Comparing Faith-Based and Secular Community Service Corporations in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania

Abstract

Much of the national dialogue regarding the role of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in social service delivery has focused on congregations that provide various types of services to their communities. Comparatively little attention has been given to FBOs that have incorporated independently as 501(c)3 tax-exempt organizations. This survey of 237 community service organizations in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, finds that a substantial amount of service is provided by agencies that consider themselves to be FBOs, which are comparable to their secular counterparts in many respects, such as size, funding, program capacity, and management sophistication. FBOs appear to be substantially different from secular agencies with respect to their extensive use of volunteers, their relatively low reliance on government funding, and their relatively low engagement in policy advocacy and lobbying.

Envisioning Religiously Diverse Partnership Systems among Government, Faith Communities and FBOs

“…Many scholars noted that faith was often linked in the policy rhetoric with transformation, with proponents of the faith-based initiative assuming that FBOs would engender transformation in the individual through the faith elements. 6 Measures of religious program effects often focused on levels of faith using one of the typologies identified above (for example, [51]), comparing organizations grouped by the type of religiosity on standard program outcomes, such as number and characteristics of job placements [14,16,52,53]. Most of the empirical studies comparing FBOs with various levels of faith to each other and secular organizations found evaluations difficult to do, faith hard to measure and complex results [14,16,53,54].…”

“…As the policy rhetoric encouraged openly religious organizations and congregations to become involved in government-funded service provision, established FBOs worried that they would lose contracts as funds were targeted toward congregationally-based, supposedly holistic, small FBOs [6]. The scholarly literature documented this focus on congregation-sponsored programs and smaller FBOs through such initiatives as government outreach through faith-based liaisons and other mechanisms [18,55] and technical assistance to new faith-based and community organizations through the Compassion Capital Fund and similar initiatives [6,14].…”

“…The scholarly literature documented this focus on congregation-sponsored programs and smaller FBOs through such initiatives as government outreach through faith-based liaisons and other mechanisms [18,55] and technical assistance to new faith-based and community organizations through the Compassion Capital Fund and similar initiatives [6,14]. Larger, established FBOs responded by clarifying the religious roots of their organizations [41,56,57].…”

“…Established FBOs have also continued to receive the bulk of government funding. Scholars report that most funding for faith-based organizations goes to FBOs with a long history of government funding [6,14], and a U.S 4 Charitable Choice, Section 104 of the 1996 welfare reform act, allowed religious providers to offer services without having to remove outward signs of their religious identity. Government funding could not be used for sectarian activities, like bible study or worship.…”

“…While some scholars have suggested that faith communities would rather partner with non-profits than work directly with government [1,[5][6][7] and many others have documented faith community service provision [2,[8][9][10][11][12], the idea of nonfinancial partnerships has not been explored in detail. Instead, organization scholars focus on the impact of government funding on FBOs [13][14][15][16][17] and the few churches that directly contract with government [18,19].…”