Community Responsibility
Finally social workers have come to the conclusion, many of them, that in most cases these are not private problems at all but socio-economic ones for which the social system, through government, is responsible. They therefore talk “community and public responsibility” and insist more and more that there shall be no public shirking or shrinking.
With the trend toward public social service, organized charity itself becomes more and more a clearing house for other agencies or, in its effort to maintain itself through the self-preservative instinct that all institutions have, it assumes also the task of prevention by offering employment; opening hospitals and rest homes, milk stations, day nurseries; circulating educational pamphlets and the like. Thus duplication of work is occasionally found where the social workers of a hospital, of a settlement, and of a charity branch visit in the same day a tenement mother and force her to repeat the story of her problems. The only way in which such duplication can be avoided is through the organization of social service and the extension of municipal functions in that line. When the hospital is a municipal enterprise, its social service department would seem to be the proper and legitimate one to have the right of way and of support; and this is especially justified through the ability of the municipality to coöperate systematically among its departments: the health department working with the education and police departments; public works with health and education; and so on.
The beginnings of the coördinated social service under municipal control are already on the horizon. Take, for instance, the Board of Public Welfare of Kansas City, Missouri. This Board is four years old. Women are active on it as district superintendents, investigators, factory inspectors; in the social service department, parole department, department of lunches and unemployed, and women’s reformatory.
The establishment of this Board makes possible an intensive district study in which is listed every special agency, school, church, institution, foreign, or negro colony. It provides for the teaching of sex hygiene in the schools and has all the up-to-date machinery, like school nurses. The work of the Board comprises studies of housing, recreation, health, temperance, vice, wage-earning women and women employed in industries, labor conditions, welfare work and industrial accidents. In short, its field is as broad as social needs.
“What good does it all do?” asks the Bureau, and then answers the question itself:
Well, in the first place, 4,517 people are living in better homes today because of the work done by our housing inspectors during the past year.
Daily 40,000 men and women go to safer places to work because of the 693 orders issued by our factory inspection department and complied with by the employers of Kansas City.
Thirty-one thousand times during the year have eager men looking for work been rewarded in their search by our employment bureau.
Over 3,000 families have been guided, inspired or comforted by our social workers in the Social Service Department.
To over 2,000 prisoners applying for parole our Board has answered with freedom and a chance.
Fifty thousand pleasant evenings were spent in social center meetings last winter, and most of these would not have been except for the efforts of the Board of Public Welfare.
Twenty-six hundred public dances, with an aggregate attendance of over 500,000, were cleaner and safer because of the presence of Board of Public Welfare Inspectors.
For the past few months there has not been a day when the 25,000 attendants on our motion-picture theaters have not, many of them, been shielded from vulgar or brutal scenes eliminated from the shows by the hot educational campaign carried on by our Recreation Department.
Fifteen hundred people, frightened or worried by some crisis in their battle for bread and butter, have turned to the Welfare Loan Agency and found relief in a temporary loan.
About 6,000 people, embittered by fraud, deceit, and oppression, turned to our Legal Aid Bureau for justice, which is often sweeter than any food.
If human life, if morality, health and financial prosperity have any value, then these paragraphs answer what good has been done.
The accomplishment of large results is due to the fact that organization on such a plan frees more money for relief than it consumes in salaries. All employees of the Board are chosen by civil service examinations. The Board “believes that social action should be based on accurate knowledge and investigations should both precede and accompany all efforts to improve social conditions. It strives for harmonious coöperation with all existing agencies, both public and private, and does not duplicate the work of any. The Board gives no public outdoor relief except in cases where the breadwinner of the family is a city prisoner, and then only on the basis of actual destitution, and upon the recommendation of the superintendent of the Provident Association.”
The policy of the Board is briefly summarized in its annual report as follows: “It lays emphasis on justice before charity and on prevention rather than cure. It agrees that the burden of caring for the poor should be laid upon the entire community through taxation rather than be provided for by the voluntary gifts of the generous minority.”
This very gradual transition from private to public control is especially apparent in the development of child-helping agencies. The Children’s Clinic in Chicago, for example, was first established by the Children’s Hospital Society. The county looked upon it, saw it was good, and assumed responsibility for it. Then social workers backed by philanthropists went a step further and established a psychopathic clinic with an alienist in charge to examine the children for mental weaknesses. “Of course,” says Jane Addams, “women interested in these children are not more interested in the psychopathic feature, which is philanthropic, than they are in the medical clinic, which is political. They are not more interested in the children who are dependent and are sent to one of the homes which are supported partly by public funds and partly by philanthropy than they are in those children who are sent to the homes which are supported altogether by public funds. And there you are—the whole thing absolutely mixed! Now a child may be paroled in care of its mother and paid by Court—where it once was dependent on private charity. We are not quite out of charity for the judge is often assisted by a committee composed of representatives of various city charities, but it is hard to tell what is philanthropy and what public service.”