Children Faith Based Agencies
By STEPHEN O'CONNOR
The child welfare system in New York offers a perfect case study of
faith-based antipoverty work. For the last 150 years, the city's services
to poor, orphaned, abused or abandoned children have primarily been
provided by religiously affiliated organizations. Modern child welfare was born in 1853, when Charles Loring Brace
founded the Children's Aid Society to provide education, jobs and homes to
street children. Brace is best known for his so-called "orphan trains" -- a
precursor to foster care -- under which thousands of children were sent in
groups to the country, where they were taken in by farm families. Brace
presented his organization as nondenominational, but he was strongly
anti-Catholic and had few misgivings when many Catholic children he had
sent away converted to Protestantism. Beginning in the 1860's, New York Catholics, outraged by what they
considered to be a Protestant plot against their faith, founded their own
child welfare services, which placed children only in Catholic homes.
Later in the century, Jewish organizations set up similar services
exclusively for Jewish children. This religious segregation persisted for most of the 20th century and
resulted in tremendous inequality. When African-American children began to
make up a substantial portion of the poor Protestant population after
World War II, contributions to Protestant agencies declined markedly.
Black children then had to depend on an ever-shrinking number of poorly
financed services. In 1973, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of Shirley Wilder, an
emotionally troubled black girl. The suit charged that she had received
inadequate care because as a Protestant, she had been turned away by city-
financed Roman Catholic and Jewish foster care agencies. While the case was not settled until 1999, religion as an eligibility
test for child welfare services effectively ended shortly after the suit
was filed. But the child welfare system's original structure -- a network
of religiously affiliated organizations -- still creates problems today.
Poor communications among agencies and a byzantine bureaucracy can have
the direst consequences for the children who are meant to be served. Moreover, the competition among agencies for limited funds has always
made it difficult to give children the care they needed. Charles Loring
Brace well understood what we might call the Iron Law of Anti-Poverty
Funding, under which no effort to help poor children, including public
education, has ever been funded well or consistently enough to operate
according to its original design. Brace knew that the Children's Aid Society would have no chance of
success if it couldn't do its work cheaply. He sent children to the
country in groups because he couldn't raise enough money to place them
individually. Nor could he screen and monitor prospective foster parents.
As a result, while many children found fine homes, many others found
nothing of the sort. Budgetary restraints contribute to many of foster care's present
failures. New York City child welfare workers must handle an average of 25
cases at a time, roughly double the caseload recommended by the Child
Welfare League of America. And caseworkers at private agencies are paid
salaries comparable to those of city sanitation workers. No one can criticize President Bush for wanting to "enlist, equip and
empower idealistic Americans" to help fight poverty. Idealists have always
been the backbone of social work. But many of them have religious agendas
that are incompatible with a multicultural democracy. Also, as the history of New York City shows, over-reliance on disparate
groups to provide needed social services can result in a bureaucratic
morass. This will prove especially true if the president's notion of
relying on idealists who will work for little or nothing turns out to be
sugar coating on a bitter pill of budget cuts to already underfinanced
social- service agencies.
here are two things
to remember about the "long tradition" of faith-based antipoverty efforts
referred to by President Bush in his recent speech at the University of
Notre Dame: First, for most of American history a primary goal of such
efforts was the propagation of particular faiths, and second, no
antipoverty program has ever succeeded well or for long without adequate
financing.
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