History as a teacher: what Obama can learn from the Bush faith-based program.(OPINION)

Barack Obama's proposal for a revised White House faith-based initiative has engendered lots of commentary pro and con, some of which seems to miss some important practical lessons that can be gleaned from the history of the faith-based program.

According to his political opponents, Obama was pandering for the votes of evangelicals and others who might have been disappointed by the Bush Administration's highly politicized faith-based program. Based on the relatively rapid conversion of program implementers such as John DiIulio and David Kuo from advocates to strident critics, there is much in the administration's program warranting a jaundiced eye. The most recent faith-based scandal in the U.S. Department of Justice's politically-biased national juvenile justice grant awards is apparently not an anomaly in the Bush Administration's faith-based efforts.

Among those inclined to see Obama's presidential campaign more favorably, Obama's proposals tapped faith-based service capabilities without blurring church-state boundaries, as the Bush Administration was wont to do. But one of Obama's proposals in the faith-based program suggests either that his campaign staff had not dug into what might have actually worked in the program, despite the Bush Administration's unerring abilities to muck up program implementation, or they were a little too energetic in throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

In his July 1st speech, Obama suggested that his renamed and relaunched version (he would rechristen Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives as the Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships) would include getting big faith-based organizations, plus a couple of secular ones, to help the smaller ones:

"We'll 'train the trainers' by giving larger faith-based partners like Catholic Charities and Lutheran Services and secular nonprofits like Public/Private Ventures the support they need to help other groups build and run effective programs. Every house of worship that wants to run an effective program and that's willing to abide by our constitution--from the largest mega-churches and synagogues to the smallest storefront churches and mosques--can and will have access to the information and support they need to run that program."

The Bush version actually did have a program of providing support to larger organizations so that they could provide training and technical assistance to smaller groups. The Compassion Capital Fund (CCF) lodged in the Department of Health and Human Services provided six- and seven-figure grants to intermediary organizations across the nation to deliver the kinds of training and technical assistance for which the Obama plan called.

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The designated CCF intermediaries, numbering 47 in 2006 and 2007, are not all evangelical proselytizers, but a range of organizations, some with faith-based roots, others reasonably secular. Some examples include the following:

* Catholic Charities of Kansas City (MO) received $417,000 in 2007 for its Concepts for Effective Services program to deliver group trainings and hands-on individual trainings to groups, plus opportunities for linking service providers to more experienced organizational mentors.

* The South Carolina Center for Grassroots and Non-profit Leadership at Clemson University's Institute on Family and Neighborhood Life received $480,000 to deliver capacity-building training to rural nonprofits plus direct technical assistance providers to work one-on-one with selected groups to "develop a customized work plan to meet the organization's specific capacity building needs."

* The Greater Erie Community Action Committee (GECAC), the Non-Profit Partnership, and the Erie Weed & Seed came together to offer training for smaller nonprofits plus more than half of its $403,000 grant as subgrants to participating organizations.

* The nation's pre-eminent rural housing training and advocacy organization, the Housing Assistance Council (HAC), received $365,000 to provide training and technical assistance seminars plus 30 customized on-site technical asssistance deliveries for nonprofits in Central Appalachia, the Lower Mississippi Delta, the Texas border area, and Native American reservations.

Others from 2006-2007 are legitimate training and TA intermediaries, such as the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty (in New York City), the Michigan Nonprofit Association, New Detroit Inc., Nueva Esperanza, the Providence Plan (serving Rhode Island's capital city, not the afterlife), the United Way of the Midlands (South Carolina) and the United Way of Northeast Florida (serving Duval County and Jacksonville).

Intermediaries in the demonstration program prior to 2006 include the Cherokee Nation, the United Way of Massachusetts Bay, the University of Hawaii, the University of Nebraska, the Citizens Committee of New York City, the Foundation for Community Empowerment (Dallas), the Southeast Asia Resource Center, Volunteers of America, the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Associations, Emory University, and Montana State University.

There is no magic in giving grants to large intermediaries. Organizations large and small can muck up training and technical assistance programs with little effort. Do we know how well the CCF demonstration grants to intermediaries did? There are two unfortunately brief evaluative studies on the HHS Web site, one done by Abt Associates in April, 2007, the other by Branch Associates in June 2008, but only the Abt study focuses on technical assistance delivered by intermediaries.

The Abt study was a survey of 125 organizations (53 percent of the survey respondents were faith-based groups, the rest secular nonprofit service-providers) that received technical assistance and sub-awards (grants) from 9 of the 21 intermediaries funded in the initial year of the CCF program (the Fiscal Year 2002 grant cycle).The groups received their intermediary-provided assistance and subgrants in 2003 and were surveyed in February and March 2006.

According to the Abt study, the recipients self-reported the following:

* Increases in their rate of application submission to funding sources--40 percent to federal agencies, 30 percent to state and local government agencies, 20 percent to "federated giving groups" (presumably like the United Way), and 7 percent to foundations;

* Faith-based organizations reported their largest increase in applications to federated giving groups (60 percent) and secular organizations reported their largest increase in applications to federal agencies (51 percent);

* Some 60 percent of the survey respondents reported improvements in internal governance through strengthening their boards of directors (defining board members' roles and responsibilities, establishing board committees, etc.);

* Over half of the recipients reported improvements in their financial systems and controls, including the use of new financial software and new systems for tracking income, transactions, and expenditures; and,

* Roughly an equal proportion of faith-based (78 percent) and secular (71 percent) organizations reported that the services they received helped them serve more clients.

These are not stunning findings, but they should not be discarded as irrelevant simply because they came from a program associated with a White House occupant named Bush. Perhaps the Bush Administration forced Abt to massage its findings to reach rosier-than-warranted conclusions, though Abt is a pretty legitimate group that might not want to trash its professional reputation for one federal evaluation contract.

The Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne suggested that there was a bit of a "cosmetic" quality to Obama's "mend, not end" proposal to the Bush Administration's faith-based program. Let's hope that the Obama makeover, both outwardly and more fundamentally, learns from rather than discards the experience of the dozens of legitimate intermediary technical assistance providers that tried to make the most out of the Compassion Capital Fund's demonstration program.

Rick Cohen is the former executive director of the National Committee For Responsive Philanthropy in Washington, D.C. His email address is cohenreport@npqmag.org and the Web site for the Cohen Report e-newsletter is http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/ cohenreport/

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