The Future of Poverty : A Woman Who Knew Hardship Keeps Trying to Help Others as Human Services Agencies Face Off in Competition for Dwindling Funds

In 1967, Vera Davis was raising nine children in a Mar Vista housing project, living on a monthly welfare check. Davis, then 46, had spent eight years alone after the desertion of her alcoholic husband.

Twenty-two years later, she has built a $385,000 nonprofit social agency for minorities and the elderly that provides one key strand in the Westside human service net.

Yet stories like Davis’, stories of compassion overcoming poverty, may be fewer and farther between as the 1980s draw to an end.

Corporate Influence

A period that marked the rise of corporate influence and concern for the bottom line in both public and private sectors, the last decade has seen nonprofit agency boardrooms become increasingly abuzz with phrases like “linkage,” “visibility” and “service marketing.”

Confronted with dwindling public grants, increasing competition for funds between agencies and rising need among the poor, such agencies are hoping that massive new fund-raising efforts can fill the gap.

At risk may be a philosophy promulgated in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty in 1964: that the poor could best help themselves in their own communities.

The problem Davis and others face is this: given cutbacks, more scrutiny over how funds are spent and the struggle simply to obtain them, poor agencies must increasingly turn to private fund raising for help. Yet in the scramble for big donors, such agencies typically find themselves the most disadvantaged in the chase.

For Davis, who already spends 80% of her occasional seven-day work weeks writing grant applications, the extra burden of fund raising may prove insurmountable. The answer she has reluctantly accepted is to subtly shift focus from the delivery of service to business management.

“The nature of the nonprofit sector has changed,” says Lola Coleman, manager of United Way of Los Angeles’ Underserved Geographic Areas program in the South-Central district.

“More and more, nonprofit organizations need to look more like profit organizations.”

Davis opened the Low-Income Elderly United Community Assistance Project in 1983, gaining private status for a segment of a federally funded program begun in 1965 that was disbanding because of cutbacks.

LIEU-CAP, as Davis’s group was known, drew from a philosophy that neighborhoods, given funding and training, could provide for their own needs with their own staffing and programs, in lieu of massive government or other outside assistance.

Poverty Pockets

Directed at two poverty pockets in Santa Monica and Venice, LIEU-CAP works closely with elderly and minority residents, helping them with everyday problems such as paying bills, applying for government aid or getting food.

The agency says it serves about 3,000 people a year with a staff of 12 and budget of $385,000, and it recently opened a shelter for homeless mothers and children in Venice. Santa Monica city officials say the group fills a critical service niche in the neighborhoods, primarily for elderly and minorities.

The directorship of LIEU-CAP is a familiar role for Davis, but it is on a scale larger than she could have imagined 15 years ago. Living at Mar Vista Gardens, Davis had spent years struggling with other mothers to raise her children.

Davis, the daughter of a New Orleans nursing volunteer, began organizing her housing project in 1971, first by creating a children’s recreation program and then forming a tenants’ rights board. In following years, Davis would form community service groups in Mar Vista, then Santa Monica, before forming LIEU-CAP.

A Role Model

“I provide the service and I feel I’m beneficial because I can use myself as a role model,” Davis says now, from her small Venice office. Hand-framed awards from churches, politicians and government offices testify to continued support for the self-sufficiency of the poor.

“That’s why I’m here. I know what the hardship is and I know the need,” she says. “I know what it’s like to be hungry. You have to go through these things in order to know.”

A recent Santa Monica City Council meeting dramatically revealed the problem facing LIEU-CAP and about 72,000 other California nonprofit service agencies.

Davis, with about 20 elderly black women, sat patiently in the council’s meeting hall at a budget hearing, waiting for their turn to appeal for the restoration to the agency of $9,000, which they say is crucial to its operation. But the crowd thinned as the meeting dragged on--from 7:30 to past 10 p.m. Many of the women simply could not stay awake longer.

By 11:30 p.m., when her motion was heard, Davis was the only one left in her group. The city, citing lack of funds, denied her appeal. Hers was the last of dozens of requests by other groups.

Rising Competition

Three reasons lie behind the crunch: funding cuts, increased accountability to funding sources for existing resources, and rising competition among agencies.

“Increasingly, all nonprofit agencies are trying to get a fund-raising capacity built in,” said Stephanie Klopfleisch, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Community and Senior Citizens Services.

Specifically, funds for the community service block grant program--the major federal source for state and local programs for the poor--have been cut about 40% since 1980, from about $50 million to $30 million for California, and from $6 million to $3.5 million in Los Angeles County, say state and county officials.

At the same time, many cities have placed more stringent demands on agencies applying for the remaining funds, as that responsibility passed from federal hands to local governments under the Reagan Administration.

Critical Questions

“There was a time when you got a flat-out, take-out grant,” Coleman says. Now, “accountability has gotten more critical. The major funding sources are beginning to ask more critical questions, which in some ways has cut back the number of dollars an agency can count on in a pinch.”

For example, LIEU-CAP, which in 1988 got $104,000 from Santa Monica, recently gave up 12% of that sum for 1989 because it failed to show it could secure a level of private support recently mandated by the city. That new requirement, intended to ensure the independence of funded agencies, reduces the share of agencies’ budgets the city will pay, from 80% down to 50% by 1991. The remaining money must be raised from private sources.

The adoption of such measures by most funding sources squeezes groups like LIEU-CAP, which draws virtually all of its funds from the cities of Santa Monica and Los Angeles, and from Los Angeles County.

But even as cities attempt to better manage limited dollars, the problems of the poor are worsening. Nationally, their numbers have increased and since 1979, living standards have fallen for the poorest segment of the population. A House Ways and Means Committee report this March showed that the lowest fifth of American households suffered a 9% decline in their standard of living this decade.

Inadequate Resources

Locally, agency and city officials say, groups have formed or expanded to address the problem, but they find themselves competing for inadequate resources.

The financial impact has hit hardest, ironically, on the poorest agencies serving the poorest communities--on agencies like LIEU-CAP.

“For some agencies that have put most emphasis on the providing of services--and were very constrained about the number of people and staff put into administration--it’s very much of a challenge and almost a nightmare going through the (funding) contract process,” says Rhonda Meister, director of the St. Joseph Center for the homeless in Venice.

But beyond its limited human resources, LIEU-CAP stands out starkly because it is a small agency serving a predominantly minority community, still reliant upon its War on Poverty, poor-helping-the-poor roots.

Access to the Wealthy

“Any smaller agency usually has a tougher time fund raising because they don’t have access to two groups of people who are very successful at it,” corporate officials and the wealthy, Coleman says.

Working out of minority neighborhoods only exacerbates the challenge, since such communities typically have no access to wealthy donors and would be ill-equipped to proceed with soliciting funds even if they had, Coleman says.

Further, such neighborhood groups are squeezed when--relying on community volunteers for staff--worsening poverty means there will be less qualified and fewer available volunteers.

“The effort in terms of community basing and hiring (from the community) is changing because our poor communities are truly poorer than they were,” Coleman says.

Market Services

“When there were a lot of dollars available, it was really easy. . . . Now we’re talking about scarcer resources, and we have to have the expertise to remain competitive, and we must market our agencies and services.” she says. “Most minority agencies in Los Angeles County don’t do a good job at that.”

The result is an evolution toward survival of the financially fittest.

“You have to compete,” says Davis. “The rise in the economy has led to more poor. It’s worse.”

Davis, accepting what increasingly seems to be inevitable, last year brought aboard a group of experienced fund raisers, willing to volunteer their time--and contacts--for the ordinarily low-profile minority communities on the Westside. It was a step she had resisted for years--thinking good work should bring its own reward, friends say.

In its first year, the nine-member board--consisting of six new members specially commissioned for the task--increased fund-raising revenue seven-fold through personal appeals, an auction and a special dinner. Although the sum that was raised, about $21,000, is still only about 5.5% of the agency’s annual budget, Davis and other directors expect the figure to jump even higher in coming years.

More Pressure Now

But the gains have not come without cost, both to programs and in the direction of the agency.

“It’s more pressure on you now, that you have to raise this money now,” says Helen Reid, who is in charge of LIEU-CAP’s Santa Monica office. Reid’s office has given up holding community lunches and planning meetings two afternoons a week so that staff could draft reports to satisfy funders’ requirements.

Davis said that working with the board has sometimes led to battles over defining jobs and responsibilities, and that she must keep a long-range view of how to spend limited resources.

“We’re in a day and time when everybody has to have a product and a client base and you have to be able to market,” says Daniel Bakewell, executive director of the Brotherhood Crusade, a multimillion-dollar black-oriented service organization in Los Angeles. The agency disperses funds to other organizations, in addition to running its own programs.

Run a Tight Ship

“We run a business at the Brotherhood Crusade--our business is about being sensitive human beings, but we run a very, very tight ship.” To Bakewell, that means helping people more efficiently--and raising dollars.

In the long run, Davis’ struggle will be a barometer of the changing climate for nonprofit social agencies.

But whether her group ultimately succeeds or fails, the question is how the service providers balance compassion for their communities with financial constraints.

That answer may determine whether the future picture of service workers will include faces like Davis’.

Improving Relations

For Julie Mulvaney, one of six new LIEU-CAP board members who has several years of experience in raising money and as an assistant to former county supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, the issue is simply making both funding sources and Davis “more flexible.”

That means improving relations with city bureaucrats, meeting funders’ requests and better articulating LIEU-CAP’s goals and successes.

But Davis and others see another result.

“The whole reason the Brotherhood exists is we know if people are running a child-care center or drug-prevention center, they need to give all their energy to running that child-care center or drug-prevention center, all they can muster,” says Bakewell.

“It just stands to reason if you have to do more than one thing, a person who does just one thing will do it better.”

“The bottom line is, it’s a big struggle especially for low-income people,” says Davis. “It burns you out.”