The limits of voluntarism : charity and welfare from the new deal through the great society / Andrew J.F. Morris

Includes bibliographical references and index

New alignments -- The collapse of charity -- Charity and the downfall of the associative state -- Public funds to public agencies -- New alignments -- No relief from relief -- Conclusion -- Selling service -- "If your family is okay, you'll be a better fighter" -- Selling service -- Therapeutic networks -- From relief to service -- Defending welfare -- The travails of welfare -- Defending welfare -- Defending welfare: Baltimore -- Defending welfare: Delaware -- Family service and the welfare state -- Conclusion -- Hope for hopeless families? -- Reorganizing voluntarism -- The St. Paul Family Centered Project -- Promotion, influence, and reaction -- Conclusion -- The voluntary sector's war on poverty -- Voluntary agencies and welfare reform -- Project enable -- The end of enable -- Conclusion -- Realignments: the nonprofit sector and the contracting state -- Limits of voluntary fundraising -- 1967 Social Security Amendments -- Conclusion

"The Depression and the New Deal forced charities into a new relationship with public welfare. After opposing public "relief" for a generation, charities embraced it in the 1930s as a means to save a crippled voluntary sector from collapse. Welfare was to be delivered by public institutions, which allowed charities to offer and promote specialized therapeutic services such as marriage counseling - a popular commodity in postwar America. But as Andrew Morris shows, these new alignments were never entirely stable. In the 1950s, charities' ambiguous relationship with welfare drove them to aid in efforts to promote welfare reform by modeling new techniques for dealing with "multiproblem families." The War on Poverty, changes in federal social service policy, and the slow growth of voluntary fundraising in the late 1960s undermined the New Deal division of labor and offered charities the chance to deliver public services - the paradigm at the heart of current debates on public funding of religious nonprofits."--Jacket