeless. Last year, according to the New York Times, the Texas Health Department tried to shut her operation down because her kitchen did not have a separate mop sink.
Mary Jackson, dubbed a "Mother Teresa" by the Detroit News when she moved into the drug-ridden Smith Homes project to look after poor black kids, cannot get the housing authorities to let her use the tiny "community center" at the complex. Why? Because she tells Bible stories.
Martha Hamstra of Samaritan Ministries in Washington, D.C., could not get a city grant to underwrite an expansion of the Ministries' successful - and flexible - job training program. "They weren't ready to give us the money if we didn't do things their way," Hamstra explains. "But our program is successful exactly because we don't [work] that way, because we don't demand the same thing from everyone who participates. People are so tired of being a num¬ber. They appreciate that we deal with them on an individual basis." Hamstra sighs, "I can't help asking: our program works and the government's doesn't, so why are they trying to make us look like them?"
Excessive regulation, unrespon¬siveness, the stifling of creativity¬ for many faith-based groups, these have been the hallmarks of "collaboration" with government. But even these obstacles are not the most serious challenges to public-private partnerships. Religious groups that accept governmental grants sometimes discover that they must hire only credentialed professionals, whereas before they relied on streetwise, local volunteers; or they learn that they cannot discriminate against prospective employees who are technically qualified but spiritually indifferent. Such regulations run the risk of impersonalizing - or secularizing - their ministries. Organizations may also" drift" from their original mandates because of the methods governments use to evaluate programs. Ministries that originally focused on transforming lives through in-depth, long-term
relationships with just a few families learn that state dollars flow more readily to groups that report impressive, quantitative statistics. "Transformation" is tough to quantify; groups that emphasize putting more goods into the hands of more people receive higher marks from bureaucrats.
Despite these problems, many faith-based groups do cooperate with governmental entities and accept state funds. They do so mainly because public money enables them to do more than they could with private funds alone. Collaboration brings additional benefits, too: ministries increase their network of helpful contacts; they receive technical training from governmental personnel; they sharpen their strategic planning
skills through the discipline of completing regular reports for the state; and they sometimes enjoy opportunities to influence public policies affecting their constituents.
As I visited two dozen ministry sites throughout urban America, I found that there is usually one example of fruitful collaboration for every story of a hogtied Good Samaritan. Steven Monsma of Pepperdine University has more systematic data. Most of the 766 nonprofit service organizations -- many of them religious - that he surveyed received public funding and reported that the benefits of such funding outweighed the negatives. Still, a significant minority of faith-based groups reported having conflicts with governmental officials over their religiously-motivated practices.
This mixed picture of public-private collaboration results largely from the prevailing, flawed model of such partnerships. The current model could be called the "delivery system" approach. Under it, government "subcontracts" the delivery of its programs to private nonprofits. In such an arrangement, nonprofits are clearly "junior partners" since they do not shape the programs they execute. This "delivery system" approach typically does save money and gets goods and services into the hands of more needy people than would otherwise be the case. This model does not necessarily reform people's lives, though, or utilize the strengths of faith-based nonprofits. It focuses too much attention on giving poor people things (meals, housing, training, financial aid) and too little on developing relationships with the poor. The delivery system approach changes who hands out welfare goodies (material and financial aid), but it does not redesign the goodies. This is the model's fatal flaw; after all, we lost the War on Poverty because we failed to see that poor people need more than material goods to escape poverty. They need friendship, moral counsel, emotional support, and opportunities to demonstrate personal responsibility and initiative.
Three current examples of positive public-private collaboration Mississippi's "Faith and Families" initiative; the partnership between Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries and the Department of Social Services (DSS) in Wayne County, Michigan; and the innovative "Spiritual Family Development" program in Richmond, Virginia - designate a better model. These initiatives illuminate six principles, described below, that are essential to fruitful cooperation between religious nonprofits and governmental agencies.
GROUND-FLOOR-UP INVOLVEMENT
The "delivery system" approach typically presents faith-based groups with a prepackaged venture that they can either join or ignore. This wastes the religious nonprofits' "frontline" experience and insight regarding what really works. Governmental bureaucrats should welcome "frontline" suggestions. And such ground-floor-up involvement in program design yields an additional benefit: nonprofits that feel a sense of ownership for a program will participate in it more enthusiastically and consistently.
Richmond's Department of Juvenile Justice understood these realities. When designing a comprehensive outreach to serve families of juvenile delinquents, it sought the input of local pastors from the city's crime-ridden East End. Ministers brainstormed with agency staff and designed their own program component, called Spiritual Family Development, to complement the Department's overall initiative.
Through the program, several local churches have" adopted" troubled families, and the involvement of the churches has boosted the Juvenile Justice Department's credibility in the neighborhood.
CONNECTED AUTONOMY
Many churches and faith-based ministries are willing to work with governmental agencies, but they don't want full responsibility for disadvantaged and dysfunctional families. Religious organizations want assurances that the individuals they serve will also be linked to government-sponsored programs that address those needs that the ministries cannot meet (such as ongoing financial assistance as the head of a household moves into the workforce, or specialized services for physically disabled individuals in the "adopted family"). Additionally, faith-based groups want to help poor people without excessive governmental interference that might squelch the spiritual character of their outreach. They desire, in short, "connected autonomy." They want to be part of a team that surrounds the needy - a team on which they playa significant, largely unfettered, and unique role - but a team nonetheless.
Mississippi's Faith and Families program provides this "connected autonomy." Mississippi congregations "adopt" families on welfare who are simultaneously enrolled in the state-mandated JOBS program. Thus, the churches provide participating families one key piece in a larger package of support. Mississippi's DSS has given churches great latitude in designing their relationships with their adopted families. But the participating family is not cut adrift from the social services system. This is important both for reassuring churches that they are not alone in helping their adopted family and for providing "leverage."
Churches can encourage and cajole their "adoptees" to take the steps necessary for self-improvement. But clients' participation is totally voluntary. Theoretically, "adoptees" can persistently reject the churches' advice, leaving churches no recourse but to terminate the "adoption." The state government, in contrast, wields more effective and diverse sanctions: it can hold clients accountable by reducing or eliminating benefits. Although Mississippi officials have not yet determined exactly how to keep Faith and Families' clients accountable to their adopting churches, all participating clients are bound by the rules of the JOBS program, and can be disciplined for noncompliance with the expectations of that program.
SYMPATHETIC RESPECT
For "connected autonomy" to work, governmental bureaucrats and faith-based ministries must adopt the proper attitudes toward one another. Bureaucrats should display sympathetic respect. They should eschew the elitist perspective that only highly educated professionals are equipped to help poor people and acknowledge that lay volunteers can provide crucial emotional support and moral guidance to needy families - things that government, by its nature, cannot offer. And they must allow religious groups the flexibility and creativity to meet clients' needs - even when ministries rely on strategies remarkably different from those employed by governmental agencies.
DISCERNING TEACHABILI1Y
Religious nonprofits, for their part, should respect their governmental partners. The failure of the government's War on Poverty doesn't imply that every DSS caseworker is incompetent. Many staffers have valuable, practical wisdom to offer nonprofits, and nonprofits should listen.
Nonetheless, religious groups must also be discerning, since their presuppositions may substantially differ from those of their secular partners.
Agency personnel may be able, for example, to instruct churches in techniques for helping substance abusers quit drinking and drugging. But as one former addict who had repeatedly relapsed during his time in government-sponsored recovery programs explained to Senator Dan Coats, "Those programs generally take addictions from you, but don't place anything within you. I needed a spiritual lifting." Secular specialists who neglect to treat individuals "holistically" will offer churches incomplete advice.
Moreover, faith-based groups must be alert to the moral relativism of secular state agents. A brief anecdote highlights this problem. While doing research for a book, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote to a federal agency to inquire about the latest statistics on illegitimacy. "I received a letter firmly rebuking me for using that term; the proper term, I was told, is either 'nontraditional child bearing,' or 'alternative modes of parenting' - hence legitimizing illegitimacy."
Churches ground their outreach among the poor on certain assumptions about right and wrong, while governmental entities refuse to call a sin a sin. Faith-based groups should not forget this fundamental distinction.
STRATEGIC INTERNAL ORGANIZATION
In their desire to avoid replicating the government's bureaucratic, impersonal approach, religious nonprofits sometimes err too far on the side of informality. Even a ministry that is highly relational in nature requires some level of internal organization and definition. Churches must have a clear idea, for example, of what "adopting" a welfare family means. What are the goals and expectations for the relationship? How often, when, and where should volunteers from a church meet with its adopted family?
In Mississippi's Faith and Families program, the churches having the greatest impact in the lives of their adopted families are those that have established structured times for meetings, that assign different volunteers to address different aspects of each family's problems, and that provide friendly support in the context of a "directed relationship" with defined, time-bound goals. One church that lacked this level of internal organization was taken advantage of by a client who abused the congregation's charity; another church frustrated one of its adoptees because the adoptee had no clear idea of what she could, and could not, expect from the church.
QUALITATIVE EVALUATION
Finally, sterile, quantitative, and "process-oriented" evaluation systems must go. Sam Chambers, Director of Social Services in Wayne County, Michigan, has adopted a better, more pragmatic, way of evaluating the Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries (DRMM).
Chambers's approach is results-oriented. His office enforces health and safety regulations and conducts financial audits, but does not interfere with DRMM's internal policies or procedures. Chambers isn't interested in challenging DRMM's holistic approach or in extirpating its religious sensibilities. He says he works with DRMM because its track record is stellar: it has helped turn around the lives of some of the toughest clients in the welfare system.
Chambers' evaluation of DRMM is not reduced exclusively to a semi-annual, arms-length procedure that measures DRMM's adherence to "correct process" and gathers statistics. Instead, the two organizations are truly equal partners with a common vision of success. Together they conduct on-going evaluations of their progress in attaining long-term goals. This" qualitative" evaluation focuses governmental agencies and faith-based ministries on the vital issues: how well they are transforming people's lives, moving families off public assistance, and giving rise to indigenous leaders.
"Collaboration" is the buzz word in today's welfare reform debates. This is good news for taxpayers, religious nonprofits, and the poor - as long as the old approach is replaced by genuine partnerships constructed on these six building blocks.
"One Church – One Offender"
The "One Church – One Offender" program in Fort Wayne, Indiana, pairs individual men and women who have been convicted of a single nonviolent offense with groups of five members from local churches. Eligible convicts can choose to participate in the program , in lieu of incar¬ceration. Each group of church volunteers provides counsel, direction, and encouragement to the individual assigned to it, and more concretely, helps him or her find a job or educational opportunities. The goal is to help the convicts become productive and law-abiding citizens.
Two sets of statistics help reflect the broader promise of this five-year-old experimental program. First, the annual cost per participating convict is $3,138, 1compared to annual jail costs of $14,600 for men and $20,805 for women in Allen County, where Fort Wayne is located. Even more encouraging is the program's very low recidivism rate of 15 percent, compared to 50 percent for Allen County jail, and 65 percent nationally for proba¬tion departments. Unsurprisingly, One Church -- One Offender enjoys the support of local judges, the county probation and sheriff's departments, the prosecutor's office, and the mayor.
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