Texas-size ministry

National Catholic Reporter, August 11, 2000 by Pamela Schaeffer

In recent initiatives prompting the downtown meetings, social ministers, led by Barbara Lashley who oversees advocacy, have directed their zeal at improving access to health care for Houston's 31 percent uninsured, a funding crisis in the Harris County Hospital District and to upgrading Texas's stingy welfare benefits.

Social ministers helped avert the hospital-funding crisis by galvanizing their networks in support of an emergency funding action that county commissioners had to approve. Commissioners, meeting in an overflowing courtroom, approved it unanimously, thanks in part to some 260 faxes parishioners at Christ the Good Shepherd had sent out. "We made a difference," said Lashley, who had devoted days to gathering support. Their crusade caught the attention of the new chief executive of Houston's public hospital district, John Guest. Not long after assuming his new post last spring, Guest began meeting regularly with Lashley and other community leaders to talk about improving access to public health care.

Social ministers' persistence in improving access led to formation of a group called Community Partners, where activists tell public hospital officials about problems their clients face. At one recent meeting, group members examined proofs of a new brochure. It was prompted by complaints that the old ones were hard to understand. "Is this clear?" social ministers asked one another. "Why don't we try it out on some of your clients?" Doran proposed.

The social ministers are "a pain sometimes," acknowledged Margo Hilliard, vice-president of the Harris County Hospital District. "But they also tell us things we need to know."

As with most issues social ministers deal with, it was an individual's needs that led them into a big arena -- in this case, public health care. "The woman who got us into health care access had cancer, but her records got lost in the public hospital district's system," Doran said. She added wryly: "She was not getting any better while they were trying to find her in their computers."

Everything social ministers do "starts with the moans and groans of the people," Doran said. "It's not like we get up and say, `I wonder what system we can go out and disrupt today.'"

Training is the secret

If the parish has a secret to success, it's "training, training, training," she said. The goal is to develop theologically informed, professionally qualified "servants of the gospel" rather than to encourage impulsive do-gooders who are long on energy and ideas but short on knowledge and skill. "We are not interested in volunteerism, but in people with a sense of vocation," she said, people who see working with the poor as "a way of life."

"I sometimes notice an attitude that, when it comes to social services, anybody can do it," Doran said. "But anybody can't. You have to be very savvy to know where the dollars are," how to get the job done.

Savvy means knowing for instance that if the church gives money directly to people, it could reduce their welfare benefits. The way around might be to pay benefits directly to vendors, such as landlords or utility suppliers.