During the 1990s, the provision of welfare in the United States went through a profound change as cities, states, and the federal government began partnering with faith-based organizations to provide a wide array of services ranging from drug rehabilitation to prisoner re-entry to community development. Jay Hein, president of the Sagamore Institute and Baylor’s ISR, details this history of this approach dating back to George HW Bush’s “thousand points of light,” through the Clinton administration’s Charitable Choice programs, and then into George W Bush’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative. Given Jay’s first-hand knowledge of these programs, we explore the relationship between the federal government, states, cities, and faith-based organizations (FBOs).
We begin our conversation with a personal story of courage and commitment. Faced with the choice of getting to meet the 2007 Super Bowl champion Indianapolis Colts at the White House or working with a faith-based community program out in Anchorage, Alaska, Jay tells why he chose the latter. This gets us into a discussion of Jay’s personal history of working with both government and churches in helping to find creative ways to provide needed social services to a variety of populations. He talks about his time with Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and how they re-envisioned the role of welfare in that state, his move over to the Hudson Institute where he built more connections and was able to study the nexus between government and FBOs, and then how he ended up in the White House working on what he describes as one of George Bush’s primary policy agenda items and signature accomplishments. Jay terms the policy changes that redirected the role of welfare provision to FBOs as a “quite revolution,” in that these changes took place at the grassroots and largely went unnoticed by the national media.
Read Full Article »