Social Services

Community Organizations and Social Services: A Brief History

The nature of social services differs dramatically from country to country; countries with socialist governments, for instance, have highly developed networks of government-run social services, whereas countries such as the United States have a patchwork quilt of social services in which public, nonprofit, and for-profit agencies play a role. In general, wealthy nations [Page 1326]have more highly developed social services systems than poor countries, although this is not always the case. This entry focuses on the relationship between community organizations and social services in the United States.

For the past century or more, community organizations have played a critical role in the development of social services to ameliorate the economic and social effects of industrialization and urbanization in the United States. In the late nineteenth century, as social conditions deteriorated, private community organizations or benevolent societies appeared to deal with the problems of poverty. These societies were the ancestors of modern social service agencies. They focused particularly on issues concerning child welfare and relief (what we now term welfare).

Many recipients of such services, however, particularly poor Catholic and Jewish immigrants and African Americans, regarded them with considerable suspicion. They preferred to use the self-help and mutual aid organizations their own communities created, such as the Irish Emigrant Society, the Hebrew Benevolent Society, and the White Rose Home for Girls, which served young African American women who had migrated from the rural South to Northern cities. Despite their limited resources, such organizations provided the bulk of social services to the urban poor and working families during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to providing employment counseling, material relief, education, and social supports, these agencies also helped the communities they served resist the explicit and implicit attacks on their cultures by mainstream institutions such as public schools, child welfare institutions, Protestant churches, and the Charities Organization Societies (COS), which attempted to apply principles of “scientific philan-thropy” to rationalize the distribution of poor relief and make it more efficient.

Settlement houses, which began to appear in urban communities such as Chicago and New York in the late 1880s, attempted to create an institutionalized form of self-help for the urban poor, striving to meet their economic and social needs while socializing them into the values of the new industrial order. By focusing on the relationship between economic and social change at the community level, and by emphasizing the real-world needs of urban families, the settlements laid the foundation for policy reforms during the Progressive Era (c. 1890–1917), the New Deal of the 1930s, and the 1960s War on Poverty. They were instrumental in the passage of major policy changes in the areas of public health, education, social security, and housing.

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