Sustainability, the work of building a world that is ecologically, socially and economically just, is essentially a learning process. To move more effectively toward this goal, a deeper understanding of learning is necessary. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have come to play a significant role within the sustainability project, and thus form the context for much learning toward sustainability. Faith-based organizations (FBOs) are a significant but understudied segment of the NGO family. This research investigates learning among individuals within FBOs doing environmental and development work in Kenya, using the framework of Mezirow’s transformative learning theory. The identity and function of these FBOs is profiled, highlighting the key role churches and faith-based agencies can play in effecting sustainable and holistic change in Global South countries, due to their rootedness in the community, the social capital they help produce, and the respect they receive from local people. Learning for sustainability is examined through interviews with participants from two case FBOs: A Rocha Kenya and Rural Service Programme of the East Africa Yearly Meeting of Friends. Attention to the context these organizations provide for learning highlighted the influence of supportive community, mentor relationships, teamwork, and training and evaluation structures. Learning outcomes covered a broad range of areas, with the highest proportion fitting within environment/conservation (e.g., linking faith and environmental concerns, and agriculture and birding skills) and community work (e.g., relating to people, managing groups, teaching and facilitation) umbrellas. Some transformative learning was experienced, mostly through learning in the instrumental domain. Key learning processes included observation and experience, training, practical application and learning from each other, highlighting the importance of embodied learning processes. Applying learning through action, both at work and in the home and community, was an important expression of learning for participants, though this expression was sometimes blocked by personal and social barriers that prevented the completion of the learning-action cycle.

Sustainability, the work of building a world that is ecologically, socially and economically just, is essentially a learning process. To move more effectively toward this goal, a deeper understanding of learning is necessary. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have come to play a significant role within the sustainability project, and thus form the context for much learning toward sustainability. Faith-based organizations (FBOs) are a significant but understudied segment of the NGO family. This research investigates learning among individuals within FBOs doing environmental and development work in Kenya, using the framework of Mezirow’s transformative learning theory. The identity and function of these FBOs is profiled, highlighting the key role churches and faith-based agencies can play in effecting sustainable and holistic change in Global South countries, due to their rootedness in the community, the social capital they help produce, and the respect they receive from local people. Learning for sustainability is examined through interviews with participants from two case FBOs: A Rocha Kenya and Rural Service Programme of the East Africa Yearly Meeting of Friends. Attention to the context these organizations provide for learning highlighted the influence of supportive community, mentor relationships, teamwork, and training and evaluation structures. Learning outcomes covered a broad range of areas, with the highest proportion fitting within environment/conservation (e.g., linking faith and environmental concerns, and agriculture and birding skills) and community work (e.g., relating to people, managing groups, teaching and facilitation) umbrellas. Some transformative learning was experienced, mostly through learning in the instrumental domain. Key learning processes included observation and experience, training, practical application and learning from each other, highlighting the importance of embodied learning processes. Applying learning through action, both at work and in the home and community, was an important expression of learning for participants, though this expression was sometimes blocked by personal and social barriers that prevented the completion of the learning-action cycle.

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This ethnographic research examines the social service encounter between private providers and child recipients involved in a faith-based afterschool program located in a southern US city. I specifically focus on the tensions and divisions that developed between staff members and participating families in daily programmatic interactions and rhetoric. I highlight how race, class, and gender intersected with age to shape children’s different experiences of the afterschool program and their lives beyond the agency. I also show how these social categories converged in local stories of religious poverty relief, which build upon cultural narratives about American welfare, to blind staff to the realities of children’s lives. These issues resulted in a program where staff members sought to transform children away from imagined social ills they associated with guardians to ideologically and programmatically isolate children from their families. I explore these conditions to draw attention to some of the ways structural inequalities can be reproduced and maintained in private service provision. It is in this context that I examine the increasing prominence of faith-based organizations within domestic poverty policy and relief services.

As provision of social services is increasingly handled by the non-profit sector, specifically through faith-based organizations (FBO's), current scholarship has suggests that FBOs have the possibility to either reinforce neoliberal ideology or progress social justice. This study provides an examination of the shift in conceptions of justice for participants in the Mission Year program, an FBO program naming justice as a goal. For the participants, this experience creates a new understanding of the causes of poverty, injustice and American culture which I name 'justice as knowing.' This understanding culminated within participants a desire to “live out justice” as ‘intentional neighbors’ by relocating to a high-poverty neighborhood, reconciling racial relations by building relationships, and contributing to a redistribution of wealth by investing resources in a high-poverty neighborhood. I call this action ‘justice as doing.’ Participants shift from liberal-based notions justice, rooted in liberalism, toward more equity-based conceptions of justice as fairness.

No description available.

Faith-based initiatives have the potential to alter church-state relationships as they remove barriers to the public funding of human services in organizations that promote the role of values, beliefs, and other characteristics of faith. In seeking to "level the playing field" for these faith-based organizations, faith-based initiatives suggest moving away from past practices, where "religious" organizations utilized public funding for the delivery of "secular" human services, and toward the public funding support of organizations whose human service activities are based on faith in a more thoroughgoing manner.This research inquires into meanings assigned to opportunities and risks related to the public funding of faith-based organizations, as articulated by a variety of stakeholders, from government officials to the leaders of faith-based organizations. The guiding research question, What are the meanings of church-state relationships for faith-based organizations?, asks the leaders of faith-based organizations in one Virginia locality, as well as other local, state, and national stakeholders, about their understandings of various aspects of the church-state relationships that develop when faith-based organizations utilize public funds for the provision of human services.The findings of this inquiry, presented in a narrative case study report, and the implications of this case study provide a richer understanding of the multiple meanings that faith-based organizations assign to relationships with government programs, government agencies, and the use of public funds. The multiple meanings of church-state relationships that are offered by diverse research participants provide valuable insights into the complex phenomenon of faith-basis organizations providing human services with government monies. The interpretations offered in this dissertation provide greater knowledge of the role of faith as a basis for publicly funded human services, and furthermore, this knowledge may find value in its recognition of the implications of faith-based, publicly funded human services.

Religious charity is said to be one of the oldest phenomena which has been present in many societies and social welfare provision is one of the central aspects of religious charity. Although, religiously motivated welfare provision has an older history than nation state based welfare provision, with the advent of the modern welfare state social aid area has been taken -partially or totally- from the religious authorities. However starting with 80s and attracting considerable interest by 90s in contemporary world, religious themes, namely faith based organizations, have been visible again in social aid area. As a form of faith based welfare provision, Faith Based Organization (FBO) is the central concept of this study / particularly Islamist FBOs will be on the focus of this study. In that sense FBOs will be studied as a part in history of Islamist faith based welfare provision in Turkey. The central hypotheses of the thesis, FBOs are organizations fertilized by changing economic and political climate of 70s. Changing state religion relationships has a significant impact on FBO proliferation in Turkey. By combating through poverty FBOs have big problems in terms of financial accountability, permanency, trustworthiness and professionalism.

Along with the power loss of welfare regimes in Europe, the problems which have always existed in the field of poverty started to reemerge as the one of the primary matters of humanity. However, in this period, the state whose intervention to economy was being already argued was deprived of the ability of intervention to the issue of poverty. After 1980s, the new generation social aid organizations emerged in the area of welfare, which was covered by the modern state institutions before. Some of these organizations can be titled as faith based organizations (FBOs) which are the organizations that refer directly or indirectly to a religion or religious values, and they function as welfare providers or as political actors. Today, faith based social aid organizations disperse into a wide area, from the sub groups of armed organizations to worship centers of several religions. These organizations perform a welfare function by carrying a number of activities. This study examines the FBOs in the sample of a non-governmental organization, Deniz Feneri (Light House) Association in Turkey. In this regard, the study opens a discussion for a new concept for the world as well as for Turkey.

No description available.