Seeking a Charitable Approach to Families in Trouble

Although it may often appear that they agree on little else, Republicans and Democrats have vowed to reform America’s welfare system.

During his campaign for the presidency, Bill Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it.” Under an early Administration proposal, welfare recipients would have been required to accept public employment after two years of government assistance. The plan was largely forgotten in the wake of the Administration’s ill-fated plan to reform the nation’s health care system.

The Republicans’ so-called “Contract With America”--the map for their legislative agenda in the first 100 days of the new Congress--proposes similar time limits for welfare recipients. The plan also includes more radical reforms, such as the elimination of benefits to teen-age mothers and the creation of orphanages to care for children of low-income families.

Once a family’s welfare benefits are exhausted, House Speaker-designate Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) has said he would like to see private charities expanded to provide assistance.

For David M. Genders, executive director of Pacific Lodge Youth Services in Woodland Hills, the notion that children are to be placed in orphanages simply because their parents cannot afford to raise them is an uncomfortable one.

Founded in 1923, Genders’ facility offers residential care and treatment for troubled teen-age boys displaced from their families. He says that while orphanages can provide a type of substitute parenting, they should only replace a child’s family for compelling reasons.

Genders approaches the new year for San Fernando Valley charities optimistically, despite a recent overall decline in donations. He explains that the fundamental desire of Americans to take care of one another will overcome threatened reductions in government services.

After two decades of work with several Southland charities, Genders argues that they must rededicate themselves to their missions and rely less on government spending to conquer the country’s problems. A charity’s greatest resource, he explains, is the community.

“The American public has to be invited back to participate,” he says.

Question: Would it be correct to call Pacific Lodge an orphanage?

Answer: No. Orphanage isn’t the correct terminology. We all kind of grew out of orphanages; in a sense, Pacific Lodge was an orphanage in the ‘20s. Orphanages were kind of connected with housing and care for kids who didn’t have families, who were wayward, who needed TLC and food and meals and good parental direction.

Today, we’re a very specific treatment center. We’re working with issues of gangs and violence and drugs and alcohol and lack of behavior control, discipline. So this is a far more sophisticated program than an orphanage, which is generally thought of as just good substitute parenting.

Q: Do those sorts of places still exist?

A: There’s some places trying to come back on the East Coast. There’s actually a couple places that are trying to make a movement toward orphanages having a place in today’s society. What I think has a place in today’s society is strong, consistent care for kids. The word orphanage is going to conjure up archaic kinds of visions, but one of the problems that we have that bothers me is that kids gets bounced around in care. Personally, I’m a proponent of really looking at our systems and finding how we bring consistent care to kids. Orphanages aren’t an end-all to whatever the problems are, residential treatment isn’t an end-all. They’re all bits and pieces of helping the process. The problem is that the process sometimes loses kids along the way. I worry about the throw-away syndrome.

Q: As part of their welfare reform plan, the Republicans have suggested eliminating benefits for teen-age mothers and sending their children to orphanages. Is that where those children should live?

A: No. I can’t go with that. The child’s only one piece of a bigger pie, and that bigger pie is the family. To just strip the child from the family because the family has had problems getting its life together simply says that we’re not trying to solve the problem at the core, we’re just trying to extract one element from it.

I still think we need to put our resources in the family and we’ve got to find a way to help that family come back together. If it was going to be an alternate living situation, I’d like to see it be something where maybe we took responsibility for housing that family and putting the entire family constellation in some kind of organized care or treatment so that we could still work to build the core of that relationship. There is going to be no other person in the history of a child that’s more important to them than the family.

If you say the thing to do is just take this kid away and put him in long-term care and send Mom on her way, now we’ve got two dysfunctional people going two different directions. We’ve got a mom that’s been disenfranchised from her child, irrespective of whether it was a strong relationship or not, we’ve got a child disenfranchised from his family, and they’re both going to live with that. They’ll both feel lost. They’re both going to continue to know all along that there’s a piece of them that they no longer have. I don’t think this person becomes any more functional by having been separated and saying, “OK, you can’t do it, so let’s take this away.” It doesn’t fit.

Q: Is it less expensive for children to be raised in orphanages?

A: An orphanage isn’t an inexpensive operation. Any congregate care requires significant staffing. Under California law, I have to have staffing of one to five--one staff member for every five kids during awake hours. Even if you took an orphanage and you said, “OK, there’s no treatment; all this orphanage is going to do is provide good, healthy play, daily care and cleanliness and school and food and recreation.” My wildest dream doesn’t say you could do that for under $20,000.

But the greater expense is the separation. The greater expense is still the fact that yes, this kid’s getting good, basic nurturing and care--and that can serve him a lifetime--but it’s still going leave him with a void.

Q: Newt Gingrich has said that under the GOP’s welfare reforms, families that had exhausted their benefits would be encouraged to turn to private charities for assistance. Could charities fill that void?

A: I think that the American public has shown that it can always rise to meet a need, and that I think the emotion is with us being able to take care of ourselves, not government taking care of us. It’s come to the point where masses of people have seemed to need support, and that has driven government spending. In my 20-year history of residential care, in the ‘70s government paid everything. You didn’t have to raise any money. You didn’t have to do anything. Prior to the ‘70s, in the ‘50s, ‘40s and ‘30s, all of these agencies were basically private, totally funded out of charitable dollars, no government money. They were a response to people’s concern about people.

I believe that services that are driven by the community are strong, maybe stronger than those driven by government, because they come from grass roots, they come from the heart, they come from a real, felt need to help one another.

I know that the community does want us here. Three years ago, our annual donations were between $50,000 and $70,000 a year. This year, we raised nearly half a million dollars.

Q: How has the Valley’s economic situation affected donations?

A: The general climate of giving is changing. I can use that to my advantage. Donors are far more sophisticated nowadays. They want their programs to be accountable.

Q: What does the threat of government cutbacks mean for Valley charities?

A: It should encourage them to be looking seriously at how they operate. It should encourage them to take a long-range look at what they do. I think 1995 represents a challenge for agencies to make themselves more independent. I think it requires a rededication by programs to what it is they really want to do. None of us should put all our eggs in one basket.

I don’t beg. I’m not here to say, “Oh, please.” I say this is what we are doing, and I think the community responds. People know what they want. When government does it, you just pay the bill and you don’t have any investment in it. People want to give to something that has a face. No one just gives you money. They give to you because they are invested in what you are invested in.