KASTEN'S CARING COUNCIL GIVES LESSON IN REFORM

When welfare is the topic of conversation, there rarely are differences of opinion regarding the need for drastic reform.

The burgeoning welfare bureaucracy too often promulgates a class of recipients dependent on handouts but unable to rise above their economic squalor. Too often that fate becomes a legacy, handed down from generation to successive generation.

But four years ago, Rep. Mary Kasten of Cape Girardeau decided that merely talking about the welfare system wouldn't solve its problems. Nor would clever conversation enable recipients to shake their dependency on the state and begin to care for themselves and their families as active participants in the nation's economy.

Kasten's brainchild, the Community Caring Council, was spawned from her frustration with "the system." The council promotes cooperation between social service agencies, churches, businesses, and schools, to enable families and individuals to realize the importance of and attain the personal goals of self-reliance, responsibility, and resourcefulness. Through this network, the council tries to identify gaps in services, eliminate duplication, improve current programs, and promote creative ways to develop new means for people to help themselves.

The council's mission statement says: "The caring and commitment of the council membership will restore the concept of a truly helping community in the old-fashioned sense and serve as model project for others to duplicate." Indeed, the U.S. House of Representatives' Select Committee on Hunger this month held a hearing in Cape Girardeau and looked at the example of the caring council as one way to improve public assistance programs.

Washington would do well to not only take a close look at the council, but to ease some of its endless regulations that often choke similar programs and prevent them from ever getting off the ground. Other rules and regulations are enforced so dogmatically that they literally force people who risk losing all assistance by taking low-wage jobs to try to help themselves to stay on welfare in order to survive.

As Congress and the president seek to make needed reforms of the welfare system, it will be necessary to provide incentives for agencies to coordinate efforts and improve efficiency. Another need is greater flexibility at the local level. The Community Caring Council has been cited as an excellent model of such cooperation. Made up of representatives from 38 agencies, the council is able to mobilize available public and private resources for those who truly need assistance.

A key part of the group's efforts at effective cooperation is the "Inter-agency Staffing Team," which consists of representatives of 13 agencies who discuss specific cases. The staffing team personally sits down with the families involved and comes up with creative ways to help the family meet today's financial burdens while planning for a brighter tomorrow.

Thanks to Kasten and the caring council, persons are able to emerge from their reliance on the "state" to become productive, responsible and dignified members of the community a far better legacy to bestow on their children.