Heralding the many heroics of America's social programs - discussion of Jonathan Freedman's book, From Cradle to Grave: the Human Face of Poverty in America

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 21, 1994 by Dennis McCarthy

It was a mantra echoed time and again during the Reagan-Bush years: Federal government programs don't work. Largely used to justify the scuttling or diminishing of as many social programs for the poor as possible, most middle-class Americans hypnotically joined the chant. Better they get the ax than we.

Of course, government programs worked all too well for the Pentagon and its suppliers, splendidly typified by the $600 toilet-seat revelations. That proved to be an apt symbol of where the civilian economy disappeared to.

But the Great Flush of the 1980s, which demonstrated that a rising tide can't lift boats that aren't in the water, had its bright side. All across America, creative and effective programs popped up on the local level, led by unexpected sources, to deal with the flood of escalating poverty and its ill effects on the vulnerable.

Ignored by the media for the most part - it was more fun to track Imelda Marcos' shoe fetish - they nevertheless captured the attention of at least one journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Freedman. He set out on a three-year journey to discover and write about these gems of pragmatic caring and healing.

"My method was to find programs that were successful and seek out people who had been helped by them. I searched for success stories because I wanted to know how people succeeded against all odds and what their stories could teach," he writes.

There's the story of Kenya Williams, introduced to drugs in the seventh grade at a San Diego school, followed by a long, downward slide into addiction. Luckily, she hit upon Options For Recovery, an experimental program funded by San Diego County from a state tax on tobacco, itself an innovative eye-opener. Let the drug pushers - none is more determined than the tobacco industry - pay for the damage they cause. "Options has successfully engaged support from the local conservative community," writes Freedman. "It meets a desperate need in a pragmatic, no-frills manner, providing day-care treatment to mothers and babies while running a small residence for a few mothers without homes."

Kenya; like many others, went through the three stages of withdrawal and healing at Options, now listed by Freedman among the nation's positive responses to the people the rest of society had written off.

In dozens of child-development centers, schools, family groups and community organizations from Auburn, Wash., to Brooklyn, N.Y., professionals are developing practical techniques for dealing with the devastating array of social, economic, physical and psychological problems confronting America, reports Freedman. In hundreds of grassroots programs, thousands of caregivers and parents are trying out these techniques and refining them within their own communities.

Programs like the Birth Place, Families First, the Comer Model, School-based Tiger-RAP, SPUNK, Focus, HOPE, the Job Connection, LIFE, Options for Recovery - they're all here, in Freedman's empathetic pages, waiting to be ingested by other caregivers around the nation and funded on the scale they deserve by the federal government.

Who knows? In time they might even reach the success level of the governments long-term program of protecting German children from the concocted threat of the former Soviet Union, now on the scrap heap along with millions of neglected Americans.

Anyone thinking of sending a gift to 16-00 Pennsylvania Ave. should wrap From Cradle to Grave and send it along. Kenya won't be alone in thanking you.

Denis McCarthy is the national director of a home study course, "Alternatives to Violence," for the Center for Teaching Peace, based in Washington. He once taught at a school whose students were reclaimed from the garbage dumps of Mexico.