Core Team Expands for "Welfare Responsibility" Project

May-June 1993

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Dr. C. Eric Lincoln, Duke University Professor of Religion, and Ms. Gina Barclay-McLaughlin, a national consultant on child development noted for leadership on Chicago's "Beethoven Project," have joined the core team of the Welfare Responsibility project being conducted by the Center for Public Justice.

The three-year project, funded in part by a major grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts, a national philanthropy headquartered in Philadelphia, is examining the religious and moral roots of America's welfare policy crisis. A national conference in Washington, D.C. is being planned for May, 1994.

Dr. Lincoln is known internationally for his scholarly work on the African-American experience. His books include The Black Church in the African American Experience (with Lawrence Mamiya, 1990), This Road Since Freedom (1990), and Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma (1984). In 1990 he was cited by Pope John Paul II for his "scholarly service to the church," and by Time magazine as "eminent scholar." Before joining the Duke religion faculty in 1976, he taught at Fisk University and then at Vanderbilt University. A student of many aspects of African-American life, Dr. Lincoln is a poet as well as an essayist. His publications range widely over literary, historical, sociological, theological, and political issues.

Ms. Barclay-McLaughlin, who is pursuing doctoral work at the University of Michigan, has also studied in Latin America and Africa. An expert on many aspects of child development and early education, she has focused especially on children with special needs in America's critical urban areas. As the director of the Beethoven Project (Chicago's Center for Successful Child Development) she coordinated a multi-faceted program in the Robert Taylor Homes—the nation's largest public-housing project. She has lectured and led workshops throughout the country.

A 1989 article in Education Week reported that the Beethoven Project, launched in 1987 in one of the nation's poorest communities, combines prenatal care and support programs for parents with a range of child-development and health services. The aim is "to give children from birth the vital underpinnings of school success." But the obstacles are tremendous—ranging from rooms without heat to families without hope.

Although encouraged by the impact she was able to have, Ms. Barclay-McLaughlin realized that the deep and complex needs of the community she was serving could not be met without an effort that involved every institution in the community. The project went through a period, she commented, when we tried to be all things to everyone in need. Then we reached a point when we were able to say we could not do everything but could serve as "a catalyst for collaboration among agencies each working at a segment of the problem."

Ms. Barclay-McLaughlin and Dr. Lincoln join six other consultants on the project's core team who were introduced in the January-February issue of the Public Justice Report Charles L. Glenn, Jr., professor of education at Boston University; Bob Goudzwaard, professor of economics at the Free University of Amsterdam (Holland); John Mason, economics professor at Gordon College; Lawrence M. Mead, political science professor at New York University; Max L. Stackhouse, professor of ethics at Andover Newton Theological School; and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, currently teaching philosophy at Calvin College and soon to become professor of psychology and philosophy at Eastern College. Dr. Stanley Carlson-Thies is the full-time director of the project working with the Center's executive director James Skillen.

The central questions that the team is investigating revolve around the locus of responsibility. Recognizing that the Great Society Programs of the 1960s did not end poverty, welfare policymakers now face a divided public—a public that no longer shares a consensus about what government should and should not do to deal with people in poverty. President Clinton's announced intention is to end welfare as we know it, but what policies should take the place of those that have been called into question? Even more important, what will be the civic-moral basis of argument in favor of such policies?

The team conducting the 'Welfare Responsibility" project is convinced that the policy crisis is closely connected to deeper disagreements in society about the nature of human responsibilities —those of individuals, of family members, of employers and employees, of school administrators and teachers, of church members, as well as of government officials. These questions will occupy it in the months ahead, leading up to and following from the May '94 conference.