Thy Neighbor's Keeper

Can private charities replace tax-funded welfare? A program in one Maryland county suggests the challenges facing church-based efforts to help welfae mothers become self-sufficient.

Amy Sherman from the August/September 1997 issue

Ed Kirk says he's the kind of person that doesn't believe in failure." A retired Bell Atlantic executive, Kirk lives in a Maryland suburb and has worshiped at Our Lady of the Fields Catholic Church for 20 years. Two years ago, he and his wife, Elaine, helped Jane, a 32-year-old single mom, get off welfare. (The names of former and current welfare recipients have been changed to protect their privacy.)

Every day for four months, Kirk rose before 7 a.m., picked up Jane and her toddler, dropped the boy off at the babysitter, and drove Jane to work. She did a lot of temping, and sometimes jobs were 30 or 40 miles away. During the long drives, he'd cheer and cajole.

"I was always talking to her positively, telling her she could get off welfare," Kirk says. He wouldn't let her dwell on the negative, tolerated no excuses for not working to resolve her problems, and encouraged her to focus on the future. After a 14-month roller coaster ride of hirings and firings, health problems, suspicious drug activity, eviction, and family reconciliation, Jane has finally settled into a full-time clerical job with medical benefits in Washington, D.C., and has her own apartment. Kirk says it's a success story but admits "it had a lot of bruises along the way."

Kirk's church is one of two dozen congregations in Maryland's Anne Arundel County that participate in the Community-Directed Assistance Program, or C-DAP. Launched in June 1994, the program links welfare recipients with small support teams of church volunteers. The church receives one year's worth of the recipient's AFDC benefits in a lump sum, and the volunteers and recipient work together for six months to tackle the obstacles to economic self-sufficiency and find stable, permanent employment. Since its inception, 21 welfare recipients have enrolled in C-DAP and 14 have not returned to the state's welfare rolls. Though small-scale, C-DAP is the most creative and thoughtfully constructed partnership between the religious community and local government I've seen while researching such initiatives in several states on the cutting edge of welfare reform. And soon more welfare recipients may be able to join something like C-DAP: Officials from Maryland's Frederick County and Washington County have invited C-DAP manager Remy Agee to teach them how to replicate the program.

Agee, an employee of Anne Arundel County's Department of Social Services, is quick to say that "C-DAP isn't for everyone." Because of its emphasis on work, pregnant welfare recipients or those with small children won't join. Recipients with drug problems are screened out, and recipients who want further schooling typically reject the offer to enroll in C-DAP. Furthermore, it appears that only churches are willing to make the long-term volunteer investment required of C-DAP mentors. Agee originally thought that service organizations, such as the Kiwanis or Rotary clubs, might be willing to help, but they turned her down. "They weren't willing to work as labor-intensively with a family for six months or more," she says.

While C-DAP is succeeding in helping recipients achieve independence from the dole, my study of 13 program participants shows the enormous difficulties of obtaining true self-sufficiency. "We and the public are learning," Agee reports, "that there are multiple issues for almost every family that is eligible for assistance. Most of the [C-DAP] participants have spiraled downward pretty far. They've exhausted their own resources and those of their families and friends." The relatively small number of C-DAP's success stories could lead one to question the initiative's value. Critics of welfare reform might argue that C-DAP's record proves that the challenge of moving needy families from dependence to self-sufficiency is just too great for private citizens; that only government with its large resources can handle it. In reality, though, the contrary is true. C-DAP provides a vivid and sobering reminder of why welfare reform was necessary. While the Maryland experiment counsels against an easy optimism about fixing the "underclass problem," it also demonstrates an innovative welfare-to-work approach that other states should consider imitating.

With the devolution of welfare from Washington to the states, and from the states to civil society, governmental entities are stepping up their efforts to collaborate with private social service organizations, particularly churches and religious nonprofit groups. Mississippi Gov. Kirk Fordice's Faith and Families program aims to match every welfare family with a congregation that can help it achieve economic self-sufficiency. Gov. George Allen of Virginia has sponsored several regional conferences bringing together state bureaucrats, community nonprofits, and religious leaders to forge new alliances and facilitate welfare-to-work mentoring programs and new child care and job training initiatives. Govs. John Engler of Michigan and Parris Glendening of Maryland are taking similar steps.

Public partnerships with religious social service agencies aren't exactly novel. Stephen Monsma's recent study, When Sacred and Secular Mix, discusses hundreds of examples of cooperation between government and religious groups. Organizations like Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army make a huge impact serving the poor and receive considerable public funding. But the climate is new in two respects. First, the "charitable choice" provisions in the federal welfare reform law give religious social service groups that accept government funds explicit protections that enable them to carry out their work without compromising their unique religious identity and mission. Such protections make it more likely that evangelical Christian groups already fighting poverty will be able to expand their activities by accepting state money. Second, most previous collaboration was with religious nonprofits, not individual congregations. Aggressive attempts to stir churches to greater activity may provide a twofold blessing. They can harness previously untapped human and financial resources, and they can encourage a reformation of church benevolence: away from traditional, "commodity-based" outreach that gave poor people band-aids of money, food, and clothing, and toward "relationally based" service that addresses the root causes of persistent poverty and encourages permanent change.

The C-DAP model is a good one for churches and policy makers to consider for several reasons. First, it illustrates the ground-floor-up involvement critical to fruitful public-private collaboration. Agee, the C-DAP manager, held focus groups with business owners, community representatives, churches, and welfare recipients to shape a program that would address both the structural and the moral-cultural factors contributing to welfare dependence while drawing on the enormous human resources available in the religious community. Welfare recipients like Wanda, a 24-year-old mother of two, said they wanted more personalized assistance; they were "sick of being treated as faceless numbers by the [social services] bureaucracy." Businesses said they'd hire poor people if they had good attitudes and a personal support system to help them cope with the challenges of day care, transportation, and budgeting. Churches said they'd administer funds, teach money management, and provide caring volunteers--as long as they weren't matched with drug addicts and the county didn't smother them in red tape.

Agee and her colleagues listened, and created C-DAP from the grassroots up, rather than from the bureaucracy down. Too often, she admits, bureaucrats don't understand what's going on out in the community because they're not in field. "Every time we came back from a [focus group]," she says, "we changed the program, modifying it on the basis of that feedback."

Rather than issuing a vague plea for the churches to "adopt" welfare recipients, C-DAP personnel clearly define the program's expectations. Churches and C-DAP participants sign written agreements specifying the responsibilities of each. For example, churches are not to be approached for financial aid, and participants are the ones responsible for seeking employment. The volunteers' role is to "do with" the clients, not to "do for" them. Budget counseling is an important focus: Volunteers and C-DAP participants agree to develop a responsible spending plan immediately. The average participant, with three kids, gets a $4,200 allowance over six months (in addition to food stamps and other noncash subsidies).

Ed Kirk and other church volunteers report that most participants "needed a lot of education" when it came to finances. "Some of the young mothers we've worked with didn't realize they were spending 50 percent more than their income," comments a Methodist volunteer. He showed one participant how her two phone lines, call waiting service, and deluxe cable TV package added a hefty burden to her monthly bills. Kirk remembers taking Jane to the dry cleaner: "Cripes! She dropped off pleated skirts, and it just about depleted her money for the whole week!" Initially, C-DAP participant Tierra says she disliked the influence the team had over the use of her money. "But I wasn't doing so great a job," she admits. "I needed the help with budgeting."

Prior to the federal welfare reforms passed last fall, C-DAP was financially front-loaded: The church had 12 months' worth of funds to spend in six months. This made it possible for volunteers to tackle large, immediate barriers to employment. With cash in hand, they could obtain expensive car repairs and so enable participants to get to work; pay off debts that weighed participants down; or get recipients' telephone service restored so they could make and receive calls about jobs. Under the new welfare rules, C-DAP participants will receive only six months' worth of cash assistance for the six-month period.

Sponsoring churches may be willing to contribute their own money if C-DAP officials let them. This isn't a pipe dream: Churches involved in northern Virginia's Project HOMES pay the security deposits and first month's rent for the homeless families they mentor, and congregations participating in the Tidewater area's Partners in Hope project do the same for the battered women they assist. In Mississippi, churches participating in Faith and Families have given their "adoptees" grants of up to $1,500.

Another key to C-DAP's effectiveness is that it employs a team approach rather than one-to-one mentoring. This cuts down on volunteer burnout, increases the participants' network of contacts, and allows volunteers to find their own niche. In the cases I studied, usually one team member took on the role of day care shopper, taking the participant around to different centers and babysitters to find an affordable, convenient option. Others listened for job openings and coached participants on their interview skills, another helped with transportation, and another provided budget counseling.