Well-credentialed social-service expertise and everyday, actual, real-life, neighborhood authority.
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. On the 10th anniversary of the law’s signings, as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of its Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, Schambra delivered the below introduction of Robert L. Woodson, Sr., to a Heritage Foundation seminar on welfare reform.
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I want to thank The Heritage Foundation for its role in bringing about the welfare-reform measures we’ve been discussing today, and for putting together such a splendid conference celebrating their 10th anniversary. It hardly seems possible it’s been that long since I drafted a memo on the subject for the board of directors of The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee, where I worked at the time.
The purpose of the memo was to describe for our board the programs we had been funding in our own urban backyard beginning in the early ’90s, preparing for the moment when the notoriously generous Wisconsin system of welfare payments disappeared, to be replaced by the work-first approach designed by many of the people from whom we’ve heard today.
It’s difficult after 10 years to recall just how bold and controversial that step was. But I tried to convey some sense of that to the Bradley board with this quote from a Summer 1996 issue of The Nation magazine. It said:
The welfare bill will destroy [America’s] state of grace. In its place will come massive and deadly poverty, sickness and all manner of violence. People will die, businesses will close, infant mortality will soar, everyone who can will move. Working- and middle-class communities all over America will become scary, violent wastelands created by a government that decided it has no obligations to its neediest citizens. In such a landscape, each of us becomes either predator or prey.
Things didn’t turn out quite that way, as we heard today. And I’d like to think that one of the reasons was precisely the exemplary work done by the nonprofit groups and churches funded by Bradley in Milwaukee’s inner city.
These folks were the real experts on welfare reform. They had been preaching the message of hard work, personal responsibility, and self-reliance for many years—battling not only urban pathologies, but also government incentives that seemed only to subsidize those pathologies. For them, the new welfare law merely meant that government was finally working with them, rather than against them.
Their names aren’t familiar to you, but deserve to be heard tonight.
Lessie Handy, whose Professional Receptionist Institute trained over 200 women to run the front desks in downtown businesses.
The late Bill Lock, founder of a business incubator funded by Community Baptist Church, who prepared hundreds of men and women for jobs by providing not just skills training, but also instruction in the personal habits expected in the workplace.
Cordelia Taylor, whose community-based senior care facility hires former welfare mothers to care for the indigent elderly, while she teaches them how to discipline their children and prepare meals on limited budgets.
When the new reform law hit Milwaukee, these neighborhood leaders were prepared to help it succeed, by providing, at any hour of the day or night, whatever it took to transform lives—not just material support, but personal counseling, morale-boosting, and sustained spiritual sustenance.
Make no mistake—the new work incentives by themselves were all it took for some to leave the roles. But for the many whose lives had been locked for years in dependency, or addiction, or despair, only the intensely and spiritually transformative work of these grassroots champions could make a difference.
And yet the only reason we knew about the Handys and Locks and Taylors was because of the work of the man from whom we will hear this evening.
Bradley had long heeded and supported Bob Woodson’s central message: that even within America’s toughest low-income neighborhoods, there are grassroots groups quietly and successfully attacking our toughest social problems. But they are invisible to the rest of America, because, we are told, only professional experts armed with the latest social-science techniques know how to deal with social problems.
Woodson’s message is that the best vaccine against disease comes from the blood of those who have survived it—from those who have personally struggled with the problems they now seek to help others to overcome. And his message is that no degree from a university can replace the energy and authority of those who are responding to a decree from God.
Now, all the Ph.D.’s in Wisconsin had insisted for years that Milwaukee was a social wasteland, and that only massive outside intervention by government would change matters. So we asked Bob Woodson to come to Milwaukee, and show us some of these grassroots champions he insisted could be found everywhere.
And so he did. Within months, his Center for Neighborhood Enterprise had led us to Handy, Lock, Taylor, and other grassroots groups that had been laboring for years just a few miles from us, without our knowing about them.
The center prepared them to be our grantees—not just by training them in the technicalities of grant application and project management, but just as important, by acquainting them with the larger idea of civic renewal that they exemplified so well, without knowing it.
Bob’s many accomplishments, honors, and books are detailed in the biography before you, so I won’t repeat them. But we need to understand that Bob Woodson uniquely combines the understanding of the role that Tocquevillian voluntary associations have played in American life with the ability to apply that wisdom by locating and nurturing the local grassroots groups that reflect it.
When Bob brought those gifts to Milwaukee, and introduced us to Lessie Handy, Bill Lock, and Cordelia Taylor, he not only helped ensure that welfare reform became a blessing rather than a curse to thousands of inner-city residents—he also introduced us at Bradley to some of America’s genuine heroes.
It’s my honor now to present to you Bob Woodson.
