Church Group Uses Public Dollars to Support Job-Readiness Program

In the fall of 1996, Daniel E. Perkins was shopping at a grocery store when he spied the cover of U.S. News & World Report,

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which highlighted an article that would transform his life — and the lives of many poor people.

The magazine debated whether churches and religious charities should do more to provide a social safety net for the poor. The article appeared soon after a federal overhaul of welfare programs that included a provision called “charitable choice,” which explicitly allowed religious charities and churches to get government grants to help current or former welfare recipients.

“I knew I had to do something,” says Mr. Perkins, a long-time marketing director at a local radio station, who has a doctor of divinity degree from a Baptist theological seminary. Seeing the magazine story that day was no accident but “divine intervention” in his life, he adds.

Mr. Perkins, a former leader of the Christian Coalition here, talked with social-service experts, his Congressman, and the Governor of Louisiana before creating a program called Faith and Families of Louisiana. The program signaled a new direction for the small evangelical charity Mr. Perkins had founded 20 years earlier, Power Source Outreach Fund.

In 1997, Faith and Families obtained a three-year contract with the state’s Department of Social Services. The charity receives about $150,000 annually to hold “job-readiness” classes in northwest Louisiana that teach welfare recipients how to become employable — from how to dress to how to develop a positive attitude — and to help them find and keep jobs.

Since then, Faith and Families has also picked up a $117,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor and a $100,000 contribution from the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, in Houston.

The program, which began with just two part-time employees, now has 14 full-time staff members at work in eight parishes, which are among the state’s poorest. The classes are held in churches that have donated space. Since September 1, 1997, 300 people, mostly women, have “graduated” from the program, a figure that represents about 70 per cent of those who began classes.

One of the most important features of the Faith and Families program kicks in only after the classroom training has ended, says Mr. Perkins, the program’s executive director. Graduates are given the chance to be “adopted” by one of more than 70 churches that have signed up to help, and almost all graduates accept the offer. Mentors call their welfare clients about once a week to check on their progress.

Such personal encouragement has made a huge difference, says Wilma Joyce Jones, a welfare recipient who graduated from the program earlier this year. “At Faith and Families, they really care,” says the mother of two, who works as an assistant preschool teacher at Mother Goose Land, in Minden, La. “You can tell when people are just jiving you around, but they really mean it.”

Duke Ramey, a Faith and Families staff member, says church volunteers have been able to help program participants overcome specific problems, such as finding reliable transportation and housing. “These ladies don’t want to be on welfare any more than anyone else would,” he says. “But if we make enough people in the community aware of what is needed, we can give these people an opportunity to break the cycle of being on welfare.” Mr. Ramey, a retired owner of an oil and gas exploration company, helps line up jobs for graduates of the program.

Faith and Families gets its clients from the state’s Department of Social Services, which routinely sends people to obtain job training at non-profit organizations and for-profit businesses. “If we know specifically that a person has a problem that might be addressed better through Faith and Families — people who need extra hands-on help or tough love — there is discretion to send them there,” said Delores Daniels, a case-manager supervisor at the department’s Caddo Parish office.

The Faith and Families program has received a lot of attention from U.S. Sen. John Ashcroft, the Missouri Republican who pushed for the charitable-choice provision to be added to the 1996 welfare law. Last year, Mr. Ashcroft paid a visit to the program’s Shreveport office. A few days later, in a speech on the Senate floor, Mr. Ashcroft said that the success of Faith and Families proved that the welfare law was working, as people were moving “from dependency to independence, from despair to dignity.”

Mr. Perkins says he eventually wants to take his program statewide. “And I’d like to inspire the rest of the faith community across America to say, ‘We could do something like that in our neighborhood.’”

Mr. Perkins says that he is careful to be sure that his program never promotes religion — not when its teachers teach in the classroom and not when church volunteers serve as mentors. “The American Civil Liberties Union and others scream about the separation of church and state and are watching us closely,” he says. “But we’ve had no problems. Not a single church has proselytized and used the situation to encourage people to be baptized or attend their church, much less join it.”

At the same time, Faith and Families is heartened that so many local churches have joined up to help, says Roger Wurtele, the program’s administrator.

“I’m convinced this is an opportunity for the church to rise up and really become relevant in our culture, to make an impact only the faith community can make to change people’s lives,” said Mr. Wurtele. “It’s a chance for the church to do what it stopped doing 50 years ago when it stepped aside and let the government take care of everything.”

Mr. Perkins is more blunt. “I’ve always felt that many ministers and churches in Louisiana are lazy and sleepy and never get involved with life, with what’s changing lives,” he says. When churches work with Faith and Families, he adds, “they are able to get off their pews and into the homes of people.”