This report was prepared at the Urban Institute under U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration contract number 1-6830-8-00-80-30, Task Order #6. Opinions expressed are those of the authors, and do not represent official positions of the Department of Labor, the Urban Institute, its Trustees or its sponsors.
The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.
Table of Contents
HIGHLIGHTS
1. INTRODUCTION
Definitions
Approach and Limitations
2. WORKFORCE INVESTMENT AGENCIES' CONTRACTING
WITH FAITH-BASED ORGANIZATIONS
3. WORK-RELATED SERVICES PROVIDED BY
RELIGIOUS CONGREGATIONS
Informal or episodic assistance
Referral services and other cross-institutional relationships
Formal Congregation Services and Programs
4. WORK-RELATED SERVICES PROVIDED BY FAITH-BASED
NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS
Types of Organizations
Funding Sources
Nature of Services
5. CONCLUSIONS
General Findings
Outstanding Issues
APPENDIX A: FAITH-BASED ORGANIZATIONS RECEIVING WELFARE-TO-WORK GRANTS
APPENDIX B: WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT BOARDS' CONTRACTING WITH FAITH-BASED ORGANIZATIONS
APPENDIX C: NUMBER OF CONGREGATIONS IDENTIFIED THAT PROVIDE EMPLOYMENT- RELATED SERVICES, BY CITY
APPENDIX D: NONPROFIT FAITH-BASED ORGANIZATIONS
Highlights
This is an exploratory examination of faith-based organizations' (FBOs)—congregations and nonprofit organizations-provision of employment related services in five cities: Baltimore, Ft. Worth, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and San Diego. The review suggests the following points:
- All five of the local workforce investment agencies (WIAs) contract with FBOs. The value of FBO contracts in 2000 range from $36,000 in Milwaukee to $3.6 million in San Diego. But FBO contracts represent just a small portion of the WIA local budgets, ranging from about 1percent (in 3 cities) to about 6 percent in San Diego and 10 percent in Pittsburgh. The median FBO contract in 2000 was about $98,000. All five agencies indicate that they expect more FBO contracts in the future.
- Most of the religious congregations/houses of worship contacted indicated that they do not formally provide employment-related services. Several explained that they provide help on an informal case-by-case basis to persons who need or request help, and that sometimes might include work-related help. But such assistance is not characteristically formal, extensive, or prolonged.
- However, one to three congregations contacted in each of the five cities provide more formal or programmatic services that are work-related, such as English tutoring or other remedial education help, job search assistance, and supportive services like clothes or transportation to work. In these congregations, the levels of service and numbers served are extremely wide ranging (from fewer than 10 to hundreds of clients), public funds are not used, and resources may still be minimal (e.g., staff are volunteers or spending is $1,000 or less a year).
- A few of the—usually large—congregations that provide fairly substantial employment-related services may serve substantial numbers of individuals (several hundred a year), and resemble programs operated by nonprofit organizations. Three such programs were identified--one each in Ft. Worth, Milwaukee, and San Diego. Services may include pre-employment preparation, job search training, supportive services, job placement, and arranging for work experience or transitional jobs.
- FBO-nonprofit organizations, like other employment service providers, offer a range of employment or supportive services, sometimes in combination with other services for the particular populations that they target. Forty-three FBO nonprofit organizations that provide employment-related services were contacted across the five cities. Nearly half have federal funding, with HUD being the most prevalent source of the funds, and many of the organizations are homeless shelters, other transitional housing facilities, or social service agencies.
1. Introduction
Employment and training services in the United States have historically been delivered through a decentralized network of local public, private, and nonprofit agencies and programs. Among the many service providers, some faith-based entities, particularly nonprofit service organizations, have provided a variety of employment-related services, for example, to help people prepare for work, improve basic skills, find jobs or new jobs, or arrange for social or emergency services that might be needed. Some of these organizations receive some public funds and deliver publicly-funded services in a secular, not a religious context. Others use only private resources (e.g., from philanthropic foundations, charitable donations, and religious groups), and may have religious features or activities as part of the services they provide.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 included a "charitable choice" provision, which allows faith-based organizations to compete for state and federal welfare funds on the same basis as other organizations and maintain their religious character. Legislation governing other federal programs, including substance abuse education, prevention and treatment, and community services block grant services, subsequently also included a charitable choice provision. The Bush Administration has placed new emphasis on expanding the role of community-based and faith-based organizations in the provision of services to meet the social and emotional needs of families and individuals.
While faith-based organizations are an important partner in the workforce development area, there is little systematic information about the extent of their involvement in the formal public employment and training system, the amount of federal funds they receive, particularly through the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) or the nature of work-related services they provide.
The purpose of this report, therefore, is to provide a basic understanding of the extent to which faith-based organizations are providing employment-related services, drawing upon exploratory information compiled for five communities: Baltimore, Maryland; Fort Worth, Texas; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and San Diego, California. The communities were purposively (not randomly) selected to provide geographic diversity to address three general questions:
- How much federal employment and training funding is going to faith-based organizations?
- What sorts of employment-related services do faith-based organizations provide?
- How much employment-related services do religious congregations provide and to whom?
The examination and the findings are exploratory, but nonetheless offer insight into the possible scale of activity by faith-based organizations in the workforce development system, and suggest the feasibility of conducting more empirical and comprehensive research to examine this issue more fully.
Definitions
There is no single generally-accepted definition of what a faith-based organization (FBO) is. For the purposes of this report, a faith-based organization is an organization that holds religious or worship services, or is affiliated with a religious denomination or house of worship.1 This includes churches and other congregations or houses of worship; nonprofit organizations affiliated with churches, congregations or religions; and local nonprofit organizations affiliated with an umbrella or national faith-based network. Faith-based nonprofit organizations generally maintain a faith-based mission but the services they deliver may or may not have a faith-based content and they do not necessarily restrict participants to those who adhere to that faith.2
For simplicity, the discussion in this report refers to two types of FBOs: (1) local congregations of churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship; and (2) nonprofit organizations with some religious or faith-based association. Admittedly, the second category encompasses a wide range of organizations, each worthy of separate examination but which are considered together in this exploratory review: local affiliates of national networks such as Catholic Charities, Jewish Family Services, Lutheran Social Services, the Salvation Army, as well as local independent organizations or ministry groups operating in a single community.
Some large national organizations originally founded with a religious affiliation no longer consider themselves faith-based, even though some local affiliates may so define themselves. Goodwill Industries and the YMCA/YWCA are perhaps the largest of the secular nonprofit service organization networks with a faith-based origin. A few local Goodwill affiliates consider themselves to be FBOs, although the vast majority of Goodwill affiliates and local YMCA/YWCAs, like their parent organizations, consider themselves secular. In this report, organizations such as Goodwill and YMCA/YWCA which are primarily secular, are excluded from the broader faith-based organization category. Local affiliates of other large national organizations, such as Jewish Family Services and Lutheran Social Services, which have carefully distinguished their secular services and activities, but still provide some separate services that are more religious in nature; these types of organizations are included in the study.
Approach and Limitations
This is an exploratory study, examining FBO provision of employment-related services in five communities. Within each site, information was collected along three tracks:
- Extent of WIA contracting with FBOs, based on telephone discussions with the local WIA administrator or designated staff person who was asked whether they contract with FBOs and the dollar amount of the contracts; and discussions with the 9 largest WIA contractors, who were also asked whether they subcontract to FBOs.
- Nature of employment-related services provided by congregations, based on telephone discussions with the nine largest congregations and houses of worship and nine smaller ones (100-700 members) selected at random from a list obtained from the American Church Lists.
- Nature of employment-related services by faith-based nonprofit organizations, based on telephone discussions with nine organizations selected at random from organizations presumed to be religiously affiliated, identified from an on-line telephone directory search (switchboard.com) under the categories "social services/welfare" or "employment agencies and opportunities."
The information compiled from these informal telephone discussions is summarized in the following sections.
There are obvious limitations. First, the study is exploratory-while the congregations and nonprofit organizations were randomly chosen, the selection process did not involve statistical random sampling,3 and only a small number of congregations, nonprofit organizations, and workforce investment agencies4 were contacted.
Second, because we drew our samples from incomplete listings and contacted a limited number, the estimates presented in this report may understate the activity by faith-based organizations. It is likely that there are more faith-based organizations than we were able to identify. The extent of the underestimate, however, is unknown, and a precise estimation would require further research with larger samples.
Thus, the samples of congregations and nonprofit organizations are not statistically representative, and the findings cannot provide a valid generalization of the sites in the study or of any other sites. The patterns of findings in this exploratory study, however, provide a useful starting point and offer a rough estimate, or approximation, of the extent of FBO involvement in employment-related services.
This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF), which many find convenient when printing.
1. A broader conception of faith-based organizations could include secular entities that are not religiously affiliated or religiously-based but have specific missions to promote certain values, beliefs, character, or moral behavior, or that are affiliated with groups with particular philosophic objectives.
2. This study, however, focuses only on those associated with or founded according to a religion or religious faith. This study does not address whether the services provided by the organizations include any religious content or whether individuals do or are asked to adhere to (be receptive to) that content. These are important issues, but beyond the scope of this report.
3. Statistical random sampling requires a complete enumeration of the entire population, but we used listings that were likely to incomplete. For example, we sampled only churches for which we had a known congregation size in order to contact both large and small institutions. However, in identifying faith-based nonprofits, we attempted to avoid introduction of systematic bias by identifying every nth entry with presumed religious affiliation to produce a total of nine from the list, and substituting the entry immediately next if the organization was either not faith-based or did not offer employment-related services.
4. For consistency throughout the text, the term workforce investment agency is used to characterize the local organization that administers federal workforce investment funds under the Workforce Investment Act. The appointed board as well as the administering agency are sometimes both referred to generically as the Workforce Investment Board (WIB).
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