Before receiving assistance from the ELM Foundation, people who need a car for work, rent assistance, or money for meals must make a promise. The grant maker will help them as long as they take multiple steps: abstain from substance abuse, improve their education, look for a job, get financial coaching, and provide services to other Huntsville, Ala., residents.
The foundation provides case managers to work one-on-one with grantees to achieve all of those goals. But continued support is contingent on recipients sticking to a plan to achieve self-sufficiency. The requirements, says Missy Hanks, ELM’s executive director, are a way for individuals to reach their full potential. If more charity came with such mandates, she said, nonprofits would see fewer clients walking through their doors for a second, third, or fourth time.
“Work shouldn’t be a dirty word,” she says.
The approach of the ELM Foundation — which is part of a growing network called the True Charity Network — is at the other end of the philanthropy spectrum from organizations that believe no-strings-attached cash grants are the most effective way to help people out of poverty. Although more commonly seen in international aid, foundations such as the Economic Security Project, a nonprofit based in New York, are testing the no-strings approach in the United States.
But the ELM Foundation and more than 200 nonprofits and churches that have joined True Charity believe aid must come with many strings attached. Members of the conservative-leaning network, founded in 2012, argue that private charitable support with work and other requirements is more effective than cash handouts or government welfare.
True Charity members believe government payments are often not tailored to individual needs and thus provide little incentive for people to improve their lives. Members, who cumulatively serve almost 800,000 annually, argue that their requirements force accountability among charity recipients and result in a deeper relationship with caseworkers. They disagree with left-leaning nonprofits built around the idea that work and service requirements are demeaning and punitive and that case management can be overbearing and paternalistic.
This push-pull between focusing on personal responsibility and addressing societal barriers to advancement reflects a debate that has raged in policy and nonprofit circles for decades. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of the 1960s helped cut poverty rates in half, but Americans living below the federal poverty line have remained between 10 and 15 percent of the population since 1980. Various attempts have been made to provide incentives for recipients to get off government support, such as the welfare time limits instituted by the Clinton-era Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and the proposed work requirements for Medicaid recipients envisioned by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy blueprint.
The True Charity Network exemplifies a recent poverty-reduction effort that leans away from government efforts, in that it is privately funded and largely faith-based.
Self-Discipline, Self-Respect
The founder of True Charity, James Whitford, and his wife, Marsha, started Watered Gardens Ministries in 2000. The goal was to fulfill a Christian mission to serve the poor in Joplin, Mo.
As they provided meals, clothes, and other help, they found people’s appreciation for the assistance quickly changed into anticipation and expectation, and finally a sense of entitlement.
Watered Gardens, which got its name from a verse in the biblical book of Isaiah, first rented a room in a building. After receiving support from local businesses and churches, it incorporated as a nonprofit and grew into a $5-million organization with about three-dozen staff members. Whitford found that clients would jump from charity to charity throughout the city, receiving help, but not improving their situation.
“Compassion was compelling us, but it was resulting in a form of charity that was not very effective,” he says. “In fact, it really was trapping some people in a type of dependency.”
At Watered Gardens, Whitford developed a blueprint for direct-service organizations that became the basis for True Charity. At webinars and conferences and in Capitol Hill testimony, Whitford has argued for a poverty-reduction approach that emphasizes private contributions, measuring impact, and the need for people to work.
Government money, Whitford says, “crowds out” people’s willingness to give; if they think government programs are taking care of the poor, they are less likely to get involved. And too often, nonprofits measure things like the number of beds they fill or the number of meals served, rather than whether they are reducing poverty levels.
The focus on work, according to Whitford, is based on respect for the individual.
“We believe each person is a contributor, someone who has a gift and skill rather than being an object of our benevolence,” he says.
True Charity is a program of Watered Gardens, with about a $1 million annual budget taken from general support grants in the nonprofit’s budget. True Charity, which Whitford hopes to spin-off as a separate nonprofit, has received support from Chick-fil-A, the Rising Tide Foundation, and an anonymous donor who gave from a donor-advised fund at Donor’s Trust.
Currently, True Charity has trained ambassadors spreading the message in 20 cities. Whitford acknowledges that it will be difficult to get other nonprofits on board. But to generate more interest in the approach, he’d like to set up community-wide tests with direct-service nonprofits.
The results will follow, he says. The goal isn’t to cut out all government support, but rather to ensure that both government and charity programs don’t offer incentives for people to stay out of work in order to receive state or federal payments.
Paternalism vs. Living Wage Jobs
Some question whether this approach is really new. Nonprofits across the ideological spectrum have moved toward developing deeper relationships between service providers and beneficiaries, says Michael Jindra, a cultural anthropologist at Boston University, whose research looks into how nonprofits help the poor.
Intensive case management and the provision of “wraparound services” can be helpful for people living in poverty because they often don’t have social networks through their education, work, or families. While that might seem paternalistic, he says, it’s a step toward ending cycles of poverty that have persisted despite decades of government and philanthropic aid.
“Social support is absolutely crucial unless you just have so much money and you really like giving it out without looking at the long-term perspective,” he says.
But adding work requirements amounts to “finger-wagging” that pins a person’s lack of resources on their own moral failings, says Cara Brumfield, managing director of research and policy at the Georgetown University Center on Poverty and Inequality.
“What value does a work requirement add other than a punitive, dark cloud hanging over their head?” she says. “It naively assumes good jobs that pay enough to live on are available to everyone who wants one, so if you aren’t working, it’s by choice.”
Other advocates for the poor point out that disabilities, criminal records, lack of digital skills and internet access, and living in areas with no or limited public transportation can make it very difficult for those seeking jobs.
To end intergenerational poverty, nonprofits would be better off working to change things that have prevented people from succeeding, Brumfield says, including raising the minimum wage, investing in communities that have historically been neglected, and passing a federal paid-leave requirement for new parents and buttressing food stamp and Medicaid programs.
The ELM Foundation’s Hanks disagrees. Home of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Hunstville has attracted car-manufacturing plants, biotech start-ups, and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket plant. It is, says Hanks, a boomtown.
“If you want to be employed in Huntsville, you can be,” she says.
Those who can’t, she says, often just need guidance and a person’s help to keep them on track. When clients meet with ELM Foundation caseworkers, the staff assess their talents and assets, and identify what they might need to become more attractive to employers. After crafting a development plan, the manager meets regularly with the client to assess progress.
When they first walk in the door, Hanks says, many people want the ELM Foundation to help with a pressing problem, like a car repair or help with rent. What they get, she says, is a relationship with someone willing to help.
“We’re not providing a quick fix to a critical need,” she says. “That may happen in the process. But we’re initially looking for people that understand they need to change.”
