What Works

Today's domestic problems are depressing and overwhelming. We all know that. Individual efforts to reverse the tide often feel like a thousand points of light in a million pools of darkness. But the real news in America is not all the despair and degradation. That's old. What's fresher is a gradual, quiet entwining of the spirit of entrepreneurship and the spirit of citizenship, as people launch local civic enterprises. It might also be called the spirit of Oklahoma City. If the explosion exposed America's darkest streak, it also lit its brightest candle--hundreds of individuals pushing aside their grief, their anger, their longstanding differences to pull together in common cause.

Part of the explanation for this shift is enlightened self-interest. The government's bankrupt, the frontier is closed and there's just no place to hide anymore from the world's problems. Leadership, it's now clear, begins not with politicians but at home, where the line "It takes a whole village to raise a child" has moved in a few short years from obscure African proverb to Middle American cliche. Our fervid rescue fantasies are just that. We've seen the cavalry--and it is us.

But within this dawning acknowledgment of responsibility lies another old American virtue: pragmatism. We want our ideas to work. The perception that they haven't is what lies at the root of the crisis of faith in government. Often programs that sound terrific expand too quickly, rely too heavily on leaders who leave or turn bad, misdiagnose the problem, create new dependencies or just plain waste money. It could happen to programs described in these pages, in part because true performance evaluation is expensive and rare.

Too often, the hard task of separating promising programs from futile ones gets lost in the mists of ideology and media indifference. Members of Congress would rather posture about the big picture than dirty their hands on the details. Members of the press prefer scandal and failure to the harder task of finding and explaining success. And all of us too often forget to take our gratifications where we can find them. While we wait for the moral equivalent of war, to use William James's classic expression, the real equivalent is that sense of grace, exhilaration and even power that comes from actually helping change something small in our own communities, child by child, block by block.

As it turns out, amid the endless crime news and noisy partisan sniping, the cynical voices and contempt for the poor, people still care about each other more than we may give them credit for. Charitable giving is down slightly, but the communal spirit is strong, especially among the young. According to a UCLA survey, more than 40 percent of college freshmen are involved in at least some kind of voluntary activity Intergenerational volunteerism-old helping young; young helping old--is growing rapidly. Businesses are pitching in as never before. Last week an insurance broker, Johnson and Higgins, shut down all of its 120 offices around the world for the day so that its 8,500 employees could do volunteer work for children.

It's true that attendance at PTA meetings is down precipitously from 80 years ago. This year's hottest sociological insight is Robert Putnam's point that Americans are "bowling alone" instead of in community leagues. But those who worry about the decline of civil society might remember that the total number of nonprofit organizations is roughly 2 million--one for every 125 Americans. While some of these groups are narrow, corrupt or ridiculous, our habit of creating civic associations--first noticed as distinctly American by Alexis de Tocqueville more than 150 years ago--still dwarfs the efforts of any other country.

And there's big money on the way, bequeathed by the World War II generation. The magazine Foundation News calls it "the largest transfer of wealth in our nation's history"; some analysts estimate the inheritance at $8 trillion to $10 trillion in the next 20 years. Local community foundations, whose numbers have doubled since 1987, are angling to get a large chunk of the cash that doesn't go to heirs or the IRS.

Of course it's a myth that the private sector can fully meet this country's social needs: anyone who has tried to raise money for a worthy cause knows that. Besides, even if government-run programs often fail, the record of government-supported nonprofit programs--many of which are now on the chopping block -- is much more mixed. Some of them are no good, either. The rules and paperwork alone wreck them. But many others -- including a few described below that receive small portions of federal. state or local funding--have not really been tried in any consistent way. With more than half of the money saved in proposed GOP budget cuts coming from programs aimed at the poor, a lot of good ideas won't even get a decent burial.

So as the struggle proceeds, how do we know what works? "If we only want to talk about National Academy of Science-quality data, we know little indeed," says Susan Philliber, a New York evaluator of nonprofits. "But if we're also willing to look at what we would bet a paycheck on, or what our experience and gut tells us is true, we can broaden the list." There are no magic bullets, but programs that succeed share some of these five characteristics:

In foreign policy, "intervention" means using American power to fix problems abroad. Now the word means the same thing at home in the struggle to break disastrous social pathologies. The hot idea in the foundation world is to make the interventions "comprehensive"--to attack interconnected problems of substance abuse, poor housing, single parenthood all at once. But trying to do everything can be a recipe for doing nothing. The important idea is that the interventions must be intense, with everyday contact and follow-through. That means a heavy investment upfront in order to save big money later on jail, welfare and medical costs.

The best interventions essentially re-create a sense of family. In New York, some of the city's poorest teen-agers -- half of them once homeless gather in small, after-school arts workshops or other youth programs where they bond and work on personal goals. "There's no secret beyond caring adults who will stick with people over the long run," says David Saltzman of the Robin Hood Foundation, which is funding the successful expansion of this so-called Carrera/Dempsey model. "The key is finding adults who will give the kids what your parents gave you: love, discipline, attention, the ability to fail and still be cared about." After five years, the percentage of kids in the program who get pregnant, drop out, abuse drugs or commit crimes is a tiny fraction of that of others who are disadvantaged.

Finding idealistic young adults willing to make the intensive commitment to at-risk kids is difficult. AmeriCorps, the Clinton administration's new national-service program, is showing some success in attracting the truly committed to grass-roots programs. At a Kentucky tutoring program called SLICE, AmeriCorps volunteers have helped increase reading comprehension 116 percent in about six months. The key is predictability and perseverance. AmeriCorps workers spend 30 minutes with each kid each day, and pay weekly home visits to get parents involved. "This is not rocket science," says director Michael Houston. "If you have someone there telling them every day 'I know you can do this'--then eventually it happens."

This logic applies to drug addicts, too. The most workable therapy--nearly everyone agrees in theory (though not at budget time) --is more drug treatment in jail. Stay 'n Out is a program based in Staten Island, N.Y., that serves as the model for 22 states. Its secret is a captive audience; participants don't have any choice about showing up for therapy. It's be there--or you're off to a meaner cellblock. The recidivism rate for enrollees is only 25 percent, which is much lower than average.

Garden-variety voluntary drug-treatment programs don't generally work well for addicts themselves; kicking the habit is tough. But almost any legitimate substance-abuse program does work for taxpayers. The most comprehensive study to date, conducted last year for the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, shows that for every dollar spent on treatment for drug arid alcohol abuse, California saves $7, mostly in criminal-justice and health-care costs. Emergency-room admissions, for instance, dropped by one third for those who received treatment. Their drug problems didn't go away, but the abuse was less acute, which saved serious money.

The big savings come in keeping people out of jail. Again, the secret is intensity. Baltimore's Choke Program has caseworkers checking in with juvenile delinquents as often as five times a day. The residential programs for ex-cons that work, like San Francisco's Delancey Street Foundation. combine tough-love therapy with cultural enrichment (including opera) and work experience in foundation-run businesses. The residents are constantly supervised and challenged.

Not surprisingly, intensive intervention is also the answer in job training for the hard-core unemployed. The jobs programs that invariably fail--and they are legion -- are those that lack discipline and follow-up. The secret of success for STRIVE, a mostly privately funded New York model now used in four cities, is that after tough orientation sessions, program officers stay in touch Long 'after the trainees find work. For the first month on the job, trainees receive daily telephone checks. Then they have someone to talk to for years after they find--and usually lose--that first job. This is critical; most hard-to-employ people have no one to call when things go badly. No intervention works without follow-through.

We all know that millions of American kids are growing up without a moral compass. But they can be instructed at school in the basics of good character. And when they learn those, discipline, effort and good grades tend to follow. In 1989, The Allen Classical Traditional Academy (formerly The Allen School) ranked fifth from the bottom in academic achievement among Dayton, Ohio, elementary schools. With 78 percent of its students in families that receive welfare, familiar behavior problems spilled over into school. By 1993, Allen was second from the top. It requires that each week, homeroom teachers introduce a new character trait ("responsibility," "kindness," "punctuality," "citizenship") and discuss it for five minutes. Throughout the day, teachers try to work the trait into lessons. If the "word of the week" is "honesty," the math teacher might give a student wrong change from a dollar and see how he reacts. The rest of Dayton is now also moving to "character education." Nationally, a much larger character-building program, Stop, Think, Act, review (STAR), is now being tried with thousands of students.

Some of the most effective character education comes from peers. In Philadelphia, a local nonprofit called the Good Shepherd Neighborhood House has contracted with the school district to teach students and staff at 60 middle schools and high schools how to help settle disputes. Similarly, at the Stoddard Fleisher Middle School, disciplinary suspensions dropped by two thirds after the peer-mediation program began. And the hope is that after learning to keep peace, students can take some of the same cool-down skills to settle fights in the streets.

As responsible parents know, character-building works best when it starts young. Alternatives for Girls, a teen-pregnancy prevention program in inner-city Detroit, reaches out to girls as early as the age of 5. The participants, mostly 12 to 14, are organized into tightly knit "girls clubs," each of which has one volunteer working at least once a week with only three or four girls. The adult volunteers must pledge to participate for at least one year. "It's the closeness with the volunteers we're after. It's about building self-esteem so they won't have to seek it from a boy, or by having a baby," says Amy Good, AFG's executive director. In education, "self-esteem" is an empty buzzword that often gets in the way of high standards; in fighting teen pregnancy, serf-esteem -- or, more accurately, self-respect -- is the character trait that means everything.

Discouraging those who are already single mothers from having more children is another pressing goal. Experience suggests that teenage single mothers with one child can, through hard work, achieve self-sufficiency, but those with more than one are all but doomed to a life of poverty. The Carnegie Corporation evaluated a program it funded at the Polly T. McCabe Center in New Haven, Conn., that offered education, counseling and postnatal care. Five years later, the effects were dear. At least 70 percent of those mothers who stayed only a short time had additional children. Of those who stayed seven weeks or longer, only 45 percent had more children. In the world of social ServiCes, that is a major success.

Obviously, the best character-building takes place at home. Parents as Teachers (PAT), begun in Missouri and now at work in 42 states, sends "parent educators" to visit families expecting children and instructs them how to be "their child's first teacher." Evaluations show that PAT children score well above the national norm. More informally, the National Institute for Responsible Fatherhood, in Cleveland, trains hundreds of volunteers to counsel young fathers wherever they find them--from home to the basketball court.

Perhaps the best way to build character is through service itself. It turns out that helping others is therapeutic, as anyone familiar with 12-step programs can attest. While pulling someone else up, you pity yourself less--and get better faster. In many programs, participants find that becoming counselors and trainers is their best route out of poverty.

Service is an effective character-building tool within the middle class as well. One of the more extensively evaluated teen-pregnancy programs, Teen Outreach, sponsored by the Association of Junior Leagues, places 1,500 middle- and high-school girls and boys in volunteer programs such as helping the handicapped. Participants have pregnancy rates a third lower than their peers. About 200 public and private schools around the country now make community service a condition of graduation, and Maryland has become the first state to do so.

Bureaucrats might mean well, but they gum up the works. Successful nonprofit programs figure out ways to either circumvent bureaucracies altogether--or coordinate the missions of government agencies so that they work together better. Local schools can be particularly useful one-stop-shopping sites for bringing together far-flung social services under one roof. It's no longer acceptable that they are open only part of the day. part of the year, following a calendar that's a vestige of farming days.

Deep in inner-city St. Louis lies the Walbridge School, which is often open round the clock. Under a program called Caring Communities, the formal school day, featuring lots of tutoring and recreation, is from 6:80 a.m. until 6 p.m. At night Walbridge becomes a teen center, and on weekends it sponsors slumber parties that help parents and kids communicate better. Several state-sponsored programs (to promote health and parent education; to prevent gangs and substance abuse) are provided through the school. Caseworkers are on call seven days a week. Attendance, achievement and parental involvement have all risen substantially. The key to success was getting different Missouri state departments to shrink their fiefdoms and coordinate.

Computer technology can be of great help in simplifying bureaucratic headaches. The Texas Employment Commission now has 44 easy-to-use kiosks around the state that print out hundreds of job openings. The kiosks are already being tapped an average of 60,000 times a month. Seattle is among those cities assigning voice mailboxes to unemployed and homeless people who can't afford phones so that they can remain in touch with the world from pay phones. This is simple but essential: much of the problem with connecting needy people to social services is that they don't have an address or phone number where they can be reached.

Community groups often have the opposite problem--they don't know whom to call in the Kafkaesque bureaucracies as they try to obtain corporate and foundation funding, construction permits and other necessities. But some help has arrived. The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) is an example of the non-profit "intermediaries" now necessary to negotiate the unbelievably tangled world that faces community groups. Activists are learning that they need some Yuppies from places like LISC to finesse city hall and persuade the suits to invest in their projects. The result has been far less antagonism between community groups and banks and other authorities than in the past.

In fact, in many areas they are surprisingly cooperative. Fueled by tax credits for business, community-development corporations have been surprisingly successful in recent years in building good, low-density, affordable housing for the poor. LISC has raised $1.7 billion from the private sector in the last 15 years and helped build or rehab 57,000 homes. That includes the notorious rubble on Charlotte Street in the South Bronx that both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, campaigning for the presidency, used as symbols of urban devastation. (The area was also featured in the movie "Fort Apache, the Bronx.") For years, the skeptics said the Bronx would come back about the same time as Elvis. They were wrong. In the past 10 years, more than 50 abandoned buildings and 19,000 apartments have been rehabbed, and home buyers are moving back in. Most have some stake in their new housing-an essential ingredient in keeping it in good shape.

Funding social projects can be good business. Of the hundreds of lenders that collapsed during the savings and loan fiasco of the 1980s, not one failed because of bad loans to the inner city. The Bank of America, among others, is now on record saying that it can make money in poor areas, and it opposes GOP efforts to repeal the law that requires lenders to invest money where their depositors live. Because bureaucracies are so inept at building and operating public housing, the private market is really the only option.

While far from meeting the need, businesses are developing more of a sense of civic responsibility. Their projects may be as big as reviving whole neighborhoods or as small as hiring a few buses so that retired employees can volunteer in inner-city schools they wouldn't dare venture to by car. Corporate efforts not only save taxpayer money; they are generally less bureaucratic.

Why do private and religious schools so often work better than public schools? They waste less time and money on paper-shuffling, don't require mindless teaching credentials and make it easier to fire bad administrators and teachers. Most important, private schools have frequently been more successful at developing a sense of community. They set high expectations, then hold schools and teachers accountable for meeting them.

While some public schools have long met this standard for performance, it's beginning to happen in the most unexpected places. "If you expect a kid to be a thug, he'll never disappoint you," says Seymour Fliegel, a public-school administrator and author of "Miracle in East Harlem," which documents an astonishing turnaround in one of New York's toughest school districts. The best way to implement high expectations is to let principals and teachers run their own schools with minimal interference from the central office. And the best way to keep that sense of community is to keep schools small, "I've never seen a large private school," Fliegel cracks. "The rich people must know something."

According to Deborah Meier, architect of the east Harlem experiment, small schools work because they allow more access for parents. stay manageable and thus safer, and--most crucial--let teachers know their students over time. Other innovative, though less tested, ideas include "charter schools" (actually run by nonprofits) and public-school choice--an idea that keeps schools competitive and accountable.

On small schools. the evidence is in. Studies in Chicago and New Jersey both concluded that after the proportion of low-income students, the most important variable in student achievement is the size of the school. Suspensions and college admission also correlated to school size. By "small" proponents mean no more than 350 students in elemental, schools and 500 in secondary schools. These schools don't require separate buildings. In east Harlem, 20 buildings were split into 51 schools. When small schools fail. they simply close them and try a different model.

But even when the schools are larger, expectations are what count. Inspired by Jaime Escalante and the movie "Stand and Delivery Newman Smith High School in Carrollton. Texas, decided to improve student performance in advanced math. The secret was identifying talented but underachieving students (especially blacks and women), letting them know they were expected to do advanced work. then using school spirit to make it cool to participate. The results speak for themselves. In 1987, 17 Newman Smith High School students received a passing score of 8 or better out of 5 on the Advanced Placement Calculus Exam that tests college-level ability. Last yes, 90 did, and this year, all signs are that more than 120 will, In 1994, more than 10 percent of all African-American students in Texas who passed the AP Calculus exam were from this one high school.

In 1969, Chattanooga, Tenn., was labeled the "dirtiest city in the country." Now it's one of the cleanest, with everything from redesigned schools to a new riverfront and aquarium. Thousands of new jobs have been created and the City's spirits are generally high. The secret of Chattanooga venture was public engagement. More than 1,700 people attended public meetings. where they boiled down hundreds of ideas to 40 goals for the community. And civic-minded Chattanoogans then began systematically meeting those goals. If the plan had been imposed from on high instead of arrived at democratically, it would have failed.

Similar citywide revitalization projects are underway in Kansas City. Indianapolis and Cleveland, among others. Harnessing community energy isn't easy, but it's the only answer to large-scale challenges. Citizens meet across racial lines, not to shout at each other, but to deliberate in the finest town-hall tradition. As one participant in a long civic meeting in New Jersey said recently: "It sure beats TV."

Actually, TV can help. The Miami Coalition for a Safe and Drug-Free Community, founded in 1988, decided that one prong of its attack on Miami's problems would be the media. With the aid of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, the coalition blanketed Miami with a huge ad buy in 1993. The aim was to tell viewers about the new substance-abuse programs available to them. The effort apparently paid off. Drug use in the area declined at nearly three times the national rate, at least partly because of the coalition's efforts.

Often the community talk begins casually. In 1989, seven African-American fathers fed up with drugs in their neighborhood met in a church basement in Omaha, Neb. and founded MAD DADS. The group patrols streets after midnight either to chase drug dealers away from the neighborhood or--preferably--to befriend them and help them out of trouble. It's now widely imitated.

Community policing is hot now, but it doesn't work if it just means cops walking around acting friendlier. They must give the community a direct role. Under Ft. Worth, Texas's Citizens on Patrol program. more than 1,000 civilians have taken a 12-hour law-enforcement course, then volunteered as auxiliary police. In 1986, Ft. Worth was first on the FBI's list of the most crime-ridden cities. Last year it was 12th, with crime down 50 percent, though the connection to community policing is hard to measure.

If citizens need a stake in their police departments, police need a stake in their communities. It helps if police officers live in the neighborhoods they patrol. Columbia, S.C., has responded by offering police officers low-interest loans, without down payments, to buy and rehab inner-city houses. This allows the officers to live and work in the same community.

Such human infrastructure is as essential in reclaiming neighborhoods as sewers, roads and other physical infrastructure. That's why affordable housing works best when it takes advantage of diverse perspectives and mixed incomes. Once one of Boston's roughest housing projects, Harbor Point (formerly Columbia Point) is now home to 800 low-income families--plus 1,480 middle-class and upper-middle-class neighbors living in luxury apartments. The project works because of community control. When Harbor Point was rebuilt in 1983, tenants had a say in every step of the transformation. They agreed to eject troublemakers unwilling to abide by their rules. A resident task force still controls 50 percent of all management decisions. Longtime low-income residents first resented the intrusion of wealth, but now mostly feel fortunate to live there.

In an exhaustive series this year on civic renewal. The Dallas Morning News identified the key elements of public engagement: work together with others you don't know, don't like or don't agree with: focus on problems in common, not issues dividing you; be inclusive; set ground rules (for instance, no personal attacks); set specific attainable goals; celebrate victories; make use of modern technology to get the word out. And most important: be patient.

Maybe these old community traditions can yet be America's new political life. As David Mathews, a former secretary of health, education and welfare who now heads the Dayton, Ohio-based Kettering Foundation, says: "To talk fear is to create fear; to talk hope is to create hope. You know that old expression 'Talk don't pick no cotton'? Well, this kind of talk does pick cotton, even if it's tomorrow, not this second."

The harvest beckons.