No abstract

Because of dramatic levels of economic volatility and massive changes in welfare policies, scholars in this decade worried anew about whether our official poverty measure, adopted in the 1960s, is adequate. Poverty's causes continued to be debated, with demographic factors often pitted against policy and maternal employment changes. Some scholars focused on events that trigger spirals into poverty or poverty exits. The literature on consequences of poverty featured new techniques for identifying underlying processes and mechanisms. Researchers also explored “neighborhood effects” and focused on poverty deconcentration efforts. Finally, scholars produced a voluminous literature on the efforts to reform welfare and their subsequent effects.

This article explores the moral economy through which poor women apply shared understandings of what is fair, just, and appropriate to their use of nonprofit services. The findings suggest that such women perceive that others are needier than they, avoid undeserving opportunist labels (yet apply them to others), and complain that nonprofits routinely violate their moral obligations by withholding services or not affording respect. These views lead to “conspicuous constraint,” or service use only in the direst of circumstances, in which women claim to reject help, in part, so that needy others might receive aid. The author argues that this allows them to construct an image of themselves as self-reliant, morally empowered, benevolent actors in line with neoliberal rhetoric. Given that the public welfare system has transferred more responsibility for delivery of services to the nonprofit sector, the very sector that many poor women avoid, their well-being is of great concern.

Using data from in-depth qualitative interviews with poor non-Hispanic white and Puerto Rican women living in a high-poverty neighborhood in Philadelphia, this article investigates how issues of geographic and social space condition participants' use of social resources provided locally by nongovernmental social service organizations (SSOs). The findings suggest that use of SSOs is highly contextual and situated in the local environment. In particular, proximity to agencies is found to be an important consideration in participants' decision to use SSOs, but equally important are subjective understandings of the immediate environs and the ethnoracial groups that live there. Results suggest that studies of geographic place and social welfare might consider the role of service users' sense of place and community in whether and how poor people make use of available organizational resources.

Using 85 qualitative interviews collected in three low-income Philadelphia neighborhoods as part of the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation's (MDRC) Project on Devolution and Urban Change, nonprofit directors and poor residents'views of neigh-borhood problems, other residents, and services needed were examined. In doing so, the assumption that local nonprofit leadership is in touch with the resident population that they serve was questioned. Nonprofit directors described neighborhood problems related to unemployment and education, whereas residents focused on crime and safety issues. Both groups agreed that drugs were a major problem in the community. Additionally, the resident group conveyed a more negative view of other neighborhood residents than the nonprofit directors did. Lastly, nonprofit directors wanted to add job placement and training services, whereas residents wanted to add youth programs. Overall, nonprofit directors across neighborhoods held more similar views with each other than they did with residents within their own communities.