Churches, Charities Must Find A Way To Replace Welfare
One of the real oversights in the welfare bill winding toward a conclusion this week in Congress is many people don’t want to be on welfare.
Take Tina Clinkenbeard. She’s been there; for 10 years the Spokane mother supported her family with a monthly welfare check until she decided she didn’t like the person it made her. She got off the dole, got a job and soon found out it wasn’t enough.
A story in Saturday’s Spokesman-Review told about Clinkenbeard’s struggle to stay off welfare. Since losing her job due to illness, Clinkenbeard has resisted dependency. But it hasn’t been easy. Just this month, she’s looked to half a dozen churches and charities for help with the rent. Their advice? Sign up for Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Get back on the gravy train.
Churches and community agencies are going to have to re-evaluate that advice, come welfare reform.
By one estimate, states will have $2 billion less in federal funds by the year 2000, a time when welfare caseloads are expected to increase with the number of women in prime child-bearing age. In addition, the bill most likely to win both House and Senate approval cuts off benefits for most welfare families after five years. When it is fully phased in, 3 million poor children will be without benefits.
Then what? The heads of those families - mostly mothers - won’t have much luck finding work, since the Republican plan for welfare reform provides little for job training or placement services.
Communities are going to have to pick up the slack through traditional channels. It used to be that churches and private charities took care of the needy in the communities; they knew most of them by name.
The problem has become so unwieldy now that those same organizations refer people to the government for help, choosing instead to spend most of their resources helping people already on welfare. In other words, the charity system is designed as a subtle complement to social services instead of a replacement for them.
With the federal government bowing out of social service, that’s got to change.
One way churches can step up is through a provision in the Senate welfare bill that would let states contract with churches and religious organizations to deliver services - from job counseling to alcohol rehabilitation - while retaining their religious bent. The move would combine a secular mission of helping the needy with a spiritual element that’s been woefully absent. It’s a good idea and the separation of church and state would be safeguarded by a requirement that states offer alternative providers to people who don’t want the spiritual element.
It’s one way communities can embrace the concept of taking care of their own. Churches and charities will have to re-examine how they help the needy. For individuals, it means bigger donations and more volunteering.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Anne Windishar/For the editorial board