The charitable choice provision and President Bush's proposed Faith-Based and Community Initiative have spurred debates regarding government support of faith-based social service programs and their effectiveness. To address the issue of relative effectiveness, the logically prior question of what constitutes a faith-based agency and how they differ from secular providers must be answered. Utilizing data from a mailed survey, this study compares the organizational characteristics of faith-based and secular agencies that provide services to the homeless in Houston, Texas. Results indicate that the two agency types vary significantly across several dimensions including funding sources and preferences, decision-making tools, organizational culture, practices, leadership, and staffing characteristics. In addition, survey data and content analysis of mission statements reveal that 80 percent of faithbased agencies use religious imagery in some form of their "public face" to communicate their religiousness.

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Based on the first national survey of faith-based social service coalitions in the United States, this article presents data on the degree to which these nonprofit organizations collaborate with other specific organizational types, as well as the range and intensity of these collaborations. In general, faith-based coalitions tend to collaborate most frequently with other faith-based agencies, a pattern especially characteristic of the more religiously expressive ones. However, collaboration with non-faith-based organizations is also quite common. Based on seven organizational characteristics, we are able to predict which faith-based coalitions are most likely to collaborate with different types of organizations: coalitions that have more explicitly religious policies and practices with reference to clients and staffs are less likely to participate in intense collaborations with some types of secular organizations, and consistently less likely to do so with all types of governmental agencies. F OR SEVERAL DECADES, nonprofit organizations have been forming collaborations and alliances with other nonprofit agencies, as well as with business and governmental entities. A number of studies focus on issues involved in creating and sustaining nonprofit collaborations (

Objective. The objective of the research reported in this article is to test four hypotheses concerning government funding among faith-based social service coalitions: that it is positively related to size and organizational professionalism; positively related to attitudes toward government funding; positively related to social activism; and negatively related to organizational religiosity. Method. Our method is the application of OLS and probit analysis to data from a national survey of 656 such organizations. Results. Using three measures of government funding and 12 predictor variables, results are mixed in their support of the size and professionalization hypothesis and generally support the remaining hypotheses. These findings are replicated when we compare coalitions that had and had not applied for government funding. Conclusions. Our findings emphasize that greater religious expressiveness dissuades coalitions from both seeking and receiving government funding, but higher levels of social activism expedite both.Religious organizations in the United States have historically been an integral part of the social welfare system-identifying social problems, bringing them to public attention, advocating their amelioration, and providing social services to the disadvantaged. The field of social service provision had its roots in the Social Gospel Movement and settlement houses of the late-19th century, as well as the social services provided by denominations and churches of the early-20th century (Cnaan, 1999). By the mid19th century, fueled by the increasing number of European immigrants, Catholic parishes became the center around which neighborhood charitable societies were organized, providing financial aid in times of sickness, disability, unemployment, and disasters (Dolan, 1985). Protestant and Jewish n Direct correspondence to Helen Rose Ebaugh hEbaugh@uh.edui. Helen Rose Ebaugh will share all data and coding information with those wishing to replicate the study.