Background

From the days of the earliest settlers, the spirit of helping others has been a key element of American society. On the frontier, the family and neighbors were the only sources of assistance. As communities sprang up and populations grew, the church and other voluntary associations became important social institutions and helpmates to those less fortunate.

The Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s witnessed the development of the settlement house, one of the early examples of a physical facility, other than a church, that served as a center of activity for community problem-solving. Hull House in Chicago became the national model. Most settlement houses were for new immigrants from European nations and provided language instruction, job training, and social services to help people “settle” into life in America.

In the early 1900s, colleges began to offer formal training in the principles and methods of social work, which led to the birth of a new profession

The great depression of the 1930s overwhelmed the nation’s communities. The nation’s families, churches, voluntary agencies, and state-funded social welfare programs were unable to cope with the magnitude of the economic and social problems. Up to this point the widely held social value had been that the federal government should not interfere with the economy, but, with the Depression, the public called for a new federal role. The government stepped in with a “New Deal” to provide retirement income through a new social insurance program called Social Security. Initially, it did not include domestic workers or farm workers – and about two-thirds of Black Americans worked in one of those two sectors. The “New Deal” also created a new Unemployment Insurance System.

Congress passed many new banking and labor laws to strengthen the economy, regulate industry, and protect workers. The Aid to Dependant Children program was created as part of the Social Security Act. ADC was modeled on programs that existed in about 17 states – especially the Illinois version that had been created in 1912 under prodding from the Hull House. ADC was created to provide “temporary public assistance” for children of men killed in industrial accidents and for others that local authorities decided were “the deserving poor.” Social workers were hired to determine who – in keeping with the local social values – “deserved” assistance, to advise recipients about how to use the money, and to help the mothers of those children to obtain the services and make the transitions necessary to get their lives back together (which in the 1930s usually meant to move back in with her family or to get married again).

From the 1930s to the late 1950s, state and local governments had much of the responsibility for administering most of the programs created during the Depression.

After World War II, the G.I. Bill provided money for college for veterans and propelled millions of people into the middle class. The communications media, especially television, expanded across the United States. The American public became more aware of the problems of the aged, the effects of segregation, the poor quality of education, health problems caused by malnutrition and hunger, the need to educate people so they could get good jobs, and the other difficulties experienced by minorities and the low-income population.

The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared that separate schools for blacks and whites in Topeka, Kansas, and several other school districts did not provide an equal education, i.e., that “separate was not equal.” This was a 180-degree reversal of the 1896 Dred Scott decision in which the Supreme Court had said that separate was equal.

The Brown decision was a dramatic expansion of federal authority into what had previously been the domain of state’s rights and local determination. In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the decision. To the surprise of many, the federal government was in fact going to enforce the decision. The decision led to an expansion of awareness of the discrimination that existed in other areas of publicly financed activity such as bus and train transportation, employment on government-funded projects, and in use of licensed public accommodations, including lunch counters, restaurants, and hotels. Citizens began to organize to seek equal rights in those areas, and the Civil Rights Movement (which had existed since before the nation was formed, e.g., the abolitionists) began to gain new support from the general public.

By the early 1960s, the economy was booming. A majority of the American public believed that everyone could live “the good life” and that society as a whole had a responsibility for helping people overcome barriers that prevented them from sharing in the fruits of American society.

The Creation Years – 1961-1964

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” included new programs to prevent juvenile delinquency. The focal point was the President’s Council on Juvenile Delinquency (PCJD), which was chaired by U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. In New York City, the President’s Council funded Mobilization for Youth (MfY) as did the Ford Foundation and the City of New York. MfY organized and coordinated neighborhood councils composed of local officials, service providers, and neighbors to develop plans to correct conditions that led to juvenile delinquency. It also enlisted the aid of the school board and city council members to implement those plans. It was called COMMUNITY ACTION, and it looked like an effective and inexpensive way to solve problems for youth.

The Ford Foundation was also funding other “gray areas projects,” including one in New Haven, Connecticut, that recruited people from all sectors of the community to come together to plan and implement programs to help low-income people. The core idea in the New Haven project was the concept of the whole community working together. This idea came from the “program of community action” that had been developed by the “Chicago School” of sociologists in the 1930s. They sought to create new social systems by linking the sectors of the community together to help youth connect with the world of work and integrate into the mainstream of society. MFY and the New Haven “gray areas project” are often cited as the “models” for a Community Action Agency.

After the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, President Lyndon Baines Johnson expanded the policy ideas initiated during the Kennedy Administration. In his State of the Union message to Congress on January 8, 1964, President Johnson said:

Let us carry forward the plans and programs of John F. Kennedy, not because of our sorrow or sympathy, bus because they are right.... This administration today, here and now, declares an unconditional War on Poverty in America.... Our joint federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists. In city slums, in small towns, in sharecroppers’ shacks, or in migrant worker camps, on Indian reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.

The “War on Poverty” was born. In February, LBJ asked Sargent Shriver – President Kennedy’s brother in-law and head of the Peace Corps – to head a task force to draft legislation. The initial staff support and coordination for the task force was provided by people who worked at – the PCJD. On August 20, 1964, LBJ signed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (EOA) into law. It created a federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) in the Executive Office of the President. “Sarge” Shriver was named Director and served until 1969. Many of the people who staffed the task force went to work at OEO.

Congress also passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which sought to eliminate discrimination in employment, public accommodations, transportation, and other areas of life. The Economic Opportunity Act, designed to help implement that guarantee in the economic sector, stated in part: “It is therefore the policy of the United States to eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty in this nation by opening, to everyone, the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.” The EOA included new education, employment and training, and work-experience programs such as the Job Corps, Neighborhood Youth Corps, and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA, the “domestic Peace Corps”). And it included the authority to work to change public policy that was discriminatory in its implementation.

Formative Years – 1964-1967

The federal OEO was created to lead the War on Poverty and to coordinate related programs of all other federal agencies. Community Action Agencies (CAAs) were created at the local level to fight the War on Poverty “at home.” Initially, there were no statutory requirements as to their structure, so some CAAs were blue-ribbon panels created by the mayor, others were grass-roots organizations composed entirely of poor people, and others were started by groups of neighbors who met in the local church basement and worked on improving their community.

CAAs varied from grass-roots, community-controlled groups to those with experienced board members and a highly professional staff. Most eventually incorporated as private, nonprofit organizations, and a few were created as city agencies. And, especially in the South and in urban areas, many of the staff and board members of CAAs were also leaders in the local civil rights movement. The concepts of civil rights and the people from the civil rights movement were at the core of the thinking and operations of CAAs in the formative years.

The state and local governments were seen as not being very effective in eliminating poverty – or as being part of the problem. In a rural county in the “Deep South,” for example, where the population was 50 percent black and 50 percent white and almost everybody – both black and white – was poor, under the ADC program the local authorities only approved financial assistance for the people they decided were the “deserving poor.” So a typical ADC caseload in 1964 would be 700 white females and four black females. There were zero black female students in the state university.

The EOA and the OEO bypassed the state and local governments and directly funded the community groups that were seeking social change. This direct funding was a key element of the Community Action concept. Community Action Agencies worked to change public policy from a situation where aid or opportunities were given only to the “deserving poor” to a public policy where aid and opportunities were open to all who were eligible for it and legislatively entitled to it – regardless of race. Using the strategies of direct action, community organization, and legal action, the CAAs challenged the structures of segregation head on – and won on virtually every front. From 1964 into the early 1970s, under the onslaught of CAAs and other groups, the segregationist barriers crumbled into the dust of history.

Another powerful anti-poverty strategy used by most CAAs was to help the father of a family get a GED (high school equivalency certificate) and then get a job in a factory. The GED would get him the job, and the job would get him the minimum wage, which was enough to lift most families out of poverty. The anti-discrimination strategy and the get-a-GED-and-get-a-job strategy were powerful – they worked to get people out of poverty.

The EOA also provided for the creation of economic opportunity offices at the state level to involve governors in the War on Poverty.

Federal funds were provided through the OEO, but the local CAAs determined the use of the funds to meet the problems of low-income people as they defined them. These were called “local initiative funds” and were used for a very variety of purposes, from helping people find work to providing basic education to improving housing to creating local community organizations and to supporting social action. One provision of the EOA called for the poor to have “maximum feasible participation” in identifying problems and in developing solutions – and in obtaining jobs within the program. Across the nation, CAAs opened neighborhood centers in storefronts, housing projects, and other buildings in low-income areas to identify people who needed help, to determine eligibility, and to help the community organize to take action on its concerns.

A new group of community leaders developed out of these neighborhood organizations, voicing the concerns of the poor and insisting on change. The philosophy, the values, the strength, and the personal commitments of Community Action were formed during this period.

It was also during this phase that the OEO hired 3,000 federal employees to manage and monitor all the new programs. Most of these people came from the CAAs, civil rights groups, universities, church leadership, labor unions, and other activist organizations.

The Community Action Program (CAP) grew rapidly and invested substantial amounts of new federal funds into communities. A confusing aspect of nomenclature that persists to this day is that CAAs are often called CAPs because they were formed under the Community Action Program division of OEO to administer funds for local Community Action Programs – so the agency itself was also called a Community Action Program.

Restructuring Phase – 1967-1968

Some local elected officials, especially in the big cities, became concerned over the control of the CAA boards. Unhappy with the new power blocks outside their own political organizations, a few big-city mayors communicated their concerns to Vice President Hubert Humphrey (who was a former mayor and President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors), to President Johnson, and to Congress. As a result, Congress began to earmark new funds into “National Emphasis Programs” that reduced the ability of the CAAs to use the funds for other purposes. Congress also began to place restrictions on use of federal funds for voter registration. President Johnson’s initial enthusiasm for OEO began to decline, and his attention turned to the Vietnam War.

In late 1967, Congress passed the Green Amendment (named for Rep. Edith Green, D-OR), which required that a CAA must be designated by local elected officials as the official CAA for that area. After designation, OEO then recognized the CAA and provided funds. After months of negotiations, over 95 percent of the existing CAAs were designated and recognized. In several large cities, the CAA was taken over by the mayor and turned into a public agency. In California, Governor Reagan urged counties to take over the CAAs, and about half of the CAAs in that state were designated as public agencies. Today, they are referred to as “Green CAPs.”

Congress also passed the Quie Amendment, which required that CAA boards of directors be composed of one-third elected officials, at least once-third low-income representatives selected by a democratic process, and the balance from the private sector.

By 1967, there were almost 1,800 CAAs covering about 2,200 of the nation’s 3,300 counties. Most big cities had several CAAs. The OEO initiated a policy that required most single-county CAAs to join together into multi-county units and also required that there be only one CAA in a large city.

By late 1968, about 1,000 CAAs had been designated under the Green Amendment and recognized by OEO, reorganized to meet the Quie Amendment criteria, and consolidated according to OEO policy. Almost all of these CAAs are still in existence today. This process of local designation and federal recognition created a unique set of local entities with a broadly defined mission and a federal mandate to eliminate the causes of poverty and ameliorate the conditions of poverty.

Although the increase in the influence of local elected officials was a controversial issue for the leaders of poverty groups that had been operating independently or at a more grass-roots level, the Green and Quie amendments ultimately had a positive effect on most CAAs. In many, many places, the CAA board became the arena for local officials, the business sector, and low-income people to have a dialogue and to reach agreement on the policies, self-help activities, and programs to help their community.

Transition Years – 1969-1974

By 1969, many successful programs had been initiated by OEO and the CAAs, including Head Start, family planning, community health centers, Legal Services, VISTA, Foster Grandparents, economic development, neighborhood centers, summer youth programs, adult basic education, senior centers, and congregate meal preparation.

The concept of using OEO and CAAs as “innovators and the testing ground” for new programs and then spinning off successful programs to be administered by other federal agencies had been around since OEO was formed. In President Richard Nixon’s first administration (1968-1972), he transferred programs from OEO to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (Head Start) and the Department of Labor (Job Corps, Neighborhood Youth Corps). Legal Services, Adult Basic Education, and Title III Senior Food Programs obtained their own legislation and also spun off from OEO.

During the first Nixon Administration, one of the OEO Directors was Donald Rumsfeld – who is now Secretary of Defense. California Governor Reagan once again vetoed the legal services grant to the California Rural Legal Assistance Program. As Sarge Shriver had done in almost all cases of gubernatorial veto, Director Rumsfeld overrode that veto (CRLA continues to provide legal services to migrant workers to this day). Director Rumsfeld also signed an OEO Instruction describing the mission of the CAA that is still in use today by many states and CAAs. The CAA mission was stated as:

“To stimulate a better focusing of all available, local, state, private, and Federal resources upon the goal of enabling low-income families, and low-income individuals of all ages in rural and urban areas, to attain the skills, knowledge, and motivations and secure the opportunities needed for them to become self-sufficient.”

Director Rumsfeld’s Instruction went further in describing the CAA mission:

“The Act thus gives the CAA a primarily catalytic mission: to make the entire community more responsive to the needs and interests of the poor by mobilizing resources and bringing about greater institutional sensitivity. A CAA’s effectiveness, therefore, is measured not only by the services which it directly provides but, more importantly, by the improvements and changes it achieves in the community’s attitudes and practices toward the poor and in the allocation and focusing of public and private resources for antipoverty purposes.”

President Nixon also supported and signed legislation that provided a significant increase in social security benefits for seniors; the senior poverty rate dropped from 34 percent to 12 percent overnight.

By the start of his second term in 1973, the Nixon Administration had changed its mind about a wide range of social policies and programs. President Nixon did not request any funds for OEO’s Community Action Program division. Congress nevertheless provided funds. Nixon appointed Howard Phillips as Director of OEO and told him to dismantle and close the agency and to not spend the money Congress provided – to “impound” it. Acting Director Phillips sent notices to the OEO Regional Offices and the CAAs to cease operations and to close their offices.

After a series of lawsuits, the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the President (a) could not refuse to spend funds that had been appropriated by Congress, and (b) that Acting Director Phillips did not have the authority to take the actions he had taken. Phillips resigned without having ever been confirmed by the Senate. In response to President Nixon’s concerns about managing federal spending, Congress created the “Anti-Impoundment and Budget Reconciliation Act of 1974.” In 1981, it was used to eliminate the CSA.

Program Management Years – 1974-1981

Under President Gerald Ford, in 1974, the Community Services Amendments were passed. The OEO was renamed and the “new” Community Services Administration (CSA) was born. The OEO employees became CSA employees and continued to administer the programs. Community Action had found a new home in the federal government and, apparently, a new supporter in President Ford. (Former President Ford was on the advisory committee for the Friends of VISTA for many years.)

From 1974 to 1981, CSA continued to fund CAAs. CAAs continued to help communities and neighborhoods to initiate self-help projects such as gardening, solar greenhouses, and housing rehabilitation. They also helped create and support federally funded senior centers and congregate meal sites. Home weatherization and energy crisis transfer-payment programs were invented by CSA and the CAAs and turned into large-scale programs. However, most of the growth in federal spending for anti-poverty purposes flowed directly to individuals, through programs like Food Stamps and Medicaid.

This resurgence of a federal commitment to supporting local anti-poverty efforts came to an end with the passage of the Omnibus Budget and Reconciliation Act of 1981

The Early Block Grant Years – 1981-1993

President Ronald Reagan’s administration wanted to reduce substantially the federal government’s support for domestic social programs. He proposed to consolidate most federally funded human needs programs into several large, general purpose block grants, to reduce the total amount of funding by 25 percent, and to delegate the responsibility for administering these block grants to the states. The Reagan proposals were largely approved by Congress, which created eight new block grants consolidating more than 200 federal programs, reduced their funding, and turned administrative authority over to the states.

The court victory by CAAs in 1973 had resulted in Congress creating new “budget reconciliation” tools in the “Anti-Impoundment and Budget Reconciliation Act of 1974.” The reconciliation tools were used to dramatically alter the federal commitment and structure.

However, although President Reagan had proposed the elimination of federal funding for CAAs, Congress did not agree. In September 1981, Congress provided that all CAAs designated and recognized by CSA were eligible to be funded under the 90 percent pass-through requirement of the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG). The CSBG provided for the continued funding of the “eligible entities,” i.e., the CAAs, migrant programs, and certain other organizations that had been financed through local initiative funds by CSA.

However, Congress did repeal the EOA and, in so doing, eliminated the procedures and regulations for designation and federal recognition of new CAAs. Furthermore, on September 30, 1981, the CSA was abolished. Rather than following the usually policy of allowing federal employees to transfer into other programs when their program was cut or eliminated, the CSA staff (about 1,000 of them) were fired. A new Office of Community Services was created to oversee phase-out of CSA activities (loan funds, etc.) and to pass the CSBG funds through to the state governments.

In 1981, at the start of this transition to state administration, many of the civil rights-era activists in CAAs were worried that the states in the Deep South might slip back into the old patterns where only whites received benefits or got hired to manage public programs. Fortunately this did not happen, and – in an interesting turn of history – almost all of the Deep South states were and still are among the most committed to the concepts of Community Action and to CAAs as organizations. Four states – Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming – obtained congressional approval to evolve to a different form of administering CSBG funds. They were called “waiver states.”

About a third of states explicitly maintained a commitment to the principles of the Economic Opportunity Act, created a high-profile state office, and left the planning and management systems in place at the CAA level. About a third of states buried the new state office deep in the innards of state government, but they left the local determination features of CAA operations in place. And about a third of states tried to synthesize the CSBG into some other state operation, usually the Social Services Block Grant or an employment and training agency.

In the 1980s CAA’s expanded their role in energy-related programs like Weatherization and LIHEAP and began new strategies seen as appropriate for the economic and social values of the time, such as family-development programs, micro-business programs, youth programs, home-ownership programs, and programs for minority males. CAAs also greatly expanded their role in housing renovation and housing development.

In the 1980s, the public began to lose faith that government programs were producing sufficient results. This was not just human development programs in nonprofit agencies, it was all programs and all forms of government – federal, state, and local. “Waste, fraud, and abuse” became the catch-phrase of President Reagan’s era. In the early 1990s, Congress reacted to the public concerns and to their own hearings and made numerous amendments to the Chief Financial Officers Act requiring federal agencies to do a better job of reporting on costs and results.

The Results and Outcomes Years – 1993 and into the future

In 1993, Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA). This requires all federal agencies to: produce strategic plans with long-term goals and performance goals; to identify results and outcome measures for their strategies; and ultimately to submit their budget requests to Congress based on the results they will produce. This has proved to be a major challenge for programs in all federal agencies. As has been the case since the 1930s, any requirements a federal agency itself must meet eventually are imposed on the entities that receive federal money from it, including state and local governments and nonprofit agencies.

To implement the intent of GPRA among states and CAAs, the Office of Community Services and the national associations representing states and CAAs created a process to develop goals and outcome measures. That system is called the Results Oriented Management and Accountability system, or ROMA. It created six national goals with about 75 suggested outcome measures (10 or 12 for each goal) for states and CAAs to use. The design standard used to create the six national goals was that the goal framework should (a) cover the very broad range of strategies contemplated by the CSBG statute and used by CAAs nationwide, and (b) be able to describe at least 90 percent of what CAAs are doing. Recognizing that the processes of invention and innovation at the local level will always be creating strategies and results that are not-yet-incorporated into the formal reporting system, ROMA allows states and CAAs to add “local measures” to describe other new results that they are achieving.

Created as a voluntary system, ROMA has followed the typical pathway of management systems created by a funding agency. It is now required of all states and CAAs. In the early 2000s, the Office of Management and Budget began advocating that all federal programs should have only a few (3-6) outcome measures and that states and local entities should be held responsible for producing their negotiated amount of that national performance goal. This dialogue among OCS, the CAA network, and OMB is now underway.

At the local level, virtually all CAAs now use the six ROMA goals in some aspect of their planning and are reporting on results – and on the ongoing challenges of developing effective results measures for human development and community development programs.

In 1996, Community Action launched a new initiative both to increase citizen involvement in the affairs of the community and the work of Community Action and to ensure that our services and advocacy efforts were properly targeted. Through the National Dialogue on Poverty (NDP) in 1996, CAAs involved more than 150,000 people in discussions about their communities and how to address issues of poverty. A second NDP in 2000 led to specific strategies and an advocacy agenda designed to eliminate the causes of poverty. The Dialogue has continued in 2004 with discussions and planning for the No Room for Poverty National Rally on September 4, 2004, when Community Action will issue its call for a White House Conference on American Poverty. It is the hope of Community Action that a White House Conference on American Poverty will lead to a national commitment and action plans to address the five pillars of poverty identified through the NDP process: jobs, housing, healthcare, education, and telecommunications.

Even with reduced core funding that came with the block grant in 1981, CAAs were able to increase their leveraging of additional funds. One survey in 1986 showed that with a CSBG budget of slightly more than $300,000, the average CAA was able to leverage more than $2.9 million – a ratio of $9.50 of other funds for every dollar of CSBG funding. Agencies also recruited an average of eight (part time) volunteers for every paid staff person.

By 2002, the CSBG IS Report, which is prepared by the National Association for State Community Services Programs (NASCSP), showed the ratio of dollars leveraged for each CSBG dollar was now $15.52 from all other sources, including federal money and the value of volunteer hours. About $5 of that $15.52 is from state, local, and private money. The number of non-CSBG dollars from all sources administered by CAAs has increased from about $1.9 billion in 1981 to about $9.8 billion in 2002.

In 2002, CAAs also received 40 million hours of volunteer services, which is the equivalent of about 18,750 full-time employees.

Whatever the specific approach taken by individual states and the block grant, the number of CAAs has increased since 1981 from about 932 to about 950. The number of counties covered by a CAA has increased from 2,300 in 1981 to about 3,100 of the nations 3,300 counties. Since 1981, more than 500 CAAs have approved the request from one or more neighboring counties to join the CAA.

CAAs have helped to expand significantly the local, state, and federal resources to benefit low-income people. The philosophy of eliminating “the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty” remains the key concept that motivates CAAs today.