The Voluntary Sector's War on Poverty

ENABLE was our War on Poverty

—Ellen Manser, director, Project ENABLE¹

In 1970, Elizabeth Wickenden, a longtime activist on behalf of public social provision and a broker between voluntary social welfare agencies and the federal government, despaired of a quiet revolution occurring in social service provision. "Virtually unchallenged and undebated," she observed, "the principle established with the first large-scale federal welfare program, the Federal Emergency Welfare Administration [sic], that public funds should only be expended by public agencies, was quietly repudiated."² Through a series of domestic initiatives, including the Economic Opportunity Act of 1965 and amendments to the Social Security Act in 1967, the federal government had begun to channel a significant amount of money through nongovernmental organizations. To older activists like Wickenden, who had fought hard to build the public infrastructure of the welfare state, such a trend was troubling, as it seemed to indicate a dwindling commitment to public social provision that had informed New Deal social policy.

This policy shift that Wickenden observed produced the contemporary nonprofit sector. While the nonprofit sector as a whole has drawn increasing attention from social scientists in the past two decades, most, with a few exceptions, deal with it after it had absorbed the public dollars made available in the 1960s and 1970s. The primary conclusions of these scholars have been twofold: first, to emphasize the interpenetration of the nonprofit and public sector, primarily through contracting arrangements; and second, to raise questions about the seeming loss of independence and identity by nonprofit agencies that deliver substantial amounts of public services.³ There is relatively little examination of how voluntary agencies that predated this period surveyed the prospects of such funding, estimated its impact, or experienced this renewed, intimate contact with public policy. Nearly all of these issues presented themselves in the 1960s; what is remarkable is how little concern they appeared to have been both to the voluntary sector and public policymakers.

Historians of the welfare state in turn have devoted most of their attention to voluntarism prior to the New Deal and the expansion of public welfare functions thereafter—neglecting what one historian has characterized as the "symbiotic" relationship between the public sector and the nonprofit sector post-New Deal.⁴ The experience of a voluntary sector that endured the Depression, made peace with (and even encouraged) the growth of public welfare during the New Deal and beyond, and then faced another shift in public policy that bore directly on their services in the 1960s has been obscured. For those interested in current questions bearing on the prospect of further expansion of public subsidy of private institutions, notably "faith-based" social service providers, this earlier history is noteworthy.

This article will argue that the creation of the nonprofit social service sector by the federal government was the culmination of a series of loosely related phenomena in both the public and voluntary sector that coalesced during the 1960s. One was the War on Poverty, which this article will focus on. There, new nonprofit organizations were seen as a way to circumvent established political system and social service networks that had not addressed the needs of the poor. Ironically, in spreading out money for the War on Poverty, poverty planners (much to the dismay of some) also found it necessary to fund older, voluntary agencies that were seen as part of the problem. In the wake of the War on Poverty, then, was left a new landscape of social service provision, with thousands of new nonprofits created by government action mixed in with an older voluntary sector whose relationship to the government had also been altered.

Exploring this episode will not only shed light on a key turning point in the relationship of the voluntary sector to the public sector, but it will also add a new dimension to our understanding of the long-range impact of the War on Poverty. The more mundane, but no...