Community-Action Groups Survive Political Storms

President Obama’s proposal last week to slash the budget for the Community Services Block Grant, which helps a nationwide network of community-action agencies pay for antipoverty projects, is just the latest attempt by political leaders to rein in one of the War on Poverty’s signature efforts.

Created by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the community-action program was inspired partly by the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas effort, which set up organizations to fight urban poverty with the help of federal money and input from community leaders.

When community-action agencies began springing up across the country, however, many state and local officials felt threatened by legislation that funneled federal money directly to antipoverty groups and required “maximum feasible participation” by low-income residents.

Mayors began complaining that the new organizations were stirring up dissent and bypassing city hall, with officials in Newark even blaming the local program for contributing to the city’s 1967 race riot.

Congress responded by amending the Economic Opportunity Act in 1967 to allow local officials to designate the official community-action agency for their areas. The new rules also required the groups to name elected officials to one-third of their board seats, while allotting at least one third to representatives of low-income people and the remainder to business and nonprofit leaders.

That board structure remains in place for community-action agencies today.

‘A Pipe Dream’

Mayors were not the only officials who resisted the new federal intervention. Gene Flaten, then a field representative for Minnesota’s Office of Economic Opportunity, now 83, recalls the roadblocks he faced in 1965 when he tried to persuade county commissioners to support the effort to set up community-action agencies in the southeastern part of the state.

At one board meeting, he recalls in written memoirs, “The county welfare director, red-faced and terribly upset, began a tirade in opposition to a CAP program. He roundly condemned me and the work I was doing and felt that if any money was to come to the county, it should be placed in his care and not squandered by a new group of do-gooders.” He also said there were no needy children in the county, Mr. Flaten says, and “this new thing called Head Start was a pipe dream from the East.”

Eventually, Mr. Flaten, of Rochester, and other organizers got around the recalcitrant county commissioners by forming “citizens action councils” that successfully applied directly for federal money.

Fighting for Survival

Over the years, presidents have tried to kill or diminish the power of the community-action agencies. President Nixon transferred a number of programs that the groups operated out of the Office of Economic Opportunity, including Head Start, Foster Grandparents, and the Job Corps. He then tried to dismantle the office completely and shut down the community-action program but was blocked by a federal court ruling.

In 1974, President Ford signed a law that created the Community Services Administration to replace the Office of Economic Opportunity, which then ran the community-action program, but it lost the cabinet-level status of its predecessor. President Reagan and Congress introduced a major reorganization of the program in 1981 that converted spending to the Community Services Block Grant, which awards money to states that pass it on to eligible local groups. Oversight of that program moved to the Office of Community Services in the Health and Human Services Department, where it remains today.

Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush tried to kill the block grants several times but were thwarted by Congress.

President Obama, who argues that the money should be awarded more competitively, has proposed sharp cuts to the program several times (from $674-million to $350-million in his 2015 plan). But so far, despite its appetite for cutting the federal deficit, Congress has trimmed spending in that area only slightly in recent years.

Still Around

More than 900 community-action agencies operate in almost every county nationwide and generally have close ties to elected officials, including members of Congress, making them formidable opponents. They also have a registered lobbyist, David Bradley, executive director of the National Community Action Foundation, who has been working on community-action issues for several decades and has a deep knowledge of Washington politics.

Mr. Bradley says even Rep. Paul Ryan, the conservative Republican budget architect and sharp critic of traditional safety-net programs, told him he likes the community-action groups in his southern Wisconsin district as well as the local control that is built into the Community Services Block Grant.

A spokesman for Congressman Ryan declined to confirm that conversation, but Lisa Furseth, executive director of Community Action, an agency that serves two counties in Mr. Ryan’s district, says: “Congressman Ryan has been consistently accessible to our agency all through his tenure in office.”

Donald Mathis, president of the Community Action Partnership, a national trade group, says he often asks at community-action conferences how many people work at defunct companies like Enron, Merrill Lynch, or Countrywide Financial. Of course, no hands go up.

His point: “After 50 years, they’re not around and we still are.”

Send an email to Suzanne Perry.

See all of our coverage timed to the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty in this special section.