Full Description
A compassionate America has spent more than $5 trillion on welfare programs over three decades, but the poor haven't vanished, and the self-destructive behavior that imprisons many in poverty has become an intergenerational inheritance. Drawing on the City Journal's superlative reporting, What Makes Charity Work? shows in concrete and compelling detail how government assistance to the poor is doomed to failure — because it treats them as victims of forces beyond their control, robs them of a sense of personal responsibility, and neglects the virtues they need to escape poverty. Contrasting case studies of charities both old and new show how charity can succeed spectacularly when it encourages the poor to take control of their own lives and teaches them habits of self-reliance and the traditional virtues. Here are accounts of charities that follow these precepts and have not only brought individuals into the economic and social mainstream but have delivered whole classes of people from poverty and degradation into the middle class in a single generation. As welfare reform unfolds, and as the nation calculates how to implement the "charitable choice" provision of the 1996 welfare reform act that allows government to use private and religious charities in helping the poor, policymakers and concerned Americans will find both encouraging and cautionary case studies in What Makes Charity Work? Here is an urgent issue considered in vivid, practical, and unfailingly absorbing fashion.
Contents
Contents Introduction vii How Dagger John Saved New York's Irish 3 by william j. stern Once We Knew How to Rescue Poor Kids 23 by william j. stern How the Agency Saved My Father 41 by howard husock Philanthropy That Worked 69 by leo trachtenberg Why the Boy Scouts Work 89 by heather mac donald How Catholic Charities Lost Its Soul 108 by brian c. anderson Behind the Hundred Neediest Cases 124 by heather mac donald The Billions of Dollars That Made Things Worse 145 by heather mac donald What Good Is Pro Bono? 172 by heather mac donald How Businessmen Shouldn't Help the Schools 190 by sol stern Who Says the Homeless Should Work? 207 by sol stern At Last, a Job Program That Works 217 by kay s. hymowitz A Note on Contributors 231 Index 233
