Religious groups can help deliver cost-effective social services, says Bob Wineburg, a social work professor at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), but Obama’s proposal, which would build on Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative, would create more problems than it solves.

Wineburg’s been doing research on partnerships between social service agencies and churches/synagogues for about 20 years and in the 1990s looked at partnerships in the Greensboro, N.C., area.

Now he's working with Ram Cnaan from the University of Pennsylvania, for the United Way of Delaware, and says their findings mirror what Wineburg found in Greensboro – that mainline service agencies overwhelmingly seek out churches and other faith organizations to help them deliver services. That's an efficient arrangement, Wineburg says, and one that deserves federal backing – but not when the money starts with those small congregations.

“I'm all for federal funding of faith-based partnerships when the money is given to established social service agencies that can then partner with local congregations,” Wineburg says. “Small churches can't handle the incredible amount of groundwork that needs to be done in order to provide community services.”

He says his research findings in both North Carolina and Delaware “run counter to the thinking of the Bush Faith-Based Initiative, the core of which Obama would build on. We found that the community is the place where everything must center and that mainline community organizations like the United Way, not small start-up organizations, are better suited to address multi-faceted community problems.”

In Delaware, Wineburg found that 69 percent of the social service agencies in New Castle County named a partnering congregation, and most of these partnerships started long before the Bush initiative. In fact, only one agency reported that the Bush Faith-Based Initiative had any effect on their partnerships with religious groups.

“Our research goal is to help community leaders match resources to needs,” he says. “These findings mirror emerging research elsewhere and the ones I uncovered in Greensboro in the 1990s. Delaware is not an anomaly. A new initiative could use federal dollars to help community stewards strengthen existing partnerships and build new ones.”