Sunday, August 16, 1998

Faith-based institutions help people

By LORETTA FULTON

Senior Staff Writer

Every day Mary Anne Sides glances over a list of "Community Resources for Basic Needs" looking for an agency to assist someone who has just called for help.

Every day she sees the same thing -- of the 32 agencies listed, 27 are faith-based; they either carry the name of a religious institution or are backed by one.

For that reason Sides, executive director of Call for Help, is somewhat puzzled by cries from government leaders for faith-based institutions to pick up the pace in assisting people moving from welfare to work.

Gov. George W. Bush is among leaders urging greater participation in the process by religious and charitable institutions.

"I think he needs to come to Abilene to see how it works," Sides said.

Call for Help is run by the city of Abilene and is the main referral office for people in need. In June alone the agency received 859 phone calls and served 250 walk-ins.

In addition Sides and her staff of five full-time and two part-time workers placed 2,781 calls on behalf of people needing aid. The majority of those calls went to faith-based organizations.

Just across the street from Sides' office, Camilla Becton waits on people coming into the Christian Ministries of Abilene office, operated by Highland Church of Christ.

In June, 900 people walked into that office looking for assistance, many referred by Call for Help.

Christian Ministries assists with basic needs such as food and clothing and provides limited financial help for medications and utilities.

"Financially we're spending about everything we have," Becton said.

Even so, federal and state officials are calling for faith-based organizations to do more.

Following federal mandates to move people from welfare to work, the state of Texas is working in that direction. State Rep. Jim Keffer of Eastland is on a special committee that is looking for ways to do that without letting people in need fall through the cracks. He conducted a town hall meeting in Abilene in June and will hold another one later this month.

At the first meeting, Barbara Evans, regional administrator of the Department of Human Services, expressed a sentiment similar to Sides'.

"For our community it's not anything new," she said of faith-based assistance.

In conversation and in a written opinion piece, Keffer said the fear is that if faith-based organizations don't do more, then the welfare-to-work initiative will fail, and the government will be back where it started.

"The reality is that if private citizens, churches, charities, and other faith-based organizations do not step up and help resolve these problems, then government programs will once again be forced to fill this void," he said.

In town hall meetings and other gatherings, Keffer said the main problems he hears from people trying to move off welfare concern child care and transportation, and he believes those are areas where faith-based organizations can do more.

"If we don't step up and help these people in transition, then welfare reform will fail," he said.

The government's role in the process is to find ways to assist faith-based organizations in making their job easier, Keffer said.

Legislators are asking "What are the anchors that are weighing you down?" and are trying to find ways to lift those anchors, Keffer said.

The Department of Human Resources is working on ways that smaller groups of people, or even an individual, can help, said Evans, the regional administrator.

For example, mentoring is considered an essential part of the welfare-to-work process. A program initiated by Comptroller John Sharp called Family Pathfinders pairs welfare recipients with teams from charitable organizations that provide various types of assistance including mentoring.

Even if a church is too small for a team, one individual may want to help, and the Department of Human Services wants to be of assistance.

"We're developing mentoring modules," to help those individuals, Evans said.

Smaller churches can help in other ways, too. Even contributing $10 a week toward child care would be beneficial. And in many instances, especially in rural communities, providing transportation is only a matter of being willing to help out.

It wouldn't be difficult for someone to say, "I go right by their house anyway. I might as well swing by and give them a ride," Evans said.

Abilene is noted for its large number of churches and three church-affiliated universities, so it's no surprise that faith-based assistance is readily available here.

"I just think that people here pull together and help when there is a real need," said Sides, director of Call for Help. "There is a strong religious influence to help your neighbor."

That influence can be seen in almost any church in Abilene, regardless of size, and also in other organizations that are faith-based such as Medical Care Mission, Baptist Social Ministries, Christian Service Center, and Community Services of St. Vincent de Paul Society to name a few.

That religious influence also spills over to the secular world. As Keffer noted, the state is working to help move people from welfare to work, not just because of a federal mandate, "but because it's the right thing to do."

Ask anyone working in a food pantry or clothes closet, and you will get much the same answer.

Margaret Hollowell has been a volunteer for a number of years at the St. Francis Center food pantry at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. She grew up in Eastland where her father, who operated a butcher shop, gave away leftovers to hungry people during the Depression. His spirit of helping made an impact on his daughter.

"If Dad knew there were all these hungry children around here, and I wasn't doing anything to help them, it would be katy bar the door," Hollowell said.

The food pantry is typical of others in town. It is manned by five volunteers five days a week with six other volunteers on standby. Hollowell and Virginia Wentrcek, a dietician, co-chair the center and make sure people coming in get a balanced diet.

"Once Virginia took over the center, she laid out nutritionally balanced items," Hollowell said. "We don't carry junk food."

The St. Francis Center food pantry is one of 13 on the list that Sides refers to daily. And that doesn't include the sack lunches that are available at First Baptist Church and the Breakfast on Beech Street program operated out of First Christian Church.

"There's no need for anybody to go hungry in Abilene," said Becton, director of Christian Ministries of Abilene.

Religious leaders want all Americans to be able to say the same thing no matter where they live. In March former Sen. Paul Simon, now director of the Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, led a symposium on the needs of society and the plight of the poor.

It was attended by religious leaders of numerous faiths and resulted in a Statement of Commitment, which said in part that working with the poor "is an essential part of the religious life and is an effective way of conveying what our faith compels us to do."

The statement included a survey for congregations to use in examining their role in relieving poverty.

"We are persuaded that faith-based involvement brings a spiritual wholeness to growth toward self-sufficiency," the leaders said in their statement.

Apparently, people in need realize that as much as the people in faith-based organizations lending a helping hand.

Although Call for Help is the main clearinghouse in Abilene for assistance, people in need don't know that. Normally, the first place they call is a religious institution.

Sides, the Call for Help director, said it's not uncommon for a caller to tell her, "I've called every church in town, and they told me to call you."