Chelsea Langston Bombino, June 27, 2016

House Speaker Paul Ryan recently announced an anti-poverty taskforce and a plan entitled A Better Way: Our Vision for a Confident America. The plan has several key areas of focus, including incentivizing work for those who are able, adapting social services toward the needs of individuals and states, improving education and job readiness programs, and providing government funding to results-proven providers.

What does Ryan’s plan mean for the thousands of faith-based organizations serving low-income people in America? This plan is a potential step toward addressing poverty in a way that utilizes the positive work that is done by community organizations, including FBOs. Yet the plan doesn’t clearly define that role nor address how to clearly protect and encourage it. The plan assumes greater and more effective involvement by faith-based organization (FBO) and community-based organization (CBO) , but there are concerns about how the plan’s suggestions about social-impact investment may adversely affect faith organizations. Moreover, the plan does not address how government can better engage FBOs in designing programs and offering wrap around solutions. In addition, the plan lacks a clear statement about ensuring that federal rules protect FBO involvement even as the federal government pushes ahead to create new protected classes in civil rights law.

Let’s take a brief look at a few of the plan’s major goals and how they may impact religious organizations and religious freedom more generally.

1) Ryan’s plan focuses on the inter-connectedness of factors that contribute to an individual’s ability to work, including stable housing, affordable and reliable childcare, adequate nutrition, and transportation. Faith-based community organizations across the country support working individuals and families through their provision of diverse services, including childcare, food assistance, jobs training, housing, and other wrap around services critical to a person’s success in sustaining full-time employment. Ryan’s plan recognizes that:

“Often local non-profits and other business partners have a better perspective and greater flexibility to address the needs of the communities they serve, as well as the ability to connect individuals entering and advancing in the workforce with needed services.”

Local faith-based organizations have been at the forefront of offering innovative solutions to their community members that take into account the unique needs of each individual and family. Perhaps churches and religious services organizations can work to provide new innovations here, as well, to offer creative solutions that may allow single parents or low-income families more flexibility in balancing work and the care of their young children.

For example, in Southeast Washington, DC, a faith-based housing nonprofit for the working homeless hired a young mother to perform administrative tasks while working from home so she could also care for her infant daughter. In other instances, houses of worship and faith communities are often the first to step in directly offering vulnerable parents flexible work or acting to connect them to their networks for employment opportunities that meet the needs of parents with young children. Additionally, faith-based child care centers and even individual faith community members often offer reduced cost or free childcare services to especially vulnerable families in their midst. Ryan’s plan should seek out the advice and counsel of faith-based organizations not just in services provision, but in the development of the plan itself before it becomes legislation, to offer innovative, first-hand perspectives on how to meet the seemingly competing needs of giving infants and young children the best care and getting all capable bodies to work.

2) Another major aim of Ryan’s plan is to “get incentives right so everyone benefits when someone moves from welfare to work.” As the plan explains, currently, social services providers currently lose funding when their services recipients achieve independence and no longer require services. The plan proposes to readjust benefits so that non-profits, including faith-based providers, are not incentivized to keep services recipients longer than needed. As the plan states, “non-profits are susceptible to…the kind of financial incentives to maintain or increase recipient levels in order to receive funding. The goal must always be to move families forward and nonprofits should be incentivized to do just that.”

The plan recommends streamlining and coordinating these plans better and aligning their incentives toward getting individuals to work. For faith-based organizations who are called by God to serve, their goals and missions may not always align with the primary objective of Ryan’s plan, that all individuals should be working. Many faith-based providers would view this as a laudable goal for most individuals, but their missional goals are often more about the specific services they provide: “feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, care for the orphan,” as well as about providing people with spiritual nourishment. Faith-based organizations should carefully consider whether partnering with the government under Ryan’s plan would divert them from their core, faith-based missions and callings and possibly express to the anti-poverty taskforce any areas where their faith-influenced goals and practices are out of step with the aims of Ryan’s plan.

3) Ryan’s plan also insists on measuring the positive impacts of programs receiving funding and basing funding on these results. The plan also calls for the use of Social Impact Financing (SIF), described as follows below:

“1. Government determines a desired social outcome and agrees to pay for that outcome;

2. An intermediary identifies a service provider, arranges for private investors to fund the services, and monitors

3. If the agreed-upon outcome is achieved—usually a cost savings or a socially beneficial result—the government reimburses the intermediary (who pays investors) for its expenses plus a return based on the program’s success. If the outcome is not achieved, the government does not pay.”

Faith-based organizations should have questions about the specifics of how SIF funding would impact their capacity to partner with government, as well as how Ryan’s plan in general reckons the value of FBOs in a pluralistic public square. Would faith-based providers have access to these “intermediaries” on an equal playing field with secular service providers? Would SIF actually reduce the total amount of governmental funding for services their beneficiaries still very much need? Would common metrics used to measure for impact and achieve the “desired social outcome” take into account the faith-shaped practices of religious providers? How can faith-based providers ensure their voices are heard throughout the process of this anti-poverty plan’s continued development and implementation? How does the plan train FBOs to compete on an equal playing field for government funding?

As Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami noted, the plan “ought to be a catalyst for bipartisan dialogue about our brothers and sisters in need and our obligations to give them priority in our policymaking.”

The Ryan plan could also be valuable catalyst for faith-based organizations of different faiths and service sectors across the country to contribute to the public square in three important ways:

1. Engage both Republican and Democratic policymakers in Congress and on a state and local level in conversations about the positive impact they have seen in their own programs to reduce poverty in their communities. Also, engage policymakers about the specific areas where your religious organizations need space to live out your faith through your faith-shaped services and practices.
2. Engage proactively in faith-shaped evaluations practices for your programs. Consider your faith-based mission’s calling your organization to be its best as an invitation to learn best practices in measuring for impact and adopt metrics, data collection and evaluation processes that capture the positive impact your faith-based services have on your beneficiaries.
3. Engage in crafting a strategic communications and messaging plan that makes clear that the positive results your organization achieves for your services recipients are not apart from your faith, but because of it.