What's need got to do with it? barriers to use of nonprofit social services

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, June, 2003 by Rebecca Joyce Kissane

In recent years, legislators have called upon private nonprofit and proprietary organizations to assume a larger role in provision of public benefits to poor persons. Little research, however, has examined poor people's willingness to use nonprofit agencies in lieu of public welfare. This analysis draws data from over 2 years of fieldwork and in-depth interviews with twenty poor women in Philadelphia. I demonstrate that decisions to use nonprofits are contingent upon stigma, information, practical predicaments (e.g., agency hours), and perceived need. I explore the implications of these impediments in a post-welfare reform landscape, while focusing on how decisions to use private services differ from those to use public welfare. One cannot assume that because people have needs they will use nonprofit services to meet them.

Introduction

With passage of the 1996 welfare reform (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, P.L. 104-193, henceforth, PRWORA), the federal government no longer has responsibility for determining welfare eligibility, nor are welfare recipients "entitled" to such benefits by law. The responsibility for providing for America's needy families now rests mainly on the states; however, PRWORA also allows for private nonprofit and proprietary organizations to take on a larger role in the provision of public benefits to poor people by allowing them to act as subcontractors of the government (Katz, 2001). In addition, many policy makers assume that private, nonprofit social service organizations (NPs) will assist current and former welfare recipients reach self-sufficiency and make ends meet with their own private funds.

Encouraging local nonprofit and governmental agencies to provide aid to poor peoples is nothing new (Katz, 1989; 1996). Policy makers, however, are increasingly applying market models to social policy, often regarding private agencies as more efficient than public agencies, largely because of their ability to compete (Katz, 2001). A growing number of politicians believe that NPs should directly relieve the ills of poor women now and as time limits hit, replacing the government in this role. Questions remain, however, as to how poor persons think about receiving aid from NPs, what kind of services they use, when they will use them, and what factors inhibit their use. In the eyes of poor women, private delivery of services may not be favorable to public delivery.

Literature

Many politicians and scholars alike assume that if former and current welfare recipients need additional help to make ends meet or to improve their lives, they will be willing and able to access private, nonprofit social services. Researchers have tried to track participation in government (public) social service programs (see Coe, 1983; Bishop, Formby, and Zeager, 1992; Blank and Ruggles, 1996; Kim and Mergoupis, 1997; Gleason, Schochet, and Moffitt, 1998), but fewer individuals have examined participation in nongovernmental (private nonprofit) social service programs.

The existing research on NP use tends to study utilization within a larger examination of poor individuals' social support and survival strategies (Stack, 1974; Stagner and Richman, 1986; Snow and Anderson, 1993; Edin and Lein, 1997). Overall, researchers have found that use of NPs is rather limited, and poor individuals are likely to seek aid from family and friends over NPs. For example, Stagner and Richman (1986) extensively examined "help-seeking behavior" among poor, largely AFDCreliant, Chicago household heads in the early 1980s. Respondents identified the top three problems they faced during the past year and how they attempted to resolve these problems. Half (49%) of the respondents did not turn to a social service provider (i.e., churches, government social service programs, and private social service agencies) for any of their reported problems. Only 23% of the respondents had sought help from a private social service agency while 28% had used churches or government services but not private providers. Reasons for nonuse of known provider services included the procedures of the provider (43% of cases), the respondent's attitude about receiving help (29% of cases), the personnel at the provider (17% of cases), and location (9% of cases). In 31% of the cases, the respondents claimed "something else" was the reason for nonuse.

In their four-city study, Edin and Lein (1997) reported higher percentages of women receiving help from private charity than Stagner and Richman (1986) reported ten years earlier. Thirty-one percent of the welfare-reliant mothers and 22% of wage-reliant mothers in Edin and Lein's sample reported receiving cash or a voucher from a private charity in the past year. A larger percentage had received in-kind help from agencies in the past year--over half of the welfare reliant mothers and about a third of the wage-reliant ones. Edin and Lein (1997), however, argue that receiving assistance from nonprofit agencies ranked very low on the mothers' list of survival strategies, largely because they were humiliating and offered little help.