Charitable Choice Goes Mainstream

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 5, 1999 | by Aimee Howd

Church and state long have been on opposite sides of a high wall. But 1996 welfare-reform legislation made it legal for them to partner in providing social services.

You might say welfare provider Bobby Polito gets things done because he's trilingual. He speaks the language of the streets, the language of the bureaucrats and the language of faith -- all punctuated with common sense.

Polito operates an effective, faith-based, 80-bed facility for drug-addicted, homeless men on Avenue D in New York City. Annually 125 to 150 men straighten out their lives through the Avenue D Project. One year after rejoining the world, 80 percent of them are drug-free, employed with medical benefits and free of all government subsidies. Many are active members of faith communities and reunited with spouses and children.

The results beat those of medical-model treatment centers by three or four times and perform at a cost of $10,000 a year per head, or 40 percent of the annual per-person rate of secular, government-run drug facilities in New York state. "We are not only cheaper but more effective than anyone else out there," says Polito. Private or church donations fund direct religious aspects of the program, such as providing Bibles for residents, but the bulk of the funding comes from a government contract.

Faithworks International is the only faith-based venture of the 33 non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, awarded social-services contracts in New York. Polito says religious providers are "an alternative, not a replacement" to traditional welfare conduits.

Unlike privately funded, inner-city religious missions that might require patrons to sit through a sermon before receiving a meal, Avenue D Project residents must be free to choose whether to participate in daily Bible study, worship services and prayer meetings, since the program is government-funded. But that is more honest anyway, says Polito.

While government is necessarily bound to standardization and bureaucracy, Polito and his staff of about 30, including many former addicts, can be personal, relational and spiritual as they struggle to meet the needs of their clients. Polito also is highly committed to sound fiscal management and regular internal and external audits and shows savvy about the system that wins the acclaim of bureaucrats. Officials from Milwaukee to Washington are asking Polito to help build similar projects in their most desperate communities.

"The welfare rolls went [down] from 100,000 to 9,000 in Wisconsin. But the work isn't done. Now the question is: What do you do with these 9,0007" says Polito. "They have some reason why they can't be just sanctioned off welfare and sent to work. Something creative and outside the box has to be done. That's where we see ourselves as effecting the next wave of welfare reform."

Thus, from the federal legislature to city councils -- beginning with the right and spreading to the left because of undeniable effectiveness -- government officials are dismantling the old wall of separation between church and state and wooing religious organizations to help nurse the social ills afflicting real people with big problems.

"Government alone will never solve problems such as poverty, substance abuse and broken homes" says GOP Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri. Three years ago Ashcroft, one of the most conservative members of the Senate, turned those sentiments into legislative action. He tucked a measure called charitable choice into the package of revolutionary welfare reforms that would slash cash-assistance rolls across the country.

The Ashcroft provision encourages states to seek social services from NGOs and requires states not to discriminate against faith-based groups.

Under charitable choice, faith-based groups accepting government money to provide social services to the poor don't have to sacrifice their religious character. The law explicitly states that they are permitted to define and maintain their religious mission, choose their own governing board, keep their religious atmosphere -- and discriminate on the basis of religious faith in selecting staff. It also protects the right of recipients to receive help without religious coercion.

The program since has been expanded so that charitable choice or similar principles now govern federal (and related state and local) spending in welfare services, the Welfare-to-Work program, certificates for low-income child care, community-services block grants and refugee-resettlement programs.

Separationists -- including the American Civil Liberties Union and its sister organization, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State -- have been greatly incensed. On the faith side, theologically liberal groups, according to one study, tend to be much more open to the idea of partnering with the government than evangelical conservatives.

Catholic Charities was working with the government on a large scale for decades before the legislation passed, but with government funding comprising about 65 percent of its budget it had no choice but to offer purely secular solutions. Asked whether charitable choice had them thinking of injecting religious content back into their social ministry, a spokesman replied, "Charitable choice means nothing to us."