Faith Based Initiatives

Visions of Development presents first-hand stories of groups and movements from many different religious and spiritual traditions that are working with impoverished communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It provides unique insights into how people's beliefs and spirituality can help to inform not only what they perceive 'development' to be but also how they go about achieving it. Through real-life examples of courageous and innovative work, the stories challenge much of the theory and practice of mainstream development agencies while also showing how religious inspiration can be a force for radical and positive change.

President Obama has signaled a sharp break from many Bush Administration policies, but he remains committed to federal support for religious social service providers. Like George W. Bush's faith-based initiative, though, Obama's version of the policy has generated loud criticism - from both sides of the aisle - even as the communities that stand...

In this textbook noted scholars Jo Renee Formicola and Mary C. Segers analyze the administration's initiative from three distinct dimensions.

This volume offers an in-depth examination of a diverse range of faith-based programs implemented in three different geographical locales: family support in rural Mississippi, transitional housing in Michigan, and addiction recovery in the Pacific Northwest (Washington-Oregon). Various types of religious service providers—faith-intensive and faith-related—are carefully examined, and secular organizations also serve as an illuminating point of comparison. Among other insights, this book reveals how the “three C’s” of social service provision—programmatic content, organizational culture, and ecological context—all combine to shape the delivery of welfare services in the nonprofit world. This book warns against simplistic generalizations about faith-based organizations. Faith-based providers exhibit considerable diversity and, quite often, remarkable resilience in the face of challenging social circumstances. An appreciation of these nuances is critical as policies concerning faith-based organizations continue to evolve.

Gain an understanding of the increased role religious congregations now play in providing social support to the elderly Religious congregations and faith-based organizations (FBO) from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions have worked on behalf of older adults for centuries. But the initiation of President Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives has raised many questions from both the traditional secular and sectarian services as well as many nontraditional services found in each community. Faith-Based Initiatives and Aging Services addresses the issues of the separation of church and state, the concerns involved in developing social services in religious congregations, and the larger public policy implications of this office. This unique book offers perspectives from traditional and nontraditional faith-based groups, as well as experts in volunteerism. The enactment by Congress of the Charitable Choice section of the federal welfare reform law combined with the creation of the Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the United States Department of Health and Human Services to signal a high-level of interest in supporting faith-based organizations. Faith-Based Initiatives and Aging Services focuses on the specific applications of services provided by religious congregations. Editors F. Ellen Netting and James W. Ellor conducted an in-depth interview with Elizabeth Seal-Scott, then Director of the Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (an edited transcript of the interview is included in the book) to help promote understanding of the development and implementation of faith-based, grass roots programs. Faith-Based Initiatives and Aging Services examines: the separation of church and state Baptist perspectives on faith-based initiatives and religious liberty managing older volunteers faith organizations and ethnically diverse elders the heritage of religion and spirituality in the field of gerontology faith-related agencies and their implications for aging services the role of religious congregations in the social service system Faith-Based Initiatives and Aging Services is an essential resource for anyone interested in developing programs for older adults in religious congregations, for human services staffs seeking to work with faith-based initiatives, and for government workers in need of a better understanding of faith-based services in their community.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush made faith-based social services one of the centerpieces of his domestic agenda. These "faith-based initiatives," supporters argued, would reduce poverty, ease the strain on an overburdened welfare system, and prove more effective than government programs. Opponents feared rampant proselytizing with government funds. Instead, these practices created a system in which neither the greatest hopes of its supporters, nor the greatest fears of its opponents, have been realized. The product of five years of in-depth research, Rebecca Sager's Faith, Politics, and Power offers a systematic examination of where and how these programs were implemented, arguing that faith-based initiatives strayed from supporters' original aim of helping the poor, and instead were used as tools to gain political power by the Republican Party and the conservative evangelical movement.