Bill Hangley, Jr. and Wendy S. McClanahan, Public/Private Ventures
February 2002
President Bush deems faith-based organizations the backbone of society's "armies of compassion." But how good are those groups at collectively meeting specific needs of the poor and downtrodden? This 46-page report from Philadelphia-based Public/Private Ventures (P/PV) offers evidence that faith-based programs can indeed meet civic needs and meet them well, at least when carefully constructed and managed in partnership with secular organizations. The case in point is Youth Education for Tomorrow (YET), an innovative research-based literacy program developed by P/PV and run by a diverse group of faith-based organizations in Philadelphia. The organizations provided the space, volunteers, and children; P/PV offered them a clear model to follow, complete with funding, pedagogy, training and oversight. The more closely the sites followed P/PV's model, the better their results. Children who were up to three years below grade level achieved significant gains in reading ability after only a few months' participation in YET. But success-which was fairly consistent across sites despite variance in organizational capacity-didn't come easily. Anecdotes from interviews with site and P/PV staff highlight the challenges inherent in any funded partnership and underscore the need for a clear mission and impeccable planning and implementation. You'll find the report in both HTML and PDF versions at http://www.ppv.org.
