Old Assumptions, New Realities: Ensuring Economic Security for Working Families in the 21st Century

7. Nonprofit Helping Hands for the Working Poor: New Realities and Challenges for Today's Safety Net

CHAPTER NONPROFIT HELPING HANDS FOR THE WORKING POOR: NEW REALITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR TODAY’S SAFETY NET SCOTT W. ALLARD Anew type of safety net has emerged in recent decades to assist lowincome Americans, far different from the safety net in place during the War on Poverty of the 1960s.1 Contrary to old notions and assumptions that view cash assistance as the dominant approach to antipoverty assistance, the twenty-first-century safety net depends heavily upon social service programs that offer helping hands to working poor populations. Government agencies and nonprofit organizations today spend more than $150 billion annually on social services such as job training, adult education, child care, substance abuse and mental health counseling, and emergency assistance that support work activity, meet basic needs, and promote greater personal well-being—more than double real-dollar spending on such services in 1975 (Allard 2009a). By comparison, federal and state government spending for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), welfare cash assistance , the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamp Program), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) reached about $130 billion in 2009 (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2010; Kneebone 2009; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2009). 187 7 188 Old Assumptions, New Realities Shifts in the composition of our safety net lead to a number of new realities for the ways society seeks to help the poor. Social service programs have become critical sources of safety net support for working poor families today, as they address a wide range of material and nonmaterial needs for millions of low-income persons who may not be eligible for cash assistance. Of particular significance is the central role that community-based nonprofit service organizations, both secular and faith-based, play in the modern safety net. Whereas government and nonprofit organizations largely occupied separate spheres of the safety net prior to the War on Poverty, expansion of public funding for social service programs in the last four decades has led to growing interdependency between government and nonprofit service organizations within the modern American welfare state (Allard 2009a; Smith and Lipsky 1993). Today, government programs fund most social services available in our communities through contracts and grants with nonprofit service organizations. Charitable foundations and private philanthropy complement this public commitment by directing tens of billions of dollars in support to nonprofit service organizations each year. Consequently, local safety nets take on a particularly important role in the delivery of antipoverty assistance, as the ability of communities to connect working poor families to many types of safety net help rests on the capacity of local service organizations. Along with changes in the composition of safety net assistance, the relationship between place and the delivery of safety net assistance has changed. Whereas cash assistance program benefits can be delivered directly to recipients , most social services cannot be brought directly to an individual at home. Clients typically visit a social service provider, often several times, to receive assistance or complete a program. Evidence indicates, however, that social service programs are not always equitably distributed in or accessible to poor neighborhoods (Allard 2008, 2009a, 2009c; Allard and Cigna 2008; Allard and Roth 2010). Poor persons who do not live in proximity to relevant service providers will find it difficult to receive needed help because of the complexity and cost of commutes between home, work, child care, and a service organization, particularly if they are reliant on public transportation . Moreover, we should expect individuals to be more likely to know about providers located in the immediate community and to have greater trust in community-based organizations than in providers located farther away. Lack of access to social service providers should be expected to reduce program participation, increase rates of program attrition, be related to lower work activity, and dampen program efficacy (Allard 2009a; Kissane 2010; Zuberi, forthcoming). Nonprofit Helping Hands for the Working Poor 189 Matters of access are complicated by the fact that social service program funding can be volatile from one year to the next. Public and private funding for social services is cyclical, falling and rising with ebbs and flows in the economy. Nonprofit service organizations must cope with lost or shifting revenue streams right when the demands placed upon them increase. Shifting public policy priorities and changes in the focus of private philanthropy shapes the availability of program funding from one year to the next...