For more than half a century, responsibility for the social welfare of America’s poorer citizens has shifted toward government and away from the private and charitable efforts of local community organizations and associations. Since the implementation of President Lyndon Johnson’s "Great Society," government cash assistance and in-kind aid have dwarfed private efforts to provide aid for needy citizens. In 1997, government spending on social welfare programs, including all federal and state cash aid, medical aid, food and housing subsidies, work relief, and education and training assistance, totaled $407.2 billion, over eleven times the $36.7 billion (in 1997 dollars) in expenditures made on similar programs in 1964. Meanwhile, private charitable spending on health, human, and social services reached $35.07 billion in 1997, less than 1.6 times the $22.02 billion (in 1997 dollars) spent in 1964.

Huge increases in government spending did little to give poor families the work experience necessary to climb the job ladder and increase their chances of permanently escaping poverty. In 1960, more than three-fourths of persons in poor families held jobs. However, by 1997, only 48 percent of such people worked, with only 19.3 percent of the heads of poor households working full-time and year-round. More adults within our nation’s impoverished populations were removing themselves from the workforce and relying instead on the benefits of federal and state welfare programs.

Today there is a realization that big government has failed Americans. In 1997, 84 percent of those surveyed by the Princeton Survey Research Associates believed the government was doing only a fair or a poor job in reducing poverty. A mere 14 percent characterized the government as doing an excellent or good job. Moreover, many American citizens still recognize that private efforts and local communities should play a pivotal role in the provision of social services. In 1995, 63 percent of respondents to a nation-wide survey by the Los Angeles Times thought the greatest responsibility for helping the poor should belong to charitable organizations, churches, families, the poor themselves, or other non-governmental entities. Less than one in four of those surveyed believed that government should have the greatest responsibility for helping the nation’s poor.

Given the failure of federal and state efforts to win the war on poverty, responsibility for America’s poor must be directed away from government and back to civil society. As American Enterprise Institute Scholar Michael Novak suggests, this includes "natural associations such as the family, as well as the churches, and private associations of many sorts; fraternal, ethnic, and patriotic societies; and voluntary organization."

Such organizations and associations are just some of civil society’s many possible "mediating structures" – structures which are "standing between the individual in his private life and the large institutions of public life." Mediating structures can serve the needy by keeping them connected with their immediate community and with the larger surrounding society.

Abraham Lincoln’s adage that government should not interfere in all that people can do for themselves rings true for the provision of social welfare services. America’s civil society was once the primary provider for our nation’s unemployed and indigent. With the failure of state-sponsored bureaucratic programs, it is time for America to return to a social welfare policy based upon people acting through their communities. A devolution of social services back to local communities necessitates a discussion of the following:

• How did early America’s civil society – its local communities and their mediating structures – provide for the social welfare needs of the nation’s poor and unemployed?
• Was civil society effective in promoting self-reliance and personal responsibility?
• Can America’s civil society be rebuilt? If so, can the pathologies of intergenerational welfare dependence be abolished?
• What policy options can be pursued to encourage, promote, and strengthen civil society?

 

In his book Alley Life In Washington, James Borchert gives examples of the important role played by civil society and private efforts before the rise of America’s welfare state. He notes how people in poor communities established community groups and associations which enabled them to pool their resources. Through such institutions as churches and fraternal societies, these communities provided particularly needy members with social welfare services. Borchert describes the psychological condition of poor African-Americans, impoverished immigrants, and white slum dwellers in Washington, D.C. during the early twentieth century. These people, he notes, "were not generally wards of the state" and "rather than being indolent ‘welfare cheaters,’ they took responsibility for their own lives, demonstrating pride, independence, and strength." They "were able to maintain their old cultural patterns in the new environment, adapting and adjusting them when necessary." Borchert credits this state of affairs to the existence of strong, self-sufficient communities characterized by the presence of extended families and of a "safety-net" of self-help and mutual aid associations.

The immigrants and African-American migrant workers who flooded large Northern cities in turn-of-the-century America were overwhelmingly poor and often discriminated against by the better-off in the larger society surrounding them. United by common heritage as well as necessity, they formed formal and informal groups helping to provide economic, health, and material security for the needy. They maintained strong local communities and, through such institutions as churches and fraternal societies, provided particularly needy members with social welfare services.

As respected welfare historian David Beito has found, churches and fraternal societies were impressive but largely unsung in "their role in the resettlement of the vast immigrant populations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century." By expert counts, "each immigrant group could turn to at least one aid society, and usually many more, to provide housing, English lessons, and information on employment." Beito notes that the popularity and presence of such mutual aid and self-help institutions amongst immigrants was "often exceeded" within early twentieth-century African-American communities. Within these communities, "Fraternal societies and other mutual aid organizations gave African Americans from all classes access to [life and casualty] insurance." The famed black sociologist W.E.B Du Bois estimated that "at least 70 percent of the adult African Americans in the seventh ward of Philadelphia belonged either to fraternal societies or to less structured mutual benefit and petty insurance societies."

Professor Beito points out that, although civil society and its mediating structures of strong local communities, churches, and fraternal societies were by no means a panacea, they by far out-performed the modern welfare state in their capability to cater "to an abundance of individual needs" and to make a clear distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor without going to the "condescending, intrusive, and paternalistic lengths" often used by both government welfare agencies and private charity organizations. The local community and the mutual aid and self-help institutions within it were not only able to provide tangible aid such as insurance and cash benefits, but also provided intangible support through "ethnic fellowship, entertainment, and the establishment of business connections." In these societies and organizations, both donor and recipient "were peers in the same organization. They often knew each other well on a personal level." Decisions concerning aid eligibility were "usually a matter of poor people classifying the aid worthiness or unworthiness of other poor people," most of whom they also knew. The aid given was truly mutual and reciprocal – those receiving it did so only because they had exerted prior efforts, or they had made future commitments, to better the providing organization as well as the surrounding local community. While the process by which fraternal societies and other community organizations decided aid eligibility may certainly have "provoked its share of tension and oversimplification," it was unlikely that there existed "adversarial relationships between donor and receiver" as often present in "any impersonal poor relief system (public or private, entitlement-based, or means-tested) controlled and funded by distant bureaucrats and other outsiders (including the taxpayer)."

 

David Beito shows how membership and activity in mutual aid associations and fraternal societies reached its zenith in the late 1920s, leveled off, and then began a "pace of descent that quickened slightly during the Depression and then accelerated rapidly after World War II." Though Beito acknowledges the rise of the welfare state was likely only one factor contributing to the decline of community-based mutual aid and self-help institutions, he also notes that "the correlation between rising governmental involvement [in the provision of social welfare services] and declining mutual aid is clear."

The growth in the government’s efforts to provide for the poor and the indigent may have contributed to the decline of community-based mutual aid and self-help organizations by cutting down on many poor people’s demand for non-governmental aid. With the initiation of Lyndon Johnson’s "Great Society" welfare programs in the mid-1960s, the indigent and unemployed could attain government aid with greater ease than most aid provided by local mutual aid societies and self-help groups. Government welfare checks and in-kind benefits were "entitlements." Unlike the temporary assistance and guidance provided by most community groups, receipt of these entitlements had no strict time limits and required no acknowledgment of personal responsibility, no exertion of personal improvement efforts, and no commitments to individual reciprocity on the part of the receiver to the local community and community organizations providing him with assistance.

The government’s use of tax dollars to fund public-aid programs also likely made people psychologically less-inclined to contribute to private community-based aid efforts. If one’s money was supposedly being used by the government to take care of the poor and unemployed, then an individual may have been less inclined to privately contribute additional money and time. This effect may have been particularly important to those communities closest to those in need, because even slight increases in the residents’ tax burdens could significantly undermine their ability to financially support non-governmental community aid organizations.

In this way, easy-to-obtain government aid may have essentially "crowded out" the conditional self-help and mutual aid provided by local, community-based organizations and associations. Professor Beito speaks to this very point, noting that: "Mutual aid, throughout history, had been a creature of necessity. Government, by taking on social welfare responsibilities that were once the ken of [community-based] voluntary institutions, must have undermined much of this necessity."

 

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA) of 1996 ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) entitlements, established time limits and work requirements for receipt of aid, and gave states more flexibility in administering social welfare services. Despite this new federal law and the reform of numerous state social services programs, obstacles remain.

As time limits and work requirements are implemented, short-term recipients of government aid – those who historically have held jobs yet currently are dealing with a temporary period of unemployment – usually are able to quickly and successfully re-enter the workforce. However, the recent experiences of many public welfare-to-work programs indicate that today’s form of government-based welfare "reform" – i.e. setting up time limits and restraints on receipt of aid and increasing efforts for job training and placement assistance – often prove inadequate to successfully move many long-term recipients of aid into full-time, gainful employment. Job-specific training and sanctions cannot, in and of themselves, guarantee a transition to a life style of full-time work on the part of individuals who are often wholly dependent on welfare for stretches of more than one year, or who are accustomed to being sustained by government aid in between brief periods of temporary employment.

A Missouri state-appointed commission that monitors welfare-to-work hires in the Kansas City area revealed that almost 75 percent of those hired from the welfare rolls from January 1995 to August 1997 eventually returned to public aid. Of this 75 percent, more than three-fourths of those who had left their jobs had been fired, with "failure to show up," "absenteeism," and "conflict with others" explaining 24 percent, 23 percent, and 12 percent of the reasons, respectively. A similar study of welfare-to-work hires in Chicago’s "Project Match" found that many of these new workers either quit or were fired, the reasons being that they often refused to perform assigned tasks, could not budget their time, were chronically late, or were pressured to leave by family and friends.

The inability to show up on time for work or get along with co-workers demonstrates their need not just to be given extensive job-specific training and to be threatened with aid-related sanctions, but also to be inculcated with the values of hard work, personal responsibility, and self-sufficiency. Belief in such values not only facilitates establishing one’s direction in professional life, it also eases the successful learning of basic "life skills" – the ability to manage one’s time, to properly present one’s self, and to retain certain standards of politeness and deference in a job situation.

For some, overcoming long-term welfare dependency, criminal activity, or drug abuse will require more than simply altering incentive structures. In early America, poor communities’ self-help groups and mutual-aid societies reinforced pro-work values and essential life-skills by providing aid only to those who had demonstrated a commitment to such values and to the continuing use of such life-skills in moving themselves off of aid and back toward a more self-sufficient condition. We must strengthen America’s poorer communities and their mediating structures so that a system of strong neighborhoods, families, and mutual aid institutions exists to establish and re-enforce pro-work values.

As the nation’s quest for welfare reform moves toward the full devolution of social welfare services to the local community, Americans must identify ways in which a spirit of community – a sense of responsibility to a local community, to maintenance of its mediating structures, and to support for one’s neighbors – can be developed within those localities disproportionately represented by welfare recipients. Past experience demonstrates that those in need may be best rehabilitated and provided with temporary assistance by those closest to them in terms both of physical distance and of social and economic circumstance. The re-development of poor communities and the revitalization of their mediating structures can create an environment in which welfare recipients are encouraged and are able to pull themselves out of indigence and unemployment. As succinctly put by David Green, director of the Health and Welfare Unit at London’s Institute of Economic Affairs, independent and self-reliant local communities can provide structures – any number of supporting organizations and associations – capable of assisting the needy "not purely as victims of circumstance, but with the respect due to men and women of character capable of self-improvement and of making a positive contribution [to society]."

 

In contemporary America, a strong, supportive, and self-reliant community can be developed amongst impoverished peoples, including those from backgrounds of crime and drug abuse. This developed community can successfully inculcate those values and life-skills necessary for true rehabilitation and reformation. The Delancey Street Foundation, a San Francisco-based, self-help residential treatment center for drug addicts, alcoholics, convicts, and the hard-core unemployed, has demonstrated this reality since its founding in 1971 by criminologist Dr. Mimi Silbert and John Maher, a former convict. Residents stay at the Foundation for a minimum of two years and an average of three and one-half years, during which they learn the basics of self-discipline; receive vocational training, image counseling, and the minimum of a high-school education; and are taught to cope with life in the working world.

Most of the residents at Delancey Street have been jailed as many as four times and drug addicted for 12 years. The majority is functionally illiterate. Most also come from poverty-stricken neighborhoods. The vast majority is archetypal hard-core welfare cases receiving government aid upon time of admission and coming from impoverished families where the receipt of such aid is considered normal. They possess few if any job skills and they have never been employed for as long as a year.

Delancey Street’s residents have strong incentives, besides those confronting many of the unemployed and welfare-dependent, to successfully complete the Foundation’s program. Specifically, they are often spurred by threats of going back to jail, being fatally injured due to a life of crime, or being killed by substance addiction. The Delancey Street Foundation proves instructive in America’s welfare reform efforts because it provides a model for moving all indigent and welfare-dependent individuals toward permanent employment and greater independence. The Delancey Street approach is based upon:

1. Individual responsibility and responsibility to one’s immediate community – in this case, the community of one’s fellow Delancey Street residents.
2. The teaching not only of skills needed to get a job, but also of skills needed to get through life and to maintain long-term employment.
3. An independent, self-reliant entity largely supported through businesses run by residents.
4. An entity that receives only a minimal amount of private contributions and no federal, state, or local government funding.

 

Stephanie Muller, Assistant to the President and herself a former Delancey Street resident, sees the Foundation’s mission as giving its residents the opportunity to live life as it should be lived – to learn how to hold down a real job, to accept one’s social and economic responsibilities, and to be accountable for all that one does. The ability of Delancey Street to fulfill this mission rests in the involvement of these residents in a self-sufficient community, not just a treatment center, a shelter, or a job-placement service.

Co-founder Dr. Mimi Silbert has written that "While by goal, Delancey Street is defined as a drug/alcohol/criminal treatment program, in its process, Delancey Street has less in common with funded, staffed treatment programs than it does with large extended families or small tight-knit neighborhoods." The Delancey Street Foundation actually gets its name from a turn-of-the-century immigrant neighborhood in New York – a neighborhood similar to those poor immigrant and ethnic minority communities previously described in this paper. In these communities, impoverished immigrants lived in extended families and pooled their resources; they worked hard and with fierce independence to move up in society. Residents at the Delancey Street Foundation gradually develop a solid work ethic and a sense of personal responsibility because, like the residents of this turn-of-the-century neighborhood, they are made directly responsible for the financial and social well-being of the institution and community which sustains and rehabilitates them.

Membership in the Delancey Street community is predicated on acceptance of personal responsibility. Many of the 500 residents currently housed at the Foundation’s San Francisco facility entered in hopes of enrolling in a rehabilitative program more effective than traditional reform centers. Others were referred to Delancey Street by concerned lawyers or by prison counselors and simply showed up, with no preconceived notion of staying, just to see for themselves what the Foundation was all about. However, no matter how or why they came, before being admitted, applicants had to first personally request admission into the facility and then go through an interview conducted by four senior residents. The Delancey Street community does not grant residence until applicants at least verbally accept personal responsibility for the problems of their past, their current position in life, and where they will be once they leave Delancey Street.

Delancey Street’s residents are wholly responsible for running and managing a variety of legitimate business ventures which provide for them and the rehabilitative process. Current businesses include a moving company, an award-winning restaurant, a coffee shop and cafŽ, a print shop, and an auto-detailing center.

Satisfying the needs of customers and running successful businesses require that all employees attain good work habits and a solid work ethic. However, with no permanent staff of expert psychologists, certified drug or criminal counselors, or professional job instructors, new residents must learn "on the job," and all residents must actively participate in the Foundation’s "each one teach one" principle. Senior residents hence become involved in the inculcation of pro-work values in all new-comers as well as in teaching them essential life-skills and various job-specific skills.

Veterans constantly brief new residents on the fundamentals of life – how to dress, eat, and speak properly; manage time; and practice cleanliness. New residents learn how to interact with fellow worker-residents as well as with those "outsiders" who comprise the Delancey Street businesses’ customer base. Senior residents give each newcomer instruction in one physical labor skill (i.e. janitor, mover, etc.), one interpersonal skill (i.e. waiting tables or sales), and one office-work skill (i.e. accounting, bookkeeping, or database management). At night, residents tutor each other. For example, a resident with a 10^th-grade level of proficiency in reading and mathematics might teach a resident with an 8^th-grade level of proficiency; he, in turn, would tutor another resident with a 4^th-grade level of proficiency. Everyone who graduates from Delancey Street reaches at least a high-school level equivalency.

 

The Lessons of Delancey Street – Successful Rehabilitation and the Maintenance of a Self-Reliant Community

By gaining at least a high-school education, learning job skills and the value of a work ethic, and learning to work with others in a professional, business-like environment, residents graduating from Delancey Street learn to evade a life of poverty, crime, and welfare dependence. Since 1971, almost 12,000 former addicts, felons, and welfare dependents have graduated. Even among the 25 percent who enter Delancey Street and end up dropping out in the first two months, roughly 1 out of every 10 returns and successfully completes a rehabilitative stay. Though 20 to 25 percent of those who do graduate end up back on drugs, welfare, or in prison, the majority of the Foundation’s graduates are definite success stories. For every 100 indigents and criminals who enter Delancey Street, an average of 59 of them successfully pass through the program and move on to obtain legal jobs, pursue largely self-sufficient lives, and stick to a path of social responsibility and economic accountability.

The lessons learned by being a member of a tight-knit and mutually supportive community are essential ingredients in the successful rehabilitation and reformation of this 59 percent. Delancey Street becomes the strong and supportive local community that too often is absent from the past lives and present experiences of its residents. Residents are responsible not only for their own selves, but for the maintenance of the Delancey Street community. Since each resident assumes such a responsibility, the entire community becomes responsible for the guidance and rehabilitation of each resident. Rewards such as promotions and punishments such as extra work assignments represent more than steps up or down the job hierarchy. They represent an appraisal by the fellow members of one’s community. Residents work hard on the job and in after-work academic sessions not because of some bureaucratic edict, the warnings of charity workers, or the scolding of taxpayers, but because their survival and the survival of their community depends on it. If they refuse to work, their fellow community members will see their lack of effort, recognize its potential harm both to the community and to themselves, and punish the guilty party.

The Delancey Street Foundation’s existence as a self-reliant community should also be highlighted in holding up the organization as a model for rehabilitation of the poor and indigent. Delancey Street takes no money from federal, state, or local governments. When funds are needed for starting a new business, such as the Foundation’s opening of a restaurant in 1992, or for building or expanding residential facilities, such as the Foundation’s recently completed South Beach complex, loans provide the dominant source – more than 80 percent – of the necessary investment capital. For example, a multi-million-dollar low-interest loan from Bank of America helped finance Delancey Street’s new resident housing center and the present location for all of its business ventures.

The remaining 20 percent of capital for major development projects comes from charitable donations. Additionally, many specialists from surrounding communities volunteer as initial "consultants" to the Delancey Street businesses. Chefs show the residents how to cook certain meals, interior designers help set up an attractive restaurant and interior, automotive technicians instruct residents in the basics of auto maintenance and detailing.

Day-to-day business expenses are paid with revenues from the businesses themselves. All maintenance of residential living facilities is performed by residents, utilizing only their own labor or revenues from the Delancey Street businesses. Residents work hard to maintain a revenue flow adequate enough not only to pay-off day-to-day business and living expenses, but also to meet the demands of loan payments and the interest payable on those loans.

As an organization attempting to simulate the self-help approach of the tight-knit turn-of-the-century immigrant neighborhoods, the Delancey Street Foundation strives to attain these neighborhoods’ qualities of independence and self-reliance. There is little doubt that some Delancey Street graduates may carry a belief in the benefits of a self-reliant community back into those neighborhoods in which they grew up.

Delancey Street’s founder Dr. Mimi Silbert cites the case of a woman named Deborah, who came to Delancey Street at age 27 as a heroin-addicted ex-convict and current welfare dependent. She graduated from Delancey Street in three and one-half years and went on to earn an A.A. in business and land a well-paying job as a sales manager with a prominent firm. Moreover, Deborah took it upon herself to set up a program for paraprofessional volunteers to work with adolescent girls returning to the community from mental hospitals. Dr. Silbert praises Deborah for managing to "come back to Delancey Street often to serve as a role model for the new women residents."

The Delancey Street Foundation still stands as a model demonstrating the capability of indigent and unemployed peoples to bond together, step away from dependence on the aid of government welfare programs or the free hand-outs of large charities, and instead to pull themselves out of poverty and away from welfare dependence. The efforts of Delancey Street’s residents clearly demonstrate that people from contemporary America’s poorest populations can together form a strong and supportive community.

The rehabilitation of most of Delancey Street’s residents clearly demonstrates the essential role that community plays in lifting people out of indigence and poverty by inculcating pro-work values and teaching not just job skills but life skills. And the success of the Delancey Street model can be replicated.

 

Delancey Street and the Re-Invigoration of Civil Society

Re-Building Mediating Structures in Poor Communities

Successful Delancey Street affiliate programs currently operate in New Mexico, New York, and North Carolina. The Delancey Street approach has also been applied to rehabilitation centers in places as diverse as Amherst, Massachusetts and Auckland, New Zealand. The Foundation, its affiliates, and similar self-help organizations around the country represent "stand-in" mediating structures. Strong nuclear families and tight-knit and supportive neighborhoods cannot be expected to sprout overnight within many of America’s impoverished communities. However, other traditional mediating structures still function within these communities, though perhaps in weakened, misdirected, or under-utilized conditions. Structures such as local churches, local religious groups, and neighborhood volunteer groups should be re-directed to follow the approach and perhaps duplicate the successes of the Delancey Street model.

These organizations and associations cannot merely hand out free food, shelter, and other forms of aid. They must also give guidance, teach values and life skills, and clarify that aid is given only on the condition that the receivers listen to such advice, adopt such values, learn such life-skills, and make an effort to improve themselves and their condition. Many churches and religious groups within poorer communities already do this. Government funds and charitable donations from church and religious groups are used as "seed money" to start self-help organizations.

For example, Maryland’s Anne Arundel County has long been conducting an intensive experiment in the successes of empowering churches to aid impoverished communities. In June, 1994, its Community-Directed Assistance Program (C-DAP) began connecting welfare recipients and families with support teams of church volunteers. A welfare recipient’s state and federal benefits are redirected to a participating church. With that money in hand, volunteers work closely with welfare recipients for six to eight months to help the recipients get back on their feet, into a job, and on their own. Since 1994, two thirds of C-DAP’s participants have removed themselves from the dole. Of note, this success has been attributed to the program’s largely communal approach to delivering care. Church volunteers spend an average of 400 hours with a family over the six to eight month period – an impossible feat for government social workers or for placement workers in traditional private sector welfare-to-work programs.

California churches working as part of the Sacramento Valley Organizing Community (SVOC) are giving people more than free food. In the words of one minister, "Rather than giving a meal, we have this program. It also tells us what kind of person we’re dealing with – if they really want to work and better themselves." In regards to those given aid, this minister insists that "once they’re back on their feet, they need to reach back and help someone else." As it pursues its goals of "empowering people in civil and political life" and "empowering neighborhoods and communities," the SVOC maintains a commitment to "work closely with [the welfare reform efforts of] government programs," yet takes extreme caution "not to become reliant on government money and lose their independence."

The "charitable choice" provision of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA) of 1996 has eased the independence of those religious organizations utilizing government funds to start-up community involvement in welfare reform. Section 104 of the PRWOA specifies "that Federal, State, and local governments consider all nongovernmental organizations on an equal basis when choosing such organizations to provide assistance for beneficiaries of government programs and . . . without impairing the religious character of any of the organizations."

 

Words of Caution – Local Involvement, not Private Bureaucracy

In Seducing the Samaritan: How Government Contracts are Reshaping Social Services, Joe Loconte cautions that religious groups and any other community-based providers may do well to free themselves from receipt of any government funds. Loconte looks closely at non-profit organizations providing social services with the outside "assistance" of government funds. Though the in-depth survey backing Loconte’s analyses focuses on government agencies and state-aided non-profits in Massachusetts, his general conclusions appear to be applicable to the nation-wide experiences of non-profits with government funding. Loconte’s study revealed that once it accepted government funds, a non-profit tended to slip under the bureaucratic grip of state and federal agencies. Rules and regulations ended up bogging down, paralyzing, and even dehumanizing care-giving groups. Also, in a problem Loconte refers to as "mission creep," dependence on public funds "can significantly shape [non-profits’] agendas" such that they begin to "assume tasks that have little to do with their original purpose, tasks for which they may be ill-equipped."

Protecting the flow of government funds often becomes a key organizational purpose. In the process, increased dependence on these funds leads the providing groups to isolate themselves from the poor, indigent, and unemployed to whom they were originally committed to serving.

Community-based religious associations and volunteer groups should not merely stand in the community, but exist as a part of the community. Welfare reform needs to be based upon the development of groups drawing funds and, more important, volunteer efforts from the members of the community served. Local homeless, indigent, and unemployed peoples should be given conditional aid and be guided back to self-sufficiency primarily by the efforts of local peoples, not by government bureaucrats, taxpayer dollars, and other outside funding sources. By having the neighbors, peers, and fellow sufferers of those in need stand in charge of providing services to those in need, a providing institution has a better chance of identifying those who truly deserve such aid and, moreover, of ensuring that the recipients of such aid are closely monitored in their progress toward self-improvement, personal responsibility, and self-sufficiency.

The success of Delancey Street and the failure of government programs demonstrates the need for a national social welfare policy defined by all local providing organizations. By developing local structures within poor communities and encouraging interim stand-in organizations like Delancey Street, our nation can move social services back to neighborhoods and local communities. America’s poor, indigent, and unemployed stand a better chance of finding a path out of poverty and toward greater self-sufficiency if that path is constructed and maintained by them, not by government officials or national charity workers who are outsiders to the nation’s impoverished communities. By returning to a social welfare policy that fully utilizes civil society – one that fully utilizes what Americans can do for themselves – America can end government social-service programs and undo the disastrous effects caused by government interference in this realm.

Michael Bragin is a research fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, California.