Yossef Ben Meir's Blog

Beyond the Obama Plan for Faith-Based Initiatives

28 July, 2008

Recently, Senator Barack Obama announced his plan for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives if he became president. Although his proposals are in the right direction, other formative measures can be taken to strengthen community and individual empowerment through more assured nonsectarian processes.

In the faith-based program initiated by President Bush, federal funds given to religious organizations for social services were not to be used to proselytize. Rather, the funds were to be distributed by these organizations to people in need, regardless of their religion, and to be used for secular social and economic activities. Senator Obama stated that he would uphold these important guidelines while extending the scope of the nondiscrimination clause to include people hired by faith organizations to administer community initiatives. Though a positive step, the extension is likely to only moderately allay concerns about government-religion entanglement and the use of the program to promote partisan interests, especially in the context of recent allegations from some of the program's former officials.

In its current form, the program supplies some guidance to religious organizations, large and small, about ways to access federal funding. To this end, point people, assigned in the eight participating federal departments and two agencies, assist religious groups in the application process on how to provide financial support for their faith-based initiatives. Senator Obama suggests extending this support through training of religious groups on how the federal funding system works and how to obtain the finances they need to run their social services. This training would give many organizations an opportunity to make a real difference in their communities that they may not have had otherwise.

Senator Obama's plan to target and expand initiatives that address key areas the program currently contributes to, most prominently afterschool and summer programs in education that would serve 1 million students, is also bold. Indeed, altogether, his proposals are helpful. However, additional reforms would enable religious organizations with federal support to more effectively provide social services while more rigorously maintaining the separation between church and state.

The following are three suggestions:

1. Connect interfaith partnership to receiving funding: In announcing his plan, Senator Obama referred to the importance of interfaith coalitions. He said that they are needed to impact enormous challenges, such as children living in poverty. From a developmental perspective, the importance of partnership here cannot be overemphasized.

In a developmental partnership, each partner brings essential inputs - technical, financial, administrative, labor, and/or other resources - to help achieve the goals of the project. In recent years, the idea of partnership has become an inseparable part of the concept of sustainable development: the more groups and individuals that come together to support an initiative, the more people there are that work to see it endure and therefore the better chance that it will. For example, partnerships mean more eyes on the finances and project materials, which help to prevent corruption and mismanagement.

In the context of faith-based initiatives, opportunities to proselytize a particular religious doctrine or serve a partisan interest become more infrequent when diverse interfaith coalitions participate. Strongly linking interfaith partnerships with funded initiatives will give real meaning to the new name Senator Obama proposes for the faith-based program - Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

2. Require 501c3 nonprofit incorporation: One way to ensure that federal funds for social services do not mingle with these institutions' general funds, which can be used for inherently religious purposes, is for faith-based institutions to create a separate nonprofit organization in the Internal Revenue Services' 501c3 category. This simple procedure will bring more transparency and organizational structure to the overall management of the community initiatives. The web site of the White House faith-based program currently mentions that some religious organizations have already created a separate 501c3 organization to manage their federally funded social services, but the site stops short of encouraging this practice.

3. Promote "participatory" initiatives: Experts in community development and the overwhelming majority of the literature on the subject underscore at least one of its guiding premises: when communities themselves determine, implement, and manage the social initiatives intended to benefit them, the initiatives are significantly more likely to succeed and the attributes of empowerment, including informed decision-making, are better instilled. This observation, based on experience, is captured in Senator Obama's frequent statements, including his recent speech about the faith-based program, that show him as strongly favoring "bottom-up" versus "top-down" approaches to social change.

Participation of community members, from design to evaluation and for the life of the initiative, ought to be a major criterion for federal funding. Support for this goal can be a way for Senator Obama to shows he stands by his own words when he says that taxpayer dollars for faith-based initiatives "will only go to those programs that actually work." And such participation will make it more difficult to advance partisan interests because the communities themselves will be ultimately in control of the faith-based initiatives. In addition to training religious organizations in navigating the federal funding system that Senator Obama proposes, skills can be transferred for these organizations to promote community management of development initiatives.

Yossef Ben-Meir is a former Peace Corps volunteer and president of the High Atlas Foundation (www.highatlasfoundation.org), a nonprofit organization that promotes community development in Morocco.

Posted by benmeir 20:09 | General | Comment(0) | Permalink

Obama, The Community Organizer President

08 July, 2008

Community organizing means different things to different people, but its basic intention is to bring people together at the local level to talk about the socioeconomic and environmental challenges they face, work through their differences, and then implement their own plan of action to meet their most critical development goals.

Facilitators of this process--such as the Democratic presidential nominee Illinois Senator Barack Obama, before he entered the political scene--are necessary to catalyze and help maintain a productive and inclusive experience for participating communities. Senator Obama often refers to this approach to social change as "bottom-up" because when implemented successfully it results in new public-private partnerships, the growth of civil society, government officials more responsive to people's needs, and a reformation of state and national social policies to promote local empowerment.

As cases from around the world have illustrated abundantly, such an approach leads local communities to have a heightened stake in their own development and to create self-help projects that further economic development, promote public health, and encourage progress that enhances people's lives in other key areas.

There are many benefits of community development based on broad local participation that make it applicable to a diverse range of domestic and international challenges facing the United States. The coherent vision offered by this approach to social change provides Senator Osama with a special and perhaps unique opportunity to enunciate detailed policies that he would pursue as president--policies that would also attract Independents and Republicans and add substance to his claim that he has the right kind of experience to lead the United States in the twenty-first century.

Consider, for example, the issue of international free trade. As devastating as free trade can be for manufacturing towns in different parts of the United States, its dislocation effect in developing countries, particularly in rural areas, can be even more acute. Under NAFTA, Mexico has seen a considerable decline in rural employment, lower prices for land and farm products, greater urban migration, rising income inequality, and increasing agricultural trade deficits.

Morocco, which entered into free trade with the United States in 2004, took heed of Mexico's experience and delayed free trade in the agricultural sector for 10 years to pave the way by modernizing its agricultural practices and diversifying its rural economy. This is where community organizing steps in. The new development projects that emerge from local participation in community initiatives nurture economic diversity and expand the income base through training and implementing the ideas for the development of local peoples.

This approach better enables hard hit communities to adapt to the economic restructuring caused by free trade while building a foundation for more rapid development. Senator Obama can therefore claim correctly, as he did at the Democratic primary debate at Howard University, that his community organizing background gives him precisely the experience necessary to create policies and reform existing free-trade agreements in order to revitalize communities at home and abroad that have experienced the extremely harsh effects of free trade but not its benefits.

Regarding reconstruction and reconciliation efforts in Iraq, only in the past year did the United States decide to "go local" to achieve successful outcomes. An experienced community organizer such as Senator Obama can readily see that the widespread use of foreign contractors undermined both the Iraqis themselves and the United States.

The evidence in Iraq clearly suggests that people do not attack projects that they design, manage, and control. The opportunity lost from not directing the tens of billions of dollars to community-based reconstruction and reconciliation created the opening, perhaps more so than anything else, for the deadly violence, the millions of people dislocated, and other disasters that followed. Because of his experience, Senator Obama can outflank Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, on this issue. Though Senator McCain was a critic of how the war has been conducted militarily, he has not been nearly as vocal about the colossal reconstruction failure and the insecurity it has created in Iraq as well as its toll on the United States.

On the domestic front, his community organizing perspective can inform Senator Obama's approach to the White House Office of Faith-based Initiatives. Senator Obama stated that, as president, he would review this program to ensure that its funded initiatives are open to everybody and are not used to proselytize.

I suggest one way to do this is to require individual initiatives to include implementing partners from different religious institutions. Such a requirement could help address first-amendment concerns related to faith-based programs while helping to ensure the long-term success of the initiatives themselves since partnership is an essential component of any successful community development. Indeed, the more collaborators, the more groups and individuals there are that seek to maintain the project's continuity.

Senator Obama's community organizer perspective also can be quite appealing to Republicans and Independents who would appreciate the local empowerment approach as an especially effective way to address the poverty and dislocation caused by free trade. The senator can use also this special perspective to explain to these key groups why the Iraq war has gone so bad, and how faith institutions can continue to play a significant, if somewhat different role in his administration.

His experience in community work is indeed the right and needed experience to formulate social policies that can revitalize the U.S. economy from the bottom-up, promoting development and helping the government to manage conflicts around the world. Throughout the campaign, Senator Obama should seize on every opportunity to carefully explain the community organizer experience and how it will inform his policies as president, always using examples of specific issues of vital interest to the electorate.

Posted by benmeir 17:50 | General | Comment(0) | Permalink