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The Roundtable:
Tell our readers about the faith-based and community initiative in Arizona.
Jannah Scott:
Arizona started its initiative in March 2005. Since then, the governor has established the Governor’s Council on Faith and Community Initiatives, a 27-member interfaith and community council. We have all the major faith groups represented as well as long-standing community partners.
The purpose of the Council is to advise the governor on strategic areas where government and faith can partner together on behalf of poor and vulnerable populations. We just presented their recommendations to the governor.
The Council is focused on three areas of work. One is emergency preparedness and education and training for faith-based groups. We accomplished quite a few things last year even though we were a brand new office with a one-person staff, but we had a lot of volunteer and council member support. We held several disaster preparedness trainings that touched 422 groups, primarily faith-based groups.
The second is outreach to faith and community groups. We had the privilege of having the governor speak at different faith and community venues to engage with people of faith and goodwill and promote the initiative across the state. It was done with evangelical church pastors, Hispanic faith and community leaders, African American Christian clergy, the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance in Southern Arizona, Jewish synagogues, and major faith-based conventions that came to town.
The third is capacity building and technical assistance, which is modeled after the core of the Faith-Based and Community Initiative nationally. We focused on the federal grants, the federal initiative and the federal guidelines. We touched 102 groups through training sessions.
The Roundtable:
Describe the Governor’s approach to the initiative.
Jannah Scott:
She wants to unveil the artificial distinction between the faith community and everyone else. She wants to integrate the values and positive contributions of the faith community, as appropriate, into the workings of government because we are both working on the same goal to improve the lives of poor people.
There is concern about the separation of church and state. She was a U.S. Attorney, so she understands the law and the Constitution. But she also understands the intrinsic value that the faith community plays in local communities. She feels that if government and faith can work together, we can have much better outcomes in the lives of those who have poor life chances.
Of course, as a state, we are not promoting prayer, proselytization, Biblical instructions or any of those things that the federal guidelines say we should not be doing. We are not trying to establish a state religion.
We are trying to recognize that just like philanthropy, business, and governmental entities, the faith community represents a viable collaborator. We would be remiss to not seek to supplement each other’s work.
The Roundtable:
How do you ensure that faith-based groups are meeting the legal requirements when partnering with government?
Jannah Scott:
We use two federal guidelines. One is entitled, "Protecting the Civil Rights and Religious Liberties of Faith-Based Organizations," and the other specifies the guidelines for faith-based groups in working with government. We try to press that in a very specific way with our groups because we do not believe that government funding should be used to promote inherently sectarian activity. The Constitution is clear about that. How could people get that wrong? It is such a clear construct that we should not be asking government to pay for a church to pray for people. We do monitoring and accountability on all contracts and grants.
The Roundtable:
How do you do that?
Jannah Scott:
We have site visits and audit reports. In some programs, we will actually send in people to enroll as a client to see the effectiveness of the services in general. Within my office, we are getting ready to establish liaisons in each of the state agencies, based on the federal model. We will work with the liaisons not only to make sure they level the playing field and provide access for faith-based organizations, but also to ensure that people understand the requirements for taking state money.
Arizona has a long history of contracting with faith-based and community groups such as Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, and the United Methodist Outreach Ministries. They are large groups that have decades of experience. One thing we are beginning through the Council is to use a mentor model where organizations that have been doing this for a long time and have been doing it right are being asked to be paired with smaller organizations in their communities.
In some contract cases, the smaller groups are not going to be able to be competitive. So they can develop a collaborative proposal with the larger organizations. We are doing this with domestic violence programs to get smaller houses of worship involved in providing shelter for domestic violence victims.
The Roundtable:
What are the future plans?
Jannah Scott:
The Governor will need an opportunity to digest the Council’s recommendations and decide what she wants to do. But the Council would like to focus its efforts in 2007 in these areas: First, emergency preparedness education with a focus on the disabled, the frail elderly and people with medically fragile conditions. Emergency recovery is pretty well-handled with the larger denominational groups. But the gap seems to be in faith-based involvement on the preparedness and relief end.
The second area is continued outreach. The focus would be a lot more in the Jewish and Muslim communities as well as outreach in the rural areas of our state including some of our Native American tribal areas.
The third area is capacity and technical assistance. We want to find mechanisms of training and capacity-building to small faith-based and community organizations that work on specific issues such as children and families in poverty, the homeless, domestic violence victims, and foster and adoption services.
Two other things we may not be able to deal with this year, but we have four more years under the Governor, are greater engagement of the faith community in the behavioral health system, such as substance abuse treatment, and workforce development.
The Roundtable:
How much government money is awarded to faith-based and community organizations in Arizona?
Jannah Scott:
We are in the middle of a state inventory of that, but maybe by spring we will have that information. From the federal perspective, data came out in 2004 from the White House on Arizona. All the Community and Economic Development money that comes through HUD and the U.S. Department of Treasury may not have been included in this figure. But there was $15 million in the general services money to Arizona, and a lot of that was for Head Start. Since then, we have gotten at least a few more million dollars because we are the recipient of two prisoner reentry grants – grants from the Compassion
Capital Fund, and Department of Justice states’ system development grants tied to local money.
But the Governor is showing how this initiative can work at the state level even if you do not get a lot of federal money. While we haven’t gotten a lot of the large federal grants, we are still working on the state level to get this done.
The Roundtable:
You and other state liaisons met recently with Jay Hein, the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in Washington, D.C. Tell us about the meeting.
Jannah Scott:
It was a great meeting. We had a chance to hear updates from our state colleagues. I think the most stellar is Ohio, who is also a Compassion Capital grant recipient but who has leveraged TANF (the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families cash assistance program) appropriations toward this effort as well.
I sensed a heightened commitment, not only from Jay and his staff, but also from the federal agency liaisons around this initiative. This new leadership brings a pragmatism to the effort that, I think, is much needed as we are trying to make these initiatives work at the state level. I felt in the meeting that now we are going to the next level, which is a greater commitment to strengthen the state effort and for us in states to strengthen the local efforts.
I also see a concerted effort to ensure that the states are engaged because when federal money goes directly to the local level without state engagement, the local entity could possibly have no capacity to sustain itself once the federal grant runs out. But if a federal grant runs out, the states have already been working with the local communities to identify other resources for sustainability. Sustainability is a big focus in this next level.
The Roundtable:
Did the meeting provide you with any new tools?
Jannah Scott:
Communication is one of the biggest tools. Knowledge is power, and the more they tell us about different federal programs and how we might replicate things at the state level, that’s going to be a powerful tool. The ability to evaluate activity at the state through data tracking is another helpful tool.
The Roundtable:
How does your previous experience of working with faith-based and community organizations help in your current state position?
Jannah Scott:
Working with faith-based and community providers taught me the difficulty of making an initiative like this work and the difficulty to articulate this movement among all sectors. I also learned the barriers and challenges that stare small, community faith-based organizations in the face. That helps me at the state level to determine our direction from a policy perspective.
Another thing I learned at the local level was the pervasiveness of people of faith in all sectors and in all walks of life. We, at the state level, have to look at this as more than a faith-government partnership – and I think the White House is moving in this same direction. Philanthropy, business, and educational institutions are all partners we need to weave the net among. It’s multidimensional. The Governor calls it a three-legged stool – the public, private and faith community. That cross-sector collaboration is key because that is what it looks like in a local community.
The Roundtable:
Thank you for speaking with us.
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