On the 30th anniversary of substantial, work-based policy revision to social-service delivery, a still-relevant call for grantmakers to look beyond “picking up the slack” and instead strengthen the grassroots institutions that foster self-governing citizenship.
This month marks the 30th anniversary of President Bill Clinton signing federal welfare reform into law in 1996, following Gov. Tommy Thompson’s signing of Wisconsin’s welfare-reform law earlier that year. The Giving Review co-editor William A. Schambra was then a program executive at Milwaukee’s Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. His edited remarks to a June 1997 Donors Forum of Wisconsin conference on welfare reform are below.
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As a foundation employee with a longstanding interest in the issue of welfare reform, I’ve been frustrated at the extraordinarily shallow and superficial character of the discussion about philanthropy’s role in welfare reform. Much of it has centered around the question: can philanthropy be expected to “pick up the slack” as government reduces its role in social services? The immediate, almost-visceral response from philanthropy is a resounding “No!” And that’s usually the end of the discussion.
A question that permits such an easy and unanimous response is usually the wrong question. If this conference has accomplished nothing else, it has shown that the “picking-up-the-slack” question is, indeed, the wrong question. Here in Wisconsin, the state is by no means withdrawing from the old welfare system and asking the private sector to “pick up the slack.” Indeed, it is investing more, not less, money in the system. And more important, we are dealing today with an entirely new system. The state knows full well that no foundation in the land would commit resources to a program that had produced the sorts of results shown by the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) system.
A better question to ask ourselves, then, might be: are there opportunities in the new system, “Wisconsin Works” (W-2), for foundation involvement? And to this—much-better—question, the board of directors at the Bradley Foundation has delivered a resounding “Yes.”
During its February 1997 board meeting, the foundation’s directors established four fundamental principles to serve as guidelines for its approach to welfare reform, two pertaining to national public policy research and two governing our support for local programs.
A new consensus
As for the national agenda, Bradley has a longstanding commitment to policy research on welfare reform, beginning a decade ago with a project jointly sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and Marquette University entitled “The New Consensus on Family and Welfare.” A distinguished task force, including not only conservatives like Larry Mead and Michael Novak, but also distinct non-conservatives such as Bob Reischauer, Alice Rivlin, Frank Raines, and Barbara Blum, did indeed arrive at a new consensus, around an argument that a few years before would have been startling and highly controversial. In 1987, they wrote,
a substantial minority of the poor is suffering from something more than the low income familiar in family memory to most Americans. This new thing, which we have called ‘behavioral dependency,’ is more like an inability to cope. Many of the poor need order in their surroundings and in their lives; they need the intellectual and moral skills that enable them to escape from poverty and to live as full and independent citizens. Low income is comparatively easy to remedy; to overcome behavioral dependency requires a much more human, complex, and difficult engagement.
Since 1987, of course, that view has found its way into the heart of reform efforts in virtually all of our states, including especially Wisconsin. More on that shortly.
To guide future grantmaking at the national level—and I pass quickly through this, recognizing that it’s not an area of interest for most of you here today—the directors established this as its first principle: we “shall support policy research and writing designed to give the American people the clearest and most objective possible picture of the results of welfare reform here in Wisconsin and around the nation, acknowledging successes as well as failures.”
In pursuance of this principle, the board approved a substantial grant to the University of Wisconsin to carry out part of the Urban Institute’s “baseline survey” of the welfare population. Recognizing that accurate perspective on any issue requires at least two points of view, the board also approved a grant for the Hudson Institute’s new Welfare Policy Network, which will publish its ongoing surveys of reform successes and failures on the internet.
As a second principle for national policy research, the board noted that administrators around the nation were now suddenly expected to adopt a dramatically different posture toward the everyday management of public assistance. And so the foundation indicated a willingness to “support practical, hands-on training and educational programs aimed at improving the design and implementation of welfare reform nationally and locally.” Illustrating this principle is a grant to the University of Maryland’s “Block Grant Academy” run by Doug Besharov, which is designed to give state and local welfare administrators thorough training in the nuts and bolts of running a successful welfare-to-work program.
A “new citizenship”
Moving to issues of more-immediate interest here today, two principles were adopted by the board applying to our local grantmaking. First, the foundation suggested that it would consider support for “efforts by the private sector and neighborhood institutions to reorganize themselves, form cooperative networks, and upgrade their institutional capacities, in preparation for playing a larger role in the programs of welfare reform.” Some of the major nonprofit institutions in Milwaukee that have long been involved with the welfare population now seek to become directly engaged in supplying W-2 services—a process of reorientation and reorganization that will cost money, but that state funds typically do not cover.
This principle suggests that the Bradley Foundation will consider assistance for the most worthwhile of those reorientation efforts. Illustrating this principle is our support for the effort by 4C’s, or Community Coordinated Child Care Inc., to increase dramatically the supply of child care available to working mothers through the establishment of six child-care “hubs.” Another grant along these lines was approved for Family Service of Milwaukee’s efforts to train former AFDC recipients for employment in child care, working with a consortium of day care providers called Day Care Advocates.
But perhaps the most-important principle governing our approach to local grantmaking is this final one: the board noted that it would “continue to support the neighborhood-based, grassroots initiatives identified through our ‘new citizenship’ agenda, recognizing that such groups are unsurpassed at helping those least prepared for the new world of welfare reform to reorganize and assume responsibility for their own lives and prepare themselves for gainful employment.” This principle requires a bit of background.
Problems they believe are most important
Beginning about three years ago, and with critical assistance from Bob Woodson at the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, we began a search here in Milwaukee for grassroots initiatives that gave expression to what we called the principle of “new citizenship.” We had come to believe, based on our support for parental choice in education, that low-income citizens, like all Americans, have a powerful yearning to govern their own neighborhoods and run their own lives according to their own moral and spiritual principles—that is, to be regarded as personally responsible, self-governing citizens. But too often, low-income citizens had come to be treated merely as passive, helpless “clients” by the large social-service agencies, both public and private, that claimed authority to run their lives for them. This patronizing and insulting treatment contributed directly to the problem of behavioral dependency noted by the “New Consensus” working group in 1987.
Bob Woodson helped us locate here in Milwaukee’s inner city some outstanding models of the “new citizenship.” There are, just few miles from this location today, independent, grassroots initiatives launched and sustained by inner-city residents themselves, addressing the problems they believe most important, in the manner they believe most effective. More often than not, their work is driven by the sort of powerful spiritual vision that unhappily has no place in the established, “scientific” social-service agencies.
Working quietly, without much fanfare and without much support from the philanthropic sector, Victor Barnett is drawing young people out of gangs and into constructive lives, Cordelia Taylor is providing a true home for the low-income elderly, Ruth Varnado and Patricia Lloyd are battling drug abuse, Deborah Darden is helping former AFDC recipients regain control of their own lives, and Bill Lock and Pastor Roy Nabors, whom some of you heard earlier today, are launching new minority business enterprises and creating jobs.
Self-government
These are the sorts of efforts that Bradley came to support, and will continue to support in the future, as we enter the period of welfare reform. For they are precisely the antidotes to the problem of “behavioral dependency” that the old system did so much to encourage. Their work is based on the faith that all individuals, of whatever economic condition, have the right, the responsibility, and the capacity to take control of their own lives again. No matter what specific problem they address, at heart, they all challenge and encourage low-income residents to reorganize and re-establish order in their own lives and neighborhoods, and acquire the basic life skills that will lead to success in the home and workplace.
Why have grantmakers been so reluctant to support such grassroots initiatives? Well, they’re usually so busy working in their neighborhoods that they don’t have a lot of time or money to prepare fancy brochures or fill out lengthy grant proposals. Their work is often rooted in a spiritual vision, rather than in sociology or psychology or some other secular science that the establishment finds acceptable. And they usually aren’t staffed by social-science professionals with walls full of diplomas and credentials, but more often than not by individuals whose primary qualification is that they themselves have successfully overcome the circumstances that now face those who seek their assistance.
And yet, in this critical moment of welfare reform, these are precisely the sorts of organizations that we foundations must seek out, if we are to replace behavioral dependency with self-governing citizenship in our inner-city neighborhoods. This goes especially for the smaller, private donors here today. You have far more flexibility to consider support for such truly innovative, out-of-the-mainstream efforts. Many of you come to philanthropy in response to a call of the spirit, and so you may be more open to engagement with those in the inner city who have heeded that same call. And the smaller grants of five or ten thousand dollars that you typically make—which would support but a microsecond in the life of a major social-service agency—would mean all the world to these struggling grassroots groups.
Beneath all the specific questions about welfare reform that we’ve discussed today, outlined dimly in all the smoke of confusion and controversy, we can in fact begin to see a vision of a new and very different Milwaukee—one with vibrant inner-city neighborhoods, built around revitalized families, churches, schools, and other civil institutions, governing their own lives according to their own deepest moral and spiritual convictions. The ultimate challenge to Wisconsin grantmakers, I would suggest, is to help make that new vision of Milwaukee a reality.
