Roundtable Interviews: Karen Woods, Director of the Center for Effective Compassion

The title-linked interview begins:

The Roundtable:

What do you think of the federal Faith-Based and Community Initiative now, given your perspective on it?

Karen Woods:

Part of the thing that concerns me is that there's a real difference between what I would call social services and Christian charity.

With welfare reform in '96, and certainly the waivers that preceded that in certain states, there was a change in the way that we looked at social services. Suddenly, work was valued, not just in the sense of an economic value, but a personal value. You're not viewed by the system as saying, "Well, we have to help you because you can't help yourself," but saying, "Guess what? There are a lot of things you could do for yourself and let's focus on that."

We've got all these people in the system -- three and four generations of people who've been on entitlement systems that don't know how to work. The parallel issue with that is that you have three or four generations of people who do not know how to help -- and many of them sitting in church pews and in religious congregations across the United States...