Answering the Call

At the turn of the century the human service sector could celebrate nearly forty years of tremendous growth. Nonprofit employment reached 12.5 million in 2001, having doubled in size since 1976, outstripping the annual growth rate for both business and government. Between 1997 and 2001 the largest percentage increase in employment among the major nonprofit industries was in social services with a growth rate of over 17 percent. 

 

But the success of the industry in building greater capacity to serve more people with an ever widening array of increasingly complex problems also spoke to the magnitude of its failure. When the avowed aim of most agencies is to eventually “go out of business,” increasing numbers of clients/consumers/customers is not a favorable outcome. This predicament is in part the product of a service orientation that concentrates too much on the “person” term in the person-in-environment paradigm.  “Strategies for improvement of individuals and families, though worthy, have not and will not change…the structural and environmental conditions under which people live. Or as a long-time community organizer once observed, “If everyone’s achieving these great outcomes, then how come my neighborhood still looks the same?” 

 

Human service agencies were not exempt from the decline in civic life that Robert Putnam has been documenting since the early 1990s. What was keeping agencies from playing an active role in the public policy arena? In 2003 the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) – having just implemented a program on democratic practice that sought to encourage nonprofit agencies to participate in civic engagement -- turned to the Alliance for Children and Families to help find the answer.  

 

The Alliance, with over 350 members in North America, seeks to strengthen the capacities of child and family serving organizations to serve and to advocate for children, families, and communities. After identifying the barriers that prevent agencies from engaging in advocacy, the Alliance launched the Building Community Voices project to train and support agency Board members to become public policy advocates. The Alliance also began to address the parallel issue of how agencies can encourage the people they serve to become more engaged in civic life. 

 

New Voices at the Civic Table (New Voices) was established to provide training, technical assistance and funding to agencies interested in building the authentic voice of the people they serve.  New Voices and Building Community Voices work hand in hand to enable local agency board members, staff, and residents to work for social changes that improve community conditions and life opportunities for agency clients and community residents.

 

Another long-standing program at the Alliance, National Family Week, has also taken a stronger turn toward supporting civic engagement and advocacy efforts. For over thirty years National Family Week (NFW) has assisted agencies to recognize leading advocates for the family in their communities. With support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), NFW has been transitioning over the past several years to focus on celebrations that are oriented toward civic engagement projects that promote and bolster year-round family-strengthening work, which in turn supports and fosters long-term systemic change. The goal is to bring visibility to agencies’ civic engagement initiatives, bolster the authentic voice of community members, and celebrate success in enhancing social policy that strengthens children and families.

 

Drawing on RBF and AECF support, the Alliance has provided funding to more than a dozen Alliance member agencies over the past two years in support of civic engagement and advocacy projects. Among the projects that received funding from both New Voices and National Family Week for 2007-08 is the Citizens Leadership Initiative (CLI). The CLI is designed to develop community leaders and promote democratic practice among low-income residents in Allegheny County (PA). A corresponding goal is to develop the capacity of human service agencies to support civic involvement by the people and in the communities they serve.

 

The CLI is a collaborative project of ten human service agencies, coordinated by the Parental Stress Center, a child abuse prevention agency. The Coro Center for Civic Leadership is the CLI’s training partner. The University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work is providing consultation on community organizing and project evaluation. 

 

The agencies recruited twenty (20) individuals with low incomes to become CLI fellows (who receive a modest stipend). The project involves three stages. The first stage began in February 2008 with the fellows participating in a twelve-session leadership training program designed and facilitated by Coro. The training program prepared the fellows to plan the second stage of the project: a series of “community conversations” on the poverty issue(s) of their choice. The fellows chose Second Chances for people with criminal records and bad credit histories as their focus. The purpose of the conversations is to learn from people in disadvantaged communities who have direct experience with these issues. Three conversations were organized and conducted by the CLI fellows between July and October.  The fellows will report their findings and recommendations to civic leaders – including elected officials, directors of government agencies, foundation officers, business leaders, and nonprofit executives – at a National Family Week community forum on November 22, 2008.

 

The collaborating agencies provide individual support for each fellow, supply agency facilities and resources for the community conversations, and facilitate contacts with community leaders. The agencies will follow through on the CLI by devising strategies aimed at implementing the CLI’s findings and recommendations.

 

The CLI embodies the core set of values guiding the Alliance’s civic engagement efforts, which include: 

 

The CLI aims to put the person back into his/her environment, an environment that features the active participation of human service agencies in promoting social change with and on behalf of the people they serve.