Charitable Choice: First Results from Three States

The Charitable Choice provisions of the 1996 welfare reform legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), introduced a major shift in the relationship between government and religious, or "faith-based," human and social service organizations (FBOs). While federal, state, and local governments have all contracted with religious social service providers for many years, Charitable Choice legislation encourages government agencies to make greater use of such organizations and to contract directly with those considered "pervasively sectarian" to provide a broad array of social services. The legislation was premised upon three assumptions:

• That the faith community contained significant untapped resources;

• That FBOs had encountered unnecessary barriers to partnerships with government agencies; and

• That FBOs are more effective service providers than secular organizations.

This research is an effort to test those assumptions. The project, made possible by the Ford Foundation, involves an in-depth evaluation of the implementation of the Charitable Choice provisions of PRWORA over the course of three years in three states - Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Indiana. In addition to evaluating the comparable efficacy of secular and faith-based providers (the first such study of which we are aware), the study focuses on three elements critical to the success of implementation:

• The capacity of FBOs to deliver and states to monitor the identified services;

• Constitutional and fiscal accountability for resources, outcomes, and processes; and

• Adherence to First Amendment boundaries between church and state.

This report includes preliminary results based on two years of investigation, data collection, and analysis.

AUTHOR

Sheila Suess Kennedy
project principal investigator
associate professor
School of Public and Environmental Affairs
faculty fellow
Center for Urban Policy and the Environment
Indiana University, Purdue University Indianapolis.
e-mail: shekenne@iupui.edu