CHARITY ORGANIZATION SOCIETIES & SETTLEMENT HOUSES

Charity Organization Societies & Settlement Houses: Impact on the Profession of Social Work



Charity Organization Societies & Settlement Houses: Impact on the Profession of Social Work

Introduction

The London, England, Charity Organisation Society was the first to be established in 1869. The movement quickly made an impression in the United States, where, by the 1880s, the largest and most influential societies were located in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Baltimore. By the early twentieth century, charity organization societies were firmly entrenched in 104 American cities. Privately funded and administered, the societies were prominent in formulating welfare policy from the 1870s to 1929. Charity organization societies used “scientific” methods of organization, coordination, and investigation to solve the problems of poverty. Their legacy is twofold. First, the societies paved the way for the development of the modern welfare state through their innovative programs such as tenement house reform and championing preventive public health campaigns. Second, charity organization societies pushed the professionalization of social work through their development of the “case-method” approach to social welfare (Waugh, 2001).

Discussion and Analysis

Charity organization societies were the institutional expressions of a major philanthropic reform movement, “scientific charity,” that advocated placing all charitable relief on an efficient, scientific, and businesslike basis to cope with the destabilizing forces of industrialization in the late nineteenth century. The problems of urban poverty—a growing homeless population, masses of people thrown out of work by frequent economic depressions, and uncontrolled immigration—seemed to call for a recasting of welfare policy for a new and dangerous age. What were people entitled to? What was the state's responsibility? What was the role of private agencies? Charity organization societies were influential in defining the attitudes and the ideology that set the agenda for the discussion and formulation of welfare policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Flanagan, 2002).

Charity organization societies struggled to preserve the best of the old-style philanthropy with new methods. Everyone agreed that the immense wealth created by the new industrial economy was also creating great poverty, and with it, a widening gap between the rich and the poor. How to bridge the gap? The charity organization answer was to encourage the prosperous members of the community to acknowledge the mutuality of society, in a thoughtful and earnest manner. Thus, the early societies were made up of largely volunteer leaders and workers. The early programs tended to focus on punitive solutions to poverty, such as the elimination of the homeless from the city streets through enforced “beggary laws,” and making sure that cash relief was given only under strict conditions (Patterson, 1986).

Therefore, the charity organization movement proclaimed that charity should not be an unthinking act, that is, based on an automatic response to distress (such as giving a “pauper” a few dollars here and there), but rather should uplift, educate, and reform the recipient into a productive and independent member of society. The individual, with important exceptions, was held accountable for his or her ...