Casey Goes to Bat for Families

The Baltimore grant maker begins a bold effort to fight urban poverty

Like many industrial cities, Philadelphia had been on the decline for decades, hemorrhaging jobs and population to its suburbs since World War II.

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But in recent years, thanks in part to an activist mayor and a booming national economy, the city has undergone a renaissance. Job losses have leveled off and an “Avenue of the Arts” is drawing crowds back downtown.

Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods, however, have proved to be much harder to turn around. Struggling schools, high unemployment, and many other problems persist.

Now the Annie E. Casey Foundation is hoping that by pumping as much as a half-billion dollars into Philadelphia and 21 other cities over the next decade, it can transform some of the most troubled neighborhoods in America. Over the next 10 years, the Baltimore foundation plans to shift up to half of its annual grants budget into programs that fight poverty by identifying new ways to strengthen families.

“Outcomes for kids will not improve unless we do better by families, and families won’t do better until neighborhoods are better able to support them,” says Patrick McCarthy, the foundation’s director of policy reform and initiative management.

The ambitious plan, which will eventually command as much as $60-million a year from Casey’s coffers, is the latest in a string of philanthropic efforts motivated by the same concern: that piecemeal efforts to improve business opportunities, schools, housing, health care, or other services for the poor have not done enough. Many foundations have come to believe that the nation won’t ever win the war on poverty unless it mounts a comprehensive attack on the multiple problems that prevent economic advancement.

Most of the private efforts have concentrated on building up specific neighborhoods with the idea that once a successful approach has been developed, it can be adopted elsewhere.

Among them:

* The Northwest Area Foundation, in St. Paul, announced in November 1997 that it would spend more than $180-million over the next decade to help 10 communities overcome problems caused by poverty and related issues.

* Foundations and corporations put $22-million into the Atlanta Project, former President Jimmy Carter’s campaign to help 20 poor neighborhoods in Georgia’s capital city.

* The Enterprise Foundation, in Columbia, Md., has led an effort to attract $70-million from private and government sources to improve a single 72-square-block neighborhood in Baltimore.

Casey made an exhaustive study of efforts like those, as well as other attempts to fight poverty, before deciding how to shape its new grant-making program. It consulted with more than 600 policy makers, researchers, and non-profit leaders, as well as people who live and work in poor neighborhoods.

All too often, Casey officials concluded, foundations focused on ways to help individuals escape poverty but paid little attention to the welfare of entire families. Casey Vice-President Ralph Smith notes, for instance, that mentor programs, now all the rage with foundations, seek to “rescue” children from their circumstances, rather than help parents and other relatives so they can take better care of their children.

The new Casey program, called Making Connections, will help local community activists, social-services groups, religious institutions, employers, and others find ways for family members to help one another overcome the challenges of poverty by:

* Expanding economic opportunities. Casey grants will be used to help parents and other adult family members find jobs, open savings accounts, obtain credit, purchase homes, and accumulate other material assets.

* Reinforcing neighborhood institutions. Institutions that can support poor families in times of need, such as child-welfare organizations and mental-health providers, must be revitalized so that the assistance they provide is more relevant and useful, Casey leaders say.

* Building social networks. The foundation hopes to help people in poor neighborhoods reinvigorate their ties to family and friends, and reach out to acquaintances who can share information, such as the names of local businesses that are seeking new employees or the best way to join a Little League team.

Beyond making grants for those purposes, Casey also wants to make sure that the challenges facing poor families are on the top of the political agenda in the 2000 Presidential race. Among other things, it is considering holding a conference for the domestic-policy advisers to all the Presidential contenders. Casey leaders also hope to get state and local officials to discuss the idea.

In doing so, they argue that it is not enough for politicians to concentrate on family values and related topics.

“There is an impulse to say, ‘If we could only get these children away from these terrible families, the kids would have a better chance in life,’” says Mr. McCarthy. “We have had many fewer conversations about what the options are to strengthen these families.”

Many say they welcome the new venture, citing Casey’s solid track record on efforts to improve the welfare of poor children.

“What they are looking at doing is quite promising,” says Peter Edelman, a professor at Georgetown University’s law school, who was an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Clinton. “They are going about it in a careful way and not rushing into it, but basing it on what they have learned from their own work and the work of others.”

Others remain skeptical.

Urban-renewal strategies that focus on specific neighborhoods have had mixed results. The Enterprise Foundation’s Sandtown-Winchester project in Baltimore takes credit for reducing unemployment in the neighborhood by 29 per cent and cutting crime by 31 per cent since 1992. But the schools have been slower to show marked improvement. In Atlanta, some scholars say, the Carter project did not produce the broad-scale improvements it had hoped to achieve.

Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, says he is concerned about the lack of evidence that comprehensive poverty-fighting efforts are effective.

“We have spent bazillions of dollars on this stuff, and I don’t think we have much of a clue as to which things are effective,” says Mr. Jencks. “If I were spending my money, I would spend it on things we have more evidence for the success of, like trying to induce kids to stay in school and go on to college.”

Casey, which has $1.5-billion in assets, has spent most of the past decade financing efforts to improve the major government systems that serve poor children, such as schools, social-service providers, and juvenile-justice agencies. It has also supported projects to help adults find better-paying jobs and finance antipoverty advocacy efforts by grassroots groups.

Now, says Mr. McCarthy, Casey has realized that it cannot help the poor unless it works on multiple fronts and makes a long-term commitment to aiding specific neighborhoods.

In Philadelphia, for example, Casey has supported job-training efforts run by a charity called Philadelphia Area Accelerated Manufacturing Education.

The group currently enrolls 180 students in a program that trains them in manufacturing skills. But typically only about half of those who enter the program complete it. Many drop out because they can’t support their families while going to school full time. Others can’t keep up with the work because their previous education was so limited.

Simply putting more money into such training programs wasn’t going to make them more effective, Casey officials realized, unless something was done to deal with the reasons students were dropping out.

Other lessons Casey officials learned from their grant making shaped the new endeavor. They noticed that poor families were becoming increasingly isolated as people who were financially better off left their neighborhoods.

At first glance, the figures on poverty seem to suggest that the opposite is happening: The number of people living in high-poverty areas doubled from 1970 to 1990, rising from four million to eight million, according to the Census Bureau.

“When you hear that the concentration of poverty has doubled, you have this idea in your mind that people all over the city have moved into these crowded neighborhoods,” says Paul Jargowsky, a professor of political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas.

“What is actually happening is quite the opposite: The neighborhoods are emptying out.”

As people who aren’t poor move out faster than those who are, the group left behind has a higher average poverty rate. The net result is that more neighborhoods are classified as very poor, but on average, they have fewer people living in them.

The isolation of those neighborhoods became clear to Casey Foundation President Douglas W. Nelson in an incident that occurred a few weeks after the foundation relocated its headquarters from Greenwich, Conn., to Baltimore.

Walking through a public-housing project, Mr. Nelson encountered two boys embroiled in a violent fight. One boy was becoming badly injured, so Mr. Nelson stepped in. As he approached them, the apparent instigator ran away, ending the fight.

What struck Mr. Nelson most at the time was the fact no one else had tried to stop them.

“It made me think how some of our systems-reform efforts didn’t get at the underlying forces shaping these kids’ lives,” he recalls. “Not many people seemed to be paying attention to them.”

What to do about it was another question. “Everyone in the world is for strong families,” he observes. “The tricky thing is to define it in a meaningful way so you can actually create or reinforce them.”

The foundation then set out to determine how many neighborhoods were suffering from problems like the one Mr. Nelson encountered. It estimates that several hundred such neighborhoods exist in the United States.

While it could not hope to work in all those neighborhoods, Casey figured that it had the resources to concentrate on 22 cities that would provide different insights into the best ways to help poor families. It selected the cities that had the greatest need and that already had produced strong community leaders who could help bring about change.

Casey officials often use the word “tough” to describe the neighborhoods they plan to help in the next decade. They picked up that word from a meeting with community leaders where one parent described her neighborhood as “a tough place to raise children.” Mr. Smith, the foundation’s vice-president, says Casey officials seized upon the term because it reflected the neighborhoods’ problems as well as their resilience.

The guiding principles of Casey’s new effort are, in the words of Mr. Smith: “First, do no harm. Second, make new mistakes.”

By that, he means that the foundation intends, at the very least, to leave the neighborhoods no worse than they found them. And it hopes that in its work, it will not repeat the errors of the past.

To figure out how to do that, Casey requested copies of program evaluations from organizations involved in other urban-renewal efforts, and it asked leaders to relate any “hunches” or unwritten findings not included in the final reports.

The planning process took longer than expected — so much longer that staff members felt at times like saying “Enough already!” Mr. Smith joked.

Though it may have seemed plodding, observers say it is precisely this careful, deliberate process that will make the difference.

“If any foundation can do this, Casey has positioned itself to do so because they have spent so much time mining the field,” says Angela Glover Blackwell, president of Policy Link, an Oakland, Cal., antipoverty advocacy group and a former senior vice-president at the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York City. “They have been very thorough in their preparation.”

While Casey has been carefully trying to avoid the pitfalls of previous efforts, some observers question whether the amount of money the foundation plans to spend in each city can make a difference. While the foundation has not set specific spending levels for each city, it is clear that no one metropolitan area will get much more than a couple of million dollars a year.

In Philadelphia, for example, the Casey money is dwarfed by the city’s federal Empowerment Zone grant, which provides $79-million over five years to three of its poorest neighborhoods. On the other hand, it’s still a major infusion compared with what one of the city’s largest grant makers, the William Penn Foundation, gives to neighborhood revitalization: about $2.3-million a year.

Casey officials expect that the money flowing to each neighborhood is likely to increase over the years because they doubt all 22 cities will participate throughout the decade. To continue in the program, neighborhoods will be expected to meet several benchmarks to show that they are taking action to help families.

The foundation also hopes to obtain more resources for its work by collaborating with United Ways and community foundations that can rally local donors; with institutions that work in low-income neighborhoods and that can also attract financial support, such as the Local Initiatives Support Corporation; and with national civic organizations that have local affiliates, such as the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

In addition, Casey is trying to enlist other grant makers in the neighborhood-renewal efforts. In March, Mr. Nelson sent letters to some 100 foundations asking for their support and inviting their advice.

No matter how much money is ultimately raised for the efforts, that is not what matters most, Casey officials say. The foundation’s goal, says Mr. Smith, is to “lead with ideas” by offering charities and others who work in poor neighborhoods access to state-of-the art expertise on such topics as child care or economic development.

Aside from questions about money, the other enormous challenge for the foundation will be to preserve improvements over the long term. Mr. Jargowsky of the University of Texas notes that one of the first things many people do when they are better off economically is move to a more-prosperous neighborhood. If the foundation succeeds in helping some people do better, he says, it will have to figure out how to keep them in the city. What’s more, he says, the foundation will have to cope with broad regional economic forces, such as the movement of jobs to the suburbs.

Foundation representatives admit that it won’t be easy.

“Even if over the next 10 to 15 years we end up falling far short of our aspirations,” Mr. McCarthy says, “we will continue to learn and share with others, and develop new strategies that do work.”

Kristen R. Batch contributed to this article.