Leap of Faith

hen Jim Towey signed on as director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives 16 months ago, he had a few basic questions. "I came in and I said: Well, how many faith-based organizations even get federal money?" Towey recalls asking. "How much money do they get? Which programs are they involved in? Do they do a good job or not?" Nobody could tell him a thing. As Towey describes it, the response he got was: "We don't know any of those answers. We couldn't tell you." Towey, who formerly headed Florida's health and social services agency, was dumbfounded. "How can you measure the success of any initiative if you don't have basic data?"

Towey, like many administration officials working on President Bush's faith-based initiative, has discovered that doling out federal money to faith-based groups is more complicated than it sounds. Two and a half years after President Bush announced it as an urgent priority, the initiative to federally fund faith-based and community groups has proved controversial, ambitious-and surprisingly difficult to administer.

The theory seems simple enough. Convinced that faith-based groups, in particular, have been unfairly excluded from the federal grants system, Bush has launched a multi-part effort to level the playing field. He announced the creation of the first-ever White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives during his first week in office. He pushed hard for legislation to ease federal restrictions on faith-based groups. He issued executive orders establishing new federal rules for faith-based charities and launching centers for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at seven government agencies.

But in practice, bringing more faith-based groups under the federal umbrella has proved problematic at best. The White House office got off to a rocky start, and was publicly excoriated for valuing politics over policy by its first director, political scientist John DiIulio Jr. DiIulio later publicly apologized for telling Esquire magazine in a January 2002 article that "everything" in the White House was "being run by the political arm." Legislation to help faith-based groups has foundered on Capitol Hill, leaving the administration to forge ahead with only lukewarm support in Congress.

Agency officials implementing the plan have stumbled into numerous gray areas and political land mines. Many lack even a clear definition of what constitutes a faith-based organization. Federal agencies rely on states, localities and intermediaries to distribute grants, but that often leaves them several steps removed from the grantees. Agencies, moreover, have no additional money to hand out to new groups; they will simply be dividing the existing pie into smaller slices.

Lack of knowledge about faith-based groups is a major stumbling block. Bush and his allies have collected many a heartwarming anecdote to trumpet the success of faith-based charities. But scholars have yet to produce reliable data on the actual performance of such organizations. The disparate nature of faith-based and community groups, their frequently small size, volunteer staffs and mission-driven management style have made them hard to study.

Those same factors will make it especially hard for federal officials to track, monitor and assess the performance of these organizations. "When you federalize a program like this, it presents major problems in terms of monitoring," says Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution who wrote a report on the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Baylor University professor Gaynord Yancey concurs. "Government traditionally has been used to working with the bigger umbrella organizations," says Yancey. "To get down to those who are in urban neighborhoods, who are beneath the radar screen . . . is going to be the major, major challenge for government."

OLD FRIENDS, NEW FRIENDS

To be sure, the federal government has publicly funded some types of faith-based organizations for decades. National organizations such as Catholic Charities USA, United Jewish Communities and the Salvation Army long have been partners with an array of agencies to deliver social services. Catholic Charities, for example, gets more than half of its funding from government grants.

But the president's faith-based initiative is breaking significant new ground. In the past, religious organizations were required to secularize their social service activities, so they were separate in time and place from their religious activities, in order to get public funds. This practice dated to as early as the 1970s,when Supreme Court rulings barred faith-based groups from receiving direct government support for inherently religious activities. Often this meant that a sponsoring religious institution had to incorporate as a separate tax-exempt group, or charitable arm, to carry out its social services.

That began to change in 1996, when President Clinton signed sweeping welfare reform legislation that included "charitable choice" provisions allowing religious groups to seek federal funding for some programs without having to change their religious character or governance. Under charitable choice, a faith-based group receiving federal welfare grants no longer must set up a separate charitable arm to deliver social services. The new charitable choice welfare rules also allow social service providers to maintain a religious environment at their facilities-displaying crosses or retaining a religious name, for example. In addition, entities that receive federal contracts may consider religious beliefs in their hiring and firing decisions.

Bush now has applied the charitable choice model to all federal agencies. While the administration has taken pains to include community groups in its initiative, there's little doubt that Bush's real interest is in the healing power of religion to help people overcome poverty, addiction and other social ills. "Faith-based charities work daily miracles because they have idealistic volunteers," Bush declared in a Philadelphia speech in December announcing his two most recent executive orders implementing the initiative. "They're guided by moral principles. They know the problems of their own communities, and above all, they recognize the dignity of every citizen and the possibilities of every life."

The first executive order issued in Philadelphia established centers for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at the Agriculture Department and the Agency for International Development. Such centers had been created by an executive order issued Jan. 29, 2001, at the departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Justice and Labor. The second Philadelphia order imposed charitable choice provisions on the full spectrum of federal social service programs. It specified, for example, that faith-based groups should be able to compete for grants "on a level playing field" with nonreligious providers without having to change their religious character.

The president's faith-based rhetoric has alarmed critics, who warn that the new rules will breach the constitutional wall dividing church and state. They object to religious congregations receiving direct federal funding. Even more controversial is the provision to allow groups to hire and fire on the basis of religion, which reverses part of an executive order issued by President Johnson in 1965 prohibiting discrimination by entities that have federal procurement contracts.

Constitutional concerns helped derail faith-based legislation on Capitol Hill.

In 2001, the House approved a bill to essentially codify Bush's faith-based initiative, but it died in the Senate. In April, the Senate approved the Charity, Aid, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) Act, but only after its sponsors abandoned all substantive faith-based provisions, including one that would have allowed religious charities to compete for federal grants without altering their religious character. The legislation was stripped down to a tax bill that encourages charitable donations.

At the same time, some social scientists, academics and social service providers embrace the Bush initiative as a logical next step in delivering social services. The administration's effort has tapped a well of growing interest in forming innovative new partnerships between government and community and religious groups. "The faith-based debate fits into that larger question about how can government be more agile, be more creative in working with other institutions," says Luis Lugo, director of the Religion Program at the Pew Charitable Trusts, a Philadelphia-based organization that provides grants for nonprofit activities. Faith-based and community groups are potential government partners "on the ground, that are trusted by the people they are trying to serve, and that generate significant resources," Lugo notes.

The faith-based initiative raises serious performance and accountability questions for people on both sides of the constitutional debate. The initiative could steer billions of federal dollars to an array of unknown, untested groups that have no experience working with the government. It spans multiple agencies and literally hundreds of programs, making funding available for everything from after-school tutoring to soup kitchens, drug treatment, homeless shelters, job training and transitional help for ex-convicts.

What is a faith-based organization? A basic problem for agency officials is that there's no simple answer. A faith-based organization could be a religious program housed in a congregation. It could be a nonprofit affiliated with a religious group. It could be a nonreligious program staffed by people of faith. It could be a partnership between religious and secular groups. The permutations are endless, and administrative questions vary with the nature of the group.

"Lack of clarity in our vocabulary on this subject creates problems for studying, funding and making policies regarding social service and educational entities with a connection to religion," concludes a recent report by the Working Group on Human Needs and Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, a coalition of policy experts, activists and religious leaders. The working group is coordinated by the Search for Common Ground USA, a Washington-based nonprofit devoted to conflict prevention and resolution. The hazy distinction between religious congregations and faith-based groups has landed the Housing and Urban Development Department in an emotional controversy. HUD has proposed regulations that would allow an organization to use federal funds to renovate facilities that are sometimes used for worship and sometimes for social services. Civil liberties groups and some on Capitol Hill have criticized the regulations.

Concern about the potential ill effects of federal support has led some conservatives and religious leaders to reject the Bush model. What makes religious programs so effective, some argue, is that they are free from government intrusion and red tape. "Officials in faith-based charities may end up spending more time reading the Federal Register than the Bible," warns Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, in a March 2001 critique of the Bush initiative dubbed "Corrupting Charity."

An administrative challenge for the faith-based initiative is that federal agencies do not, in most cases, directly fund faith-based and community groups and therefore rely on state and local officials or intermediary organizations to collect data necessary to ensure accountability and assess results. Most of the money goes through block grants or formula grants to the states. It could then pass through local governments or intermediaries, on whom federal officials rely heavily to help smaller groups navigate the system.

For example, last year, the Labor Department gave out $17.5 million in grants to states and to intermediaries to encourage them to reach out to faith-based and community groups. Labor asked the intermediaries, in particular, to propose how to link smaller, grassroots organizations with the 1998 Workforce Investment Act system, which runs federal job training programs. The theory is that larger umbrella groups (an example would be Catholic Charities) can take administrative and reporting burdens off smaller ones. "You really need more experienced organizations who can serve as the administrative body for some of the smaller ones," says Brent Orrell, director of the Labor Department's Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. "It just doesn't make sense to go around building administrative capacity in all of these smaller organizations. They need the economies of scale, which all of the intermediaries bring."

But some intermediaries have come under fire. Last year, the Health and Human Services Department drew criticism when it awarded a $500,000 grant to Operation Blessing International, an organization led by controversial religious leader Pat Robertson, who repeatedly has been criticized for disparaging gays and lesbians, feminists and Jews. Operation Blessing was one of several intermediaries asked to distribute sub-grants to smaller faith-based and community groups to help them build capacity and manage their programs more effectively. The money came from the HHS Compassion Capital Fund, which aims to give faith-based and community groups the technical training they need to apply for and meet the requirements of federal grants. The fund doled out 21 grants totaling $24.5 million for such training in fiscal 2002. Some $35 million has been appropriated for the fund in fiscal 2003, and Bush wants to increase that to $100 million in the coming fiscal year.

Relying on intermediaries can make federal money harder to track, skeptics warn. "It's not clear at this point who's getting the money and what they're doing with it [and] what kinds of results they're getting," says Kay Guinane, counsel and manager of community education at OMB Watch, a Washington-based watchdog group focusing on government accountability and civic participation. Using intermediaries raises questions about "what kind of financial and programmatic accountability system will be put in place," she adds. Such problems can be avoided, Towey maintains, "if you make it clear that the intermediaries are as accountable for the sub-award activity as they are for their own activity." He and other administration officials stress that the standards for performance, certification and accountability are the same for faith-based and community groups as they are for any federal grantees.

"I don't think that the issue of accountability and management of grants going to faith-based groups is really any different than the management of grants going to other social service providers, who aren't faith-based," says Towey.

Indeed, faith-based and community groups have no guarantee they will receive federal grants under the initiative. The administration has set aside no significant new money for such organizations. HHS' Compassion Capital Fund does introduce some seed money, but it underwrites training and recruitment, not direct services. Some investments are associated with the initiative, including $600 million for drug treatment vouchers. But the initiative largely calls on agencies to encourage new grantees within existing budgets.

The absence of special faith-based funding creates its own challenges. Agency officials will not have the money to underwrite new grassroots organizations, as Bush has directed them to do, unless they cut the funding for current grantees. In some cases this may mean abandoning a larger, well-known charity with a proven track record in order to take a risk on an unfamiliar, less-experienced organization. This has alarmed some well-established social service providers, who worry about unfair competition. "The concern is that the agenda here is to prefer particular groups . . . that preference flies in the face of equal standards, equal opportunity," says Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector, a coalition of national voluntary and philanthropic organizations.

Some social service providers also protest that there's a drastic mismatch between what Bush calls the "armies of compassion" and the available funding. The CARE Act includes a $1.3 billion increase in social service block grant funding to states, but Bush objects to that feature of the bill. Yet White House and agency officials continue to host standing-room-only forums in major cities to encourage faith-based and community groups to apply for federal grants. "Without additional funding, it's a cruel hoax to run around the country encouraging people to apply for funds that aren't there," said Mary Nelson, president of Bethel New Life, a faith-based community development corporation in Chicago. Nelson spoke at an April conference in Washington on harnessing the power of faith-based and community groups.

"The cruel hoax is when you're stiff-armed from being able to even apply for federal funds, and when the same old organizations get funded year after year, without any regard to the effectiveness of their service delivery," Towey retorts. One purpose of the initiative is to involve more providers in offering federally funded social services. "Right now there's a limited group that's willing to work with the federal government," Towey notes. "We hope that changes." At the Education Department, the faith-based initiative dovetails nicely with an effort that was already under way to diversify the pool of grantees, says John Porter, director of the department's Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The faith-based initiative "was very well received here within the department," he adds.

Orrell, at the Labor Department, also reports positive responses among rank-and-file federal employees to the faith-based initiative. "I certainly expected a lot more resistance from the career bureaucracy of the Department of Labor on this issue," he admits. "And the biggest and most pleasant surprise to me has been the level of receptiveness to what we're trying to achieve."

Of course, if any government employees were unhappy with the initiative, they would be unlikely to speak out. Bush has made it clear that he expects federal officials to get with the program. "Every person in every government agency will know where the president stands," he pledged in Philadelphia last year. The White House has kept a tight rein on agency officials involved in the initiative. None agreed to be interviewed for this story without White House approval, for example.

DO THEY WORK?

The biggest challenge for administration officials still lies ahead. To win over his critics, Bush will have to furnish more than anecdotes to show that faith-based groups really can deliver on their promises. "I think the question ultimately will be: Do these faith- and community-based groups do it better than" other organizations, says Aviv. "And if they don't, then why are we spending all this money and energy on them?"

The administration has challenged universities and foundations to help it conduct research to evaluate faith-based and community groups, and many have stepped up to the plate. The most ambitious effort under way is a national research project at the State University of New York's Rockefeller Institute of Government. Dubbed the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, the project is funded by a $6.3 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Researchers do not have an easy task. Faith-based groups often are more interested in serving God than in evaluating outcomes, social scientists say. Their volunteer-driven structure can make it hard to track even how many hours they spend serving clients. Their small budgets make it hard for them to spend time on accounting and paperwork. "The state of literature around faith-based organizations and their effectiveness is in its infant stage, and is being designed as we speak," says Fred DeJong, a research and statistics professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. "In other words, the political agenda got ahead of us."

Bush administration officials are taking steps to fill in the blanks. Government conferences held to invite faith-based and community groups to apply for funding also furnish basic information on accountability, standards and compliance. The president's initiative also includes money to train and build the capacity of such groups, and to study their outcomes.

This year, federal agencies finally started collecting data about which grantees actually qualify as faith-based and community groups-a step toward answering some of Towey's initial, basic questions. But to ensure that faith-based and community groups aren't afforded special treatment, administration officials making grant decisions will not be privy to the data. Towey acknowledges that it may be a while before the questions he posed when first starting his job are fully answered: "This is going to take years, to evaluate what is being undertaken today."