FBO definitions, typologies and experiences

The term ‘faith-based organisation’ (FBO) began to feature in policy rhetoric within the US in the 1990s (Kramer, Reference Kramer2010) and is now common parlance in political discourse across the globe (Jochum et al., Reference Jochum, Pratten and Wilding2007; Melville and McDonald, Reference Melville and Mcdonald2006). This expansion in use has however occurred in the absence of any agreed definition as to what an FBO actually is or does (Jeavons, Reference Jeavons2004; Sider and Unruh, Reference Sider and Unruh2004). As Grettenberger et al. (Reference Grettenberger, Bartkowski and Smith2006) note when talking about FBOs, policy-makers tend to not only homogenise the breadth of faith traditions but also blithely refer to faith-based and secular programmes as if they are separate and somehow easily distinguishable entities.

Clarke and Jennings (Reference Clarke and Jennings2008: 6) arguably go the furthest in defining the term, describing an FBO as ‘any organisation that derives inspiration and guidance for its activities from the teachings and principles of the faith or from a particular interpretation or school of thought within the faith’. It thus incorporates organisations that are shaped by faith or grounded in a faith tradition but do not involve activities that are explicitly religious (Harris et al., Reference Harris, Halfpenny and Rochester2003). One should be careful to avoid conflating religious congregations and FBOs, however, as the former are communities of practicing believers who gather for worship; the latter institutions whose inspiration and origins may be religious but whose activities are focused on the provision of services, information or advocacy (Howarth, Reference Howarth, Jochum, Pratten and Wilding2007). FBOs vary substantially in scale and geographical remit, ranging from, for example, international bodies such as the Salvation Army to small groups of believers associated with a single place of worship (James, 2003). FBOs are not only major providers of welfare services but are also frequently involved in political action, mobilisation and/or contestation (Beaumont and Cloke, Reference Beaumont and Cloke2012).

A number of academics have reflected on the ways in which an organisation's administrative, environmental, funding and/or programmatic elements might be influenced by faith or religion (see for example Adkins et al., Reference Adkins, Occhipinti and Heffernan2010; Sider and Unruh, Reference Sider and Unruh2004; Smith and Sosin, Reference Smith and Sosin2001). Specifically, aspects reflected upon include: mission (the place of faith in an organisation's identity and purpose); founding (whether it has a faith heritage and the continuing relevance of this); affiliation (whether affiliated with a faith entity); governance (role of faith identity in board selection); staff (role of faith identity in staff selection); support (financial and non-financial support from faith sources); target group (whether aimed at people of a particular faith); practices (integration of faith practices such as prayer or scriptural study); environment (whether premises are mainly used for religious purpose or contain religious objects/symbols); programme content (whether explicitly religious); and expected connection between religious content and outcomes (that is, whether spiritual experience is considered significant in promoting desired outcomes).

Importantly, Smith and Sosin (Reference Smith and Sosin2001) note that FBOs vary substantially with regard to the strength of their ties or ‘coupling’ to faith, and that there is no clearly defined relationship between an organisation's ‘religiosity’ and its size, type or other structural attributes. Building upon this, the Working Group on Human Needs and Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (2002) developed a typology comprising six organisational categories – faith-saturated, faith-centred, faith-related, faith-background, faith-secular partnership and secular – each differentiated by the degree and manner of influence faith has on mission and operation. According to this framework, by way of example, in faith-saturated organisations all staff share a faith commitment and programmes involve explicit mandatory religious content. In contrast, faith-related programmes may display religious symbols but do not require staff (with the possible exception of leaders) to affirm religious belief, and programmes do not include religious messages or activities, albeit that dialogue about faith may be available to participants who seek it out. Faith-background organisations, on the other hand, do not include any religious material in programmes and tend to ‘look and act secular’ despite having a religious heritage.

In a similar vein, Clarke (Reference Clarke, Clarke and Jennings2008) classifies the extent to which faith is operationalised by FBOs as either: passive, active, persuasive or exclusive. In his typology, faith is subsidiary to broader humanitarian principles as a motivator for action and mobiliser of support in the former categories, but is the overriding motivation for action and/or sole consideration shaping operation in the latter ones. Further, he notes that whilst passive and active agencies do not expect a faith-based dividend (e.g., converts or greater credibility for the faith among people of other faiths), persuasive and exclusive organisations contain, to varying degrees, a commitment to winning new adherents, providing support to adherents to the exclusion of others, or advancing the cause of that faith at the expense of others.

As might be expected, the nature of programme content, particularly the inclusion of faith practices, is a key factor determining where FBOs are placed in such typologies. Unruh (Reference Unruh2004) notes that these may take a number of forms such as: prayer (for, alongside, or by service users); worship (singing, liturgy and religious ritual); or the sharing of personal testimony (highlighting the role that faith has played in an individual's life). Some include religious teachings and/or invitations to a personal commitment to faith. Notably, the latter moves beyond presenting truth claims to asking beneficiaries to respond to these claims and thus corresponds most closely to what many mean by ‘proselytism’, but the line between that and the presentation of truth claims is a fine, and contested, one (Unruh, Reference Unruh2004). Such categories, Unruh (Reference Unruh2004) notes, can be further distinguished by the ‘how’ of programme content delivery, particularly the issue of whether they are mandatory or optional, corporate or individual, and whether they convey beliefs rooted in a particular religious tradition or affirm ‘faith’ in a more general sense.

Several commentators note that attempts to classify FBOs, and/or identify any ‘unique’ influence of faith, are complicated by the non-uniformity of definitions in existing literature, a lack of robust data, and the influence of variable structural characteristics (Boddie and Cnaan, Reference Boddie and Cnaan2006; Grettenberger et al., Reference Grettenberger, Bartkowski and Smith2006; Kramer, Reference Kramer2010). That said, there is a degree of consensus that FBOs strongly coupled to faith are qualitatively different in that they tend to view the personal ‘transformation’ of clients, informed by religious teachings, as crucial to attainment of programme objectives, whereas secular agencies are more likely to view the change process as dependent on clients’ achievement of appropriate skills (Adkins et al., Reference Adkins, Occhipinti and Heffernan2010). Smith et al. (Reference Smith, Bartkowski and Grettenberger2004: 24, 26) do however caution that such differences are rarely obvious, and conclude that:

Given the varying extents to which and ways that faith shapes service delivery, it is perhaps unsurprising that the findings of the few studies that have explored service user experiences and perspectives are mixed. For example, Goggin and Orth (Reference Goggin and Orth2002) found that clients perceived workers at most, but not all, FBOs providing intermediate-term housing to homeless households in Michigan to be ‘more caring’ than those in government agencies. When evaluating faith-based projects for homeless young people in Los Angeles, Ferguson et al. (Reference Ferguson, Wu, Dyrness and Spruijt-Metz2007a) concluded that an emphasis on religion and spirituality had apparently promoted positive outcomes for users, such as an increase in self-respect and levels of personal responsibility. In contrast, when evaluating parenting programmes, drug/alcohol treatment and transitional housing projects in the US, Smith et al. (Reference Sider and Unruh2004) found that there were few obvious differences in client satisfaction between FBO and secular services, or FBOs with greater and lesser degrees of faith integration. More negatively, Sager and Stephens (Reference Sager and Stephens2005) report that compulsory religious elements such as attendance at sermons or prayers in some congregation-run feeding establishments for homeless people in a US city were perceived by the majority of service users to be coercive, hypocritical and/or condescending.

The insights from literature reviewed above are drawn upon later, where expressions of faith in UK homelessness services, and users’ experiences of these, are discussed. Before doing so, however, the following section outlines the methods employed in the study of UK homelessness provision.

The evolving expression of faith in UK homelessness services

The study aimed to identify what, if any, difference a faith affiliation or heritage makes to the type and nature of homelessness services ‘on the ground’.Footnote ² A review of literature and service databases was initially conducted to explore the scale and structure of FBO homelessness provision in the UK. This informed the selection of two case study cities, London and Manchester, within which services provided by ‘faith-based’ and ‘secular’ organisations were compared. These cities were selected in part because of their extensive network of services, but also their larger than average ethnic minority populations, so as to maximise the likelihood of encountering services operated by minority faith groups. Across the two cities, a total of twenty-five organisations were recruited. Agencies were purposively selected to ensure adequate representation of a wide range of service types (including hostels, night shelters, day centres, soup kitchens and soup runs) and sizes, organisational structures and affiliations and extent (or lack) of coupling to formalised religion.Footnote ³ Approximately two-thirds (n = 17) were described as faith-based by the project manager;Footnote ⁴ these comprised a range of religious orientations, including Christian (of various denominations), Hare Krishna, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh.

Across the twenty-five agencies, semi-structured in-depth face-to-face interviews and focus groups were conducted with a total of: thirty project managers or co-managers, thirty-three paid and volunteer frontline staff, seventy-three service usersFootnote ⁵ and seven key informants such as representatives of local authorities and places of worship. A further ten interviews with national stakeholders, including representatives of central government, umbrella bodies and faith-based welfare providers, were also conducted to set the case study findings within their broader policy context.

The vast majority of the agencies studied (faith-based and secular alike) grew out of faith-based initiatives, which is unsurprising given that most contemporary UK voluntary organisations have historical roots in faith-based, particularly Christian, philanthropy (Harris, Reference Harris1995). In their earliest iterations, these typically took the form of soup runs or night shelters, run by volunteers and resourced exclusively by charitable donations. Since then, these organisations have evolved along a number of different trajectories, differentiated by the extent to which they have ‘professionalised’ (Cloke et al., Reference Cloke, May and Johnsen2010), by for example employing paid staff, expanding the range of services to include specialist facilities and/or seeking statutory funding.

The case study agencies thus reflected the diversity of the UK's contemporary homelessness service landscape (see Cloke et al., Reference Cloke, May and Johnsen2010), including a range of services which lie on a spectrum between what might (crudely) be classified as ‘basic’ provision such as winter shelters, soup runs and soup kitchens, to more ‘specialist’ provision such as high support hostels or resettlement programmes. The former provide meals and basic (often dormitory-style) emergency accommodation and are typically run by volunteers; the latter provide tailored support to assist service users to access settled accommodation and address vulnerabilities such as mental health or addiction problems, and tend to be staffed by professional workers (see Johnsen et al., Reference Johnsen, Cloke and May2005). Notably, the vast majority of ‘basic’ services are provided by FBOs, representing a range of religious affiliations including minority (i.e., non-Christian) faiths. ‘Specialist’ services are provided by a greater mix of faith-based and secular agencies, with the former almost exclusively having Christian affiliations, representing many different denominations.

As organisational structures and project types have evolved, so too has the role and expression of faith. The following subsections outline how the strength of coupling to religion, or at least the outward expression of faith, has apparently diminished in many. Informed by the typologies described above, the influence of faith in a number of domains is explored, including: faith heritage, affiliation and public identity; ethos and aims; governance and staffing; resourcing and environment; and programme content and religious practice.

Identifying the ‘F’ in FBO from ‘the inside’ . . . not an easy task?

Discussions with homeless service users confirmed that the influence of the ‘F’ in FBO is not necessarily obvious. In fact, given the declining visibility of faith described above, many homeless people find it difficult to discern any tangible difference between avowedly faith-based and secular projects. Service users frequently assumed that if they were not compelled to participate in religious practices, and/or if staff never proactively promoted faith in conversations, a project ‘could not be’ faith-based, when in fact that same service may be described as such by its manager. Conversely, service users often presumed that inclusion of ‘people of the cloth’ (e.g., nuns) in the staff team ‘must be’ indicative of a faith basis; when their presence can be an ‘historical artefact’ which reflects ongoing links with a founding religious body but has little if any bearing on its current (secular) ethos and practice. Disagreements about whether or not the projects they used regularly had a faith affiliation were thus commonplace in service user focus groups, as illustrated by the following conversational excerpt:

Importantly, with few exceptions, homeless interviewees reported that there were no obvious differences in the quality, or integrity, of ‘care’ provided by staff in projects that were (known to be) faith-based or secular. Such views were widely echoed by frontline staff (both with and without faith themselves), including those who had worked for both faith-based and secular agencies. There was a strong consensus that the project dynamics were defined much more by the quality of staff and infrastructure, than any formal affiliation to faith per se.

When asked whether they preferred either faith-based or secular projects, a few service users reported that they sought out FBOs because they wanted to explore questions of faith or spirituality and/or the support of fellow believers. Others reported actively avoiding faith-based services due to prior negative experiences with faith groups in the past, particularly religious schools. The majority, however, were relatively indifferent as to whether or not the services they used were faith-based, as long as they could choose whether or not to participate in or talk about anything ‘religious’. For example:

On this issue, and significantly given the central government's acknowledgement that many commissioning bodies have been ‘squeamish’ about funding FBOs given fears that they may use public money to propagate religion (Commission on Integration and Cohesion, 2007), experiences of unwelcome promotion of faith were very rare. Virtually all service user interviewees felt that any expressed wish to desist from conversation about religion or faith had been respected by FBO staff.

Many service users and staff nevertheless highlighted the role that faith, and the provision of support in this domain, had played in boosting some homeless persons’ morale and senses of ‘hope’, and/or promoting positive behavioural changes such as overcoming substance misuse problems:

The issue that ‘mattered’ most in defining service user preferences, however, was not whether they were faith-based or secular, but rather providers’ expectations regarding behaviour change. There is at present a heated debate within the UK's homelessness sector regarding how ‘interventionist’ services should be. Stances on this issue fall along a spectrum: at one pole are ‘non-interventionist’ agencies which have an open door policy and hold no expectation that service users commit to change. Some homeless people, particularly those experiencing severe and multiple disadvantage (MEAM and Revolving Doors, 2011), will only use these services. The approach has however been deemed irresponsible by some commentators for allowing vulnerable people to continue behaviours such as drug misuse which are profoundly detrimental to their wellbeing (Lane and Power, Reference Lane and Power2009). At the other end of the spectrum are highly ‘interventionist’ organisations that insist homeless people ‘engage’ with support to address problems such as addiction. Interventionist approaches can be very effective with some individuals and are being endorsed by government (CLG, 2006, 2012), but have been severely criticised by campaigning groups for excluding the ‘hardest to reach’ and exacerbating their already difficult circumstances (Housing Justice, 2009).

Contrary to what is often presumed, it is the secular agencies that are most sympathetic toward the interventionist rehabilitative approaches. Whilst FBOs can be found along much of the spectrum, they tend to favour non-interventionist ‘unconditional’ approaches.Footnote ⁷ This puts many at odds with the direction of UK homelessness policy, which has become increasingly interventionist in tone in recent years (Fitzpatrick and Johnsen, Reference Fitzpatrick and Johnsen2009). It also presents a challenge to what Cloke (Reference Cloke, Beaumont and Baker2011) refers to as the postsecular ‘rapprochement’ of ethical praxis underpinning many contemporary partnerships between faith-based and secular bodies. These, he explains, were generally forged via a setting aside of moral differences in order to respond to the needs of homeless people from compatible ethical bases. Divergent stances on interventionism cannot be suspended easily, however, given the depth of feelings associated and the different weighting accorded to aspects of welfare and individual liberty. For many individuals and organisations, the adoption of more interventionist approaches represents a compromise ‘too far’ given conflicts with religious ideals of unconditional hospitality and care.