news-record.com

UNCG professor Bob Wineburg is wasting no time questioning President-elect Barack Obama's plan to keep the core of President George W. Bush's faith-based initiative - a plan that would continue to put billions of dollars each year in the coffers of religious congregations when community organizations are starving for the cash.

Wineburg even put his research on YouTube.

Obama might appreciate that Wineburg, one of the leading critics of Bush's initiative, has a master's degree in community organization from Syracuse University . Wineburg, the Jefferson Pilot Excellence Professor of Social Work at the Greensboro school, also wrote the book "Faith-Based Inefficiency: The Follies of Bush's Initiatives. "

"As President Obama moves through his issues and gets to the faith-based initiative - where he plans to keep the core of the Bush plan, take out the controversial religious hiring provisions, and create neighborhood councils - he will be doing the wrong thing confidently because his advisers are not on target with the reality of what is taking place in communities nationwide," Wineburg said.

Wineburg has been studying the role of religious organizations in social services delivery for 25 years.

"There's a better way than starting with a Washington initiative and ending with a novice local organization that's getting limited training and few federal dollars," Wineburg said. "Instead, the money should be shifted to trusted community stewards, like the United Way or local government departments that distribute Community Development Block Grants. These stewards have existing partnerships with religious congregations and small, sectarian nonprofits and could use some of the federal funds to prioritize community needs."

Stanley Carlson-Thies , the director of social policy at the Center for Public Justice, a nonpartisan Christian think tank near Washington, is a supporter of the faith-based initiative.

"People who are run down, who are battered by life, with things going against them - all those things require a 'people to people' service that's the speciality of volunteer groups and congregations," Carlson-Thies said. "Obama realizes how important those things are for the health of very stressed communities. That doesn't mean the congregation could do drug treatment, but they could do some of the things that make it successful."

However, "Bob has tried to keep an honest eye on what actually happens and not just on the rhetoric of what people hope will happen," Carlson-Thies said.

The faith-based initiatives office was created by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 to allow religious organizations the opportunity to compete for tax dollars. During the George W. Bush administration, the pot of money grew, and faith groups receiving funding were allowed to discriminate in hiring based on a person's religious background.

Bush's plan additionally set aside millions of dollars to teach small nonprofits and congregations how to apply for and manage federal grants.

Obama has said he would take out the controversial hiring part and add "neighborhood councils" to bring nonprofits and coalitions together.

"Obama's proposed initiative appeals to some on the left because it thickens the wall between church and state, where Bush's initiative consciously chipped away at that wall," Wineburg said.

Still, "Theirs is the earth is flat, and I'm saying the earth is round, and there's stuff here we should be building on."

Wineburg's views are not just based on theory. He has studied partnerships between religious congregations and community agencies in Greensboro after the Reagan budget cuts.

"Religious organizations, out of a moral sense of responsibility, started caring for the homeless," Wineburg said. "But the other services the homeless people needed had to be coordinated with other agencies and organizations ranging from the police to the hospitals to the veterans."

Those findings mirror his recent research for the United Way of Delaware.

Wineburg points to the Greensboro-based Welfare Reform Liaison Project as the model. The group, which partners with secular and religious groups, has received federal funding and national recognition for tackling barriers to self-sufficiency for the poor or undereducated, from skills training and obtaining a GED to attitudes and work ethic.

It is also a group Wineburg helped to nurture.

While the project receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal money annually, it also generates hundreds of thousands of dollars by redistributing unused corporate goods to churches, nonprofits and governmental agencies for a small administrative fee. The project then redistributes those earnings back to the program participants in the form of training stipends.

Wineburg's YouTube presentation, for example, is a product of the agency's Copycents media production company. Trainees who now work in the program told him his research on community initiatives was good but the presentation was boring.

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com