Has the Social Safety Net Been ALTARED? (continued)

Appendix B
Annotated Bibliography

The years immediately following the 1996 passage of PWRORA and the subsequent implementation of charitable choice policy by the federal government have seen a dramatic increase in the body of literature broadly focused on charitable choice and its surrounding issues. However, there has been a much more limited amount of research of relevance to the four study questions of this project, especially with regards to Question 1 ("What types of current and former welfare recipients receive services from FBOs?") and Question 3 ("Do FBOs have the organizational capacity, relative to non-FBOs, to help welfare recipients avoid exhausting their time-limited welfare benefits?"). Additionally, very little of the literature surveyed focused specifically on faith-based providers of welfare-to-work services, leaving us to infer capacity issues from more broadly-based studies.

The following literature review presents a selection of significant research germane to our study. It includes articles that discuss Indiana's charitable choice programs, contextual background on charitable choice itself, FBOs' capacity issues or their potential problems with implementation, as well as articles that provide information about the types of programs offered and types of clients served by these organizations.

Brown, Rebecca (2001). "Emerging Issues and Opportunities for Community-Based Organization Involvement in Welfare Reform" Issue Notes 5(5). Welfare Information Network.
Brown begins by outlining a series of policy questions that have arisen for communitybased organizations following the 1996 welfare reform and the subsequent shift toward time-limited assistance. This devolution process, along with the accompanying charitable choice provisions in the Personal Work and Responsibility Reconciliation Act (PWRORA), has resulted in a movement towards the increased use of CBOs (community-based organizations) and FBOs (faith-based organizations) as transitional agents for low-income families who have been or are about to be dropped from the welfare rolls. She cites the previous study from this research team, noting that people seeking assistance from FBOs tended to be more disadvantaged then those seeking services from CBOs. These CBOs and FBOs are engaging in more employment-oriented services such as job-readiness and what Brown calls "soft-skills" training programs. Problems CBOs could face in this new environment include increased reporting responsibilities, increased competition, or having limited staff or capacity to meet these new needs and responsibilities. Brown also posits that there will be a continuing need for CBO involvement in promoting such areas as employee retention, as well as training for hard-to-place populations.

Chaves, Mark (2001). "Religious Congregations and Welfare Reform." Society, January-February 2001, pp. 21-27.
Chaves analyzes the general typology of religious congregations involved in providing social services in order to examine the impact of congregation type, size, location, and type of social service offered on the receipt and acceptance of charitable choice funding and social service delivery. While forming only a subset of faith-based organizations in general, Chaves posits that religious congregations are key to an assessment of the relationship between religion and welfare reform. Using data from the 1998 National Congregations Survey (NCS), he finds that 57 percent of congregations perform some form of social service, favoring housing, clothing, and food programs over health, education, or domestic violence programs. The largest one percent of American congregations accounts for one-quarter of the money spent by congregations on social services, while in 80 percent of congregations, less than 30 volunteers participated in social service work in the past year. Chaves points out that these findings imply that congregations do not tend to engage in long-term or large-scale social services, but in periodic, bounded volunteer-based efforts aimed at emergency relief, therefore demonstrating that a shift to the provision of large social service programs would be unlikely for the majority of American religious congregations.

Chaves also details key indicators of usage of charitable choice funding, also collected from the NCS. These findings include race and liberality as the key determinant of willingness to apply for government funding; 64 percent of African-American congregations were willing to apply for government funds as opposed to 28 percent of white congregations. Additionally, liberal/moderate Protestant denominations are 12 percent more likely to apply for funds than conservative or evangelical denominations. Chaves concludes that the congregations most likely to take advantage of charitable choice initiatives may not be the ones political leaders expect, although he adds that this article only begins the process of assessment of the relationship between religion and changes in welfare policies.
| back | next |