From maximum feasible participation to disenfranchisement.

• Date: 22 March 1998
• Author: Naples, Nancy A.
• Published date: 22 March 1998
• Author: Naples, Nancy A.

As a consequence of a unique confluence of political, economic, and social factors, the Great Society programs established by President Lyndon B. Johnson helped broaden the basis for citizen participation in poor urban communities across the U.S. In the context of the Civil Rights Movement and an apparently strong and growing economy, Johnson declared a War on Poverty in his State of the Union address in January of 1964.(1) The Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964 became the legislative linchpin. It called for maximum feasible participation of residents living in the poor neighborhoods served by newly established community action programs.(2) In his State of the Union Message, Johnson explained: "I propose a program which relies on the traditional time-tested American methods of organized local community action to help individuals, families, and communities to help themselves" (quoted in Sundquist, 1969: 23). Yet the designers of community action were unprepared for the political challenge that participants would pose to the established political regimes in different locales (see, e.g., Sviridoff, 1989; Yarmolinsky, 1969). City officials from across the U.S. responded to the challenge by pressuring the president to limit the poor's policymaking role.(3)

Nevertheless, the War on Poverty expanded local citizenship, albeit for a short time. This contrasts sharply with the disenfranchisement and urban disinvestment that characterizes the contemporary policy context. Commitment to maximum feasible participation of the poor has disappeared from the welfare policies of the 1980s and 1990s. Emphasis on community action and comprehensive, multiservice, community-based approaches to fighting poverty has receded from public discourse. So have calls for local community control over the assessment of community needs and the design and implementation of antipoverty programs. Contemporary welfare reform shifts control over funds for social support to the individual states, but it does not require or invite the active participation of community residents and welfare recipients in program design, resource allocation, and implementation. However, certain features that were prominent in the Community Action title of the EOA have gained renewed popularity in the contemporary conservative political climate: namely, community service and decentralization. In this article, I demonstrate how the progressive aspects of community action shifted to serve conservative ends in the 1990s. Contemporary welfare policy reform embodies this shift, which narrows rather than expands the citizenship of the poor.

Low-Income Women in the War on Poverty

Community action programs (CAPs) funded under the Economic Opportunity Act provided the opportunity for women from low-income communities, particularly women of color, to gain leadership experience and to get paid for much of the work they already were doing for their communities for free (see Naples, 1998a). Symbolically, if not also in practice, CAPs merged antipoverty policy with the expansion of citizenship rights (see also Sarvasy, 1994; Slim, 1994). During the War on Poverty, CAPs provided resources to low-income communities and offered sites designed to expand poor residents' political participation. In particular, the CAPs created a context for women with no training in community work to develop their political skills and for those with previous experiences to share their political analyses and develop their political networks. As a consequence of the War on Poverty, many community workers deepened their political perspectives and organized much more broadly than they did when they first began as community workers.

Analysts disagree over the extent to which designers of the EOA actually intended for the CAPs to organize the poor. In fact, in a 1966 study of how 20 cities implemented community action, Stephen Rose (1972) reports that less that three percent of the CAPs "were in any way designed to organize the poor, to transfer power, or to change the institutional structure." Moreover, political pressures from mayors, other public officials, and traditional social service organizations circumscribed the federal government's commitment to maximum feasible participation of the poor. The pressure to control the political behaviors of CAPs and their staffs frequently led to a return to the traditional social service approach that community action had been designed to replace.

In an effort to understand the experiences of women from low-income communities who were hired by CAPs during the late 1960s and early 1970s, I gathered oral histories from women community action workers in New York City and Philadelphia during the mid-1980s. Of the 64 activists I interviewed, 42 lived in low-income neighborhoods, where they were hired as community workers in community action programs; 10 were nonresident community activists; 12 of the community activists were not employed by the CAPs. I reinterviewed 16 of the community workers in 1995. I also extensively interviewed four city, state, and federal officials who were responsible for designing and overseeing CAPs to gather additional information about the organizational structure and history of the CAPs in New York City and Philadelphia more generally. I draw on this research and on diverse archival and secondary data for the discussion to follow.

Recent federal proposals to prohibit organizations that apply for or receive government funds from engaging in political activities reveal a complete abandonment of the principal of maximum feasible participation provided for in the EOA. In April 1995, Jeff Shear reported in the National Journal (p. 924) that conservative House Republicans were "aiming to 'Defund the Left' by stopping the flow of federal money to not-for-profit organizations that have been associated with liberal causes." Organizations identified as the target of this campaign included the Association of Head Start Grantees, the Child Welfare League, the Children's Defense Fund, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund Inc., the National Council of La Raza, and the National Council of Senior Citizens.

Set up to respond to local community needs, CAPs and other community-based organizations cannot avoid their role as advocates for residents in poor neighborhoods. All the women I interviewed emphasized that political activism is essential to their community work. Indeed, they believe that advocacy and other forms of political activism should be expanded rather than curtailed. According to Nina Reyes, a Puerto Rican community worker from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, community agencies must take more initiative in the 1990s to help organize residents in poor neighborhoods, to improve housing and other services, and to enhance the political participation of the poor. She complained that most social service agencies have a narrow definition of their role in organizing the local community. However, since agencies situated in low-income neighborhoods are vulnerable to funding cuts, those working in these organizations often find themselves fighting intense political battles to ensure their continued existence. Nina described how she successfully involved residents in her neighborhood in an effort to prevent funding cuts to her program for the elderly in 1995. Recognizing the need for ongoing organizing to prevent further cuts in subsequent years, Nina and her co-organizers established a coalition of different groups who would be affected by funding cuts in the future. As she explained, "people are getting older, people are getting sicker, so we have to keep our faith. We have to because we can't let the government run us."

Contraction of the Democratic State

Ignoring the documented economic need of low-income families and the dearth of above-poverty-level jobs, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (henceforth, PRA) in August 1996, thus ending the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program established by the Social Security Act in 1935. Although the inadequacies of AFDC are widely known, it provided an essential economic "safety net" for low-income families, especially those headed by single mothers. Beyond the withdrawal of the safety net, the PRA includes no federal oversight to protect the poor against arbitrary bureaucratic decisions and other problems with implementation. Other legislation now prohibits Legal Services attorneys from filing class action suits on behalf of groups like children with disabilities or welfare recipients, so the ability of poor residents to defend their rights is further constrained.(4)

A 1996 study by Joe Volk, chair of Milwaukee's Task Force on Emergency Shelter and Relocation Services, reported that over three-fourths of the 500 people who attempted to find shelter in the 400 beds located in that city's five family shelters in late December 1996 lost welfare benefits in error. This highlights the significance of the loss of legal services and procedural guarantees (Children Defense Fund, 1997). Sanford Schram (1995: 94) explains that the process of cutting eligible clients off public assistance, a process known as churning, is justified by the charge of bureaucratic "noncompliance," which includes, for example, failure to respond to letters requesting the client to appear for recertification of their eligibility. Clients who may not have received these letters or who do not speak English can appeal their termination, but during the period of appeal they will not receive their benefits. Schram points out that the process of churning is furthered by the managerial decision "to count errors only in granting aid, not in denying it. This built-in bias, in effect, encouraged states to deny aid to many who are eligible."

Challenging abuse of administrative power was, and continues to be, a major target for welfare...