Peter Marris - Dilemmas of Social Reform: Poverty and Community Action in the United States

dilemmas of social reform

CONTENTS

We would like to thank the Ford Foundation and the Presidents Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime for their financial support, and in particular, Paul N. Ylvisaker and the staff of the Foundations Public Affairs Programme for their friendship, for the stimulus of their ideas, and for their tactful encouragement of ruthless impartiality. Few of our ideas can pretend to be original. As we went round talking to project directors, research directors and programme staff; interviewed mayors and civic leaders; discussed with members of Federal departments, we absorbed their insight and knowledge, and tried to make a coherent synthesis of all these points of view. If we have abused their ideas, we can only plead the inherent complexity of the events and issues to be understood, and thank them all the more for their time and patience. Besides members of the Projects staff, we have learned a great deal from discussion with other sociologistsespecially Herbert J. Gans, S. Michael Miller, Frances Piven, and Frank Riessman. Many of these read the book in draft, and helped us with their comments and corrections. We would like to thank all those associated with the Presidents Committee, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and members of the staff and advisory committee of the Institute of Community Studies who also gave us their comments. Diana Rodricks typed the manuscript. Tom Knutt helped prepare much of the additional material for the epilogue. Besides those we have already mentioned, we would like to thank Daniel P. Moynihan and Robert A. Levine for their comments on a draft of these additional sections

I N this book we set out to examine, in the light of one experiment, some of the principles, dilemmas and frustrations with which social reform in America must grapple. The particular projects with which we shall be concerned were few, and their scope limited, but they represent the most imaginative and ambitious attempt to manipulate deliberate social change in the years 19601964. These projects were promoted, and largely financed, by the Ford Foundation and the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offences Control Act of 1961: absorbed into the poverty programme, and diffused as a national strategy, they are now known as community action projectslocal agencies, drawing on federal funds, which concert the resources of a community in a democratic, coherent attack upon the handicaps of the poor. But though, from the first, this movement of reform was concerned with poverty, it arose less from protest or moral indignation at injustice, than from a sense of breakdown in the institutions which should be diffusing opportunities to all. The reformers in the Ford Foundation, in the Presidents Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, and the executives of the projects they funded were intellectuals, for whom poverty was more a problem in social engineering, than a cause. They attacked it by expert knowledge and political manoeuvre, as technicians to whom the guidance of social change was a career. This study is concerned, then, with strategies of reform, as they appeared to a group of dedicated professionals working within the limits of community action.