Two Christmases ago, the then-10-year-old United Veterans of America (UVA) shelter in Northampton, Massachusetts, was denied nearly $500,000 in funding from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Had the shelter not exhausted its cash reserves and made cuts to staff and services, it would have had to turn 60 veterans out of their beds by the following April.
Jack Downing, the shelter's executive director, had been writing grant proposals for 35 years. He had a pretty good idea of what the shelter had done wrong: It hadn't checked off the box that asked if it was faith-based. It was “made pretty clear that [the federal government was] prioritizing faith-based groups,” Downing says.
Downing brought his shelter's troubles to the New England Congressional Caucus, and he took another proactive step as well: He registered United Veterans of America Inc. as a faith-based organization.
The strategy worked. A year later, the UVA's federal funding nearly tripled and it was able to add 70 beds and open a second facility.
This past March, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives announced that it had awarded more than $1.1 billion to religious charities from a group of 140 competitive grants. The figures represent a sizable jump in the amount of money given to faith-based groups and the number of such groups receiving money. (They don't include state-distributed block grants, such as the one originally sought by the UVA.)
Few of the grant programs examined in the White House survey received additional funding in the 2003 fiscal year. The additional money to faith-based groups came by redistribution of the existing funding streams, often at the expense of established organizations.
In other words, the money newly allotted to faith-based initiatives ($144 million from the Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development departments alone) came largely at the expense of nonsectarian groups that had previously received federal grants.
Officially, all grants are scored on their merits, with no preference given to faith-based organizations (or any other kind). Religious affiliation is only asked on a voluntary questionnaire that has had a low return rate, according to officials; it is not intended to be part of the application review process at all. Groups, officials say, did not lose grants to make room for faith-based initiatives but because newer groups were better qualified. “It's not like stealing from Peter to pay Paul,” says HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan.
But many suspect that this is precisely what is going on. “In some areas, there's been some fairly clear preference,” says Sheila Kennedy, principal investigator on the Urban Center's study of the faith-based initiative and its 1996 predecessor, Charitable Choice.
Contrary to HUD claims, the renewal application for its Continuum of Care housing program, the largest among the grants reviewed, asks at the outset whether a group is “a religious/faith-based organization” -- giving the question higher priority than the number of beds maintained or individuals served. Downing laughs when mentioning the “optional” box on his grant forms; after his experiences in 2002, he says “it's not optional for us anymore.”
When Downing became the unofficial spokesman for all the Massachusetts programs that had been cut, he heard from a number of groups that believed the same thing had happened to them. The successful groups in the Department of Veterans Affairs funding pool, for example, included some that, as Downing said, “previously weren't even aware of veterans.”
Training programs designed to help groups that have not previously received federal funding pursue grants have assisted many new organizations. The Compassion Capital Fund, designed to help organizations successfully apply for federal grants, has grown from a $30 million annual budget when introduced in 2002 to a slated $100 million budget for 2005. At least two-thirds of its grantees are explicitly faith-based (though fund officials did not respond when asked to give numbers or dollar figures for “community-based” recipients, or to estimate the number of non-faith-based groups attending its regional conference in Pittsburgh on April 21).
The purpose of the fund is to redress “a pattern of discriminating against faith- and community-based groups.” But federal dollars have long gone to religiously affiliated charities. Pepperdine University political-science professor Stephen Monsma found little discrimination in his 1996 book, When Sacred and Secular Mix, and advocated an official position of “positive neutrality” toward the groups. The targeted funding of new faith-based organizations is a clear departure from that sort of evenhanded neutrality.
Downing believes that spiritual guidance is an essential piece of the services the United Veterans of America shelter offers. He maintains that there are “not many groups that don't interface with every faith” -- but, for funding purposes, “because you don't wear that on your sleeve, they don't consider you faith-based.”
Of course, any new money to assist groups that provide social services is widely welcomed. But there has been little scrutiny of what distinguishes productive organizations from less successful groups. According to Byron Johnson, who researched the topic extensively with The University of Pennsylvania's Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society, “What little evidence we have to date on the efficacy of faith-based organizations is preliminary but positive.” However, he cautions, our knowledge is incomplete. “Most people,” he says, “know next to nothing about them … . There are no published studies on the Salvation Army -- and they're a household name.”
What worries some observers is the possibility of a shift away from established service providers, such as the UVA, and toward newer faith-based organizations. While faith-based organizations may be broadly equivalent to nonsectarian charities, there is a concern that this may not hold true of more recently founded, “pervasively sectarian” groups, as they're called in the 1996 Charitable Choice legislation.
“The newly formed nonprofits … tend to be smaller, less experienced, and more intensely faith-oriented,” according to Wolfgang Bielefeld, faculty fellow at the Center for Urban Policy and the Environment. Studies have suggested that newer, more holistic faith-based groups perform well on intermediate measures of success but are inferior to the for-profits and established nonprofits on hard outcomes, such as whether their clients can obtain full-time jobs, how well the jobs they get pay, and whether the jobs include health benefits.
In speaking to a faith-based conference in Los Angeles March 2004, George W. Bush boasted that he is “a person who believes in results.” But in advocating a blanket shift of funding to faith-based groups, the administration seems to be judging the results based on who gets the money -- not on how effective the aid is.
That message has gotten across pretty clearly to Jack Downing. “I'm not getting out-Jesused for money ever again,” he says. “That's a horrible thing to do to people.”
Jeffrey Dubner is a Prospect editorial intern.
