This spirit was closely allied to the social gospel movement. The settlement movement asked what was needed in deprived areas to make a good life possible. It saw government as the creation of society and as the instrument through which the good life could be brought within reach of all. If public baths or a playground or a citizenship class proved useful in one neighborhood, surely it was something which should be made available to all neighborhoods.
The function of the settlement, and of city and national federations, was to interpret the significance of such public social programs and to push for their wider provision on the appropriate city, state or national level. Settlements were characterized not by a set of services but by an approach.
In cases where the initiative came from indigenous neighborhood leaders or organizations—and this has been increasingly true in recent decades—the program has been flexible and reflected neighborhood judgment about priorities. They pioneered in nursing services, clinics, convalescent homes, milk stations. They established camps and playgrounds. They taught English and citizenship.
Settlement workers studied housing conditions, working hours, sanitation, sweatshops, child labor, and used these studies to stimulate protective legislation.
They worked to remedy abuses by loansharks, pawnshops, and predatory installment buying practices. And always there were the activities which brought fun and fulfillment to life—music, art, theater, sociability and play.
The list is as varied and as changing as the needs. In this hundred years there have been clear trends. In some periods the program reflected national calamities such as severe depressions or world wars. As the century advanced, many activities pioneered by the settlement disappeared because they were taken over by public authorities e.
One dramatic change has come with the increase in life expectancy, from This great increase in the number of aged in the population is reflected in a proliferation of programs like meals on wheels or adult day centers, none of which existed during the first sixty years.
Another change appears in the current emphasis on preparing youth for responsible parenthood, partially reflecting the fact that the average age of sexual maturity in girls occurs between 12 and 13, as compared with age 17 in There have been trends in staffing, too.
Their observations were expected to carry evidence about neighborhood problems to the larger society and to result in reform. Residence no longer focused on formal social research. The residence as a learning center, however, required staff leadership and later generations of executives were not willing to focus in the residence their personal as well as professional life as the pioneers had done. Without such leadership, the educational function of the residence diminished, and it was impossible to justify the large subsidies which had always been necessary.
The expanded staffs of volunteer and paid workers had many different skills—research, social group work, case work, community organization, education, recreation, camping, and the arts. Whatever the skills needed, settlements always had a concern that staff be well prepared.
Throughout the Thirties and Forties institutes were jointly sponsored by the Federation and schools of social work and there was a close working relationship with the evolving Council on Social Work Education. Of all specializations, the strongest affinity was with group work because of its relevance to settlement values—its emphasis on human relationships and on democratic decision-making, including social action. The group workers for their part viewed the arts disciples as elitist.
The concern with training peaked with the establishment of the National Training Center in Chicago in , located first at Hull-House. The Fifties and Sixties brought a kaleidoscope of events which shook the country—and the settlement movement—to the core.
Against the background of the undeclared war in Vietnam which created ever-mounting rage, there were intertwined movements of profound significance for low-income neighborhoods. One was the rediscovery of poverty and a crusade for its elimination. The other was the Civil Rights Movement. By the nation had rediscovered poverty, and a liberal and compassionate administration launched an array of services. By programs like Head Start, legal services and job training were in place, with the Office of Economic Opportunity as the central planner.
The War on Poverty which followed proved both a boon and a challenge. They did respond to this challenge, and by a quarter of the local board members were neighborhood residents.
Soon their ideological fervor diminished as the idea of complete local control met massive resistance: city governments asserted ultimate control, and it became obvious that the victims of poverty had limited power to attack problems which lay in the national economy.
These public service centers tended over time toward a standardized though useful program, primarily offering services of public departments on a decentralized basis. Meanwhile, funds from the War on Poverty also went to settlements in relatively massive amounts.
By neighborhood centers nationally were receiving from public funds a total equal to what they received from United Ways.
Additional experimental approaches were set up through interagency cooperation for 14 additional cities.
It had moved decisively into the complexities of public-private financing involving many federal and state agencies.
Funds had been vastly increased for undernourished programs, and imaginative leadership was stimulated and rewarded. A broader question was how to cooperate fruitfully with an increasing array of neighborhood-focused programs brought into being by public departments, or by indigenous neighborhood self-help groups. During these two decades the Civil Rights movement was a parallel force. The brave marches, sit-ins and boycotts based on non-violence raised massive resistance which was violent, but they also brought success, backed by a national awareness that long-delayed justice had finally arrived.
The March on Washington was a symbolic high point of this phase, which was firmly established by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of Neighborhood centers were allies in this cause. Many centers served black neighborhoods. The first major study of black urban life was made in Philadelphia in. DuBois for College Settlement.
They participated in planning a National Interracial Conference in What few people had foreseen was the gathering storm of unassuaged rage which swept the northern cities: between and there was a total of significant riots. The Detroit riots left 43 dead, injuried, and 2, businesses destroyed. This evidence of continuing desperate need provided stimulus for federal social programs and some economic help from the business community.
Neighborhood centers were on the front lines as cities burned. The rise of black nationalism came during this period. It places squarely before us all the absolute core of our local and national problem in human relations and social and economic justice. Beyond this there is nothing so solid and unyielding: so the challenge was to welcome this new force and at the same time fight against the polarization of society, keeping faith in the common good and in social interdependence.
The Sixties came to a sad close, the nation exhausted by the economic and spiritual drain of Vietnam. The Poverty Program was dismembered. The subsequent dismantling of social and economic programs in the Eighties left all voluntary agencies struggling to maintain earlier gains, and to assert their common purposes. In this time when great dreams seem to have been abandoned, what can be learned from a century of heroic settlement effort?
Progress in social reform, to be sure, was not steady. Such a period occurred at the beginning in in London, when people of conscience and power were moved by what they heard from Toynbee Hall. It was most dramatically true in the U. What is constantly being reaffirmed is the continued validity of the neighborhood approach, so obvious it is almost unseen. Neighborhood centers are there. They are still where the action is.
Sometimes aspects appear in different forms, as in the case of the Peace Corps, or Head Start. There is much unfinished business for neighborhood centers in local areas.
The ideal public-private neighborhood service center has not yet been designed. The urban frontier remains an exciting laboratory, worthy of the most creative efforts of neighborhood workers. Many neighborhoods still need stimulation and support. But this second century makes possible—even requires—a different style. This generally prevailing spirit makes possible a more equal partnership between neighbors and staff, sometimes taking the form of offering technical assistance to independent neighborhood groups.
No longer is the emphasis on being spokesmen for inarticulate neighbors, but on supporting them as they speak for themselves. Neighborhood centers have a common heritage, but they are no longer unique.
They share with many others a concern for improving the quality of local life, and a direct, pragmatic approach to solving its problems. However, the Chicago Commons Association — and Hull House Association — , both loose federations of former settlements, neighborhood centers, and social service agencies, perpetuate the names and at least some of the aspirations of the original settlement houses.
Carson, Mina. Davis, Allen F. Trolander, Judith Ann. All Rights Reserved. Portions are copyrighted by other institutions and individuals. And as in England, individual artisans were losing economic ground to the factory system, which reduced the demand for manual labor; the average worker was experiencing a decline in real income, as well as chronic unemployment.
Economic pressures on the poor were giving rise to child labor; public welfare was non-existent, and cooperative and mutual aid societies, forerunners of the labor movement, were still in their infancy. As a result, reform movements were also emerging in the United States at the time, although lacking the philosophical and organizational coherence of their British counterparts.
The heterogeneous character of American society, especially as immigrants from Europe began to arrive, made the question of reform a more complicated one. But in the Social Gospel movement, which spread through American churches of all denominations during the later 19th century, a reform-minded ethic took hold. Without assuming an explicitly political form, it imbued a populist hostility to business and laissez-faire capitalism, and sympathy for regulation, setting the stage for the reforms of the Progressive Era in which the settlement movement would play an important role.
The first attempts to put the settlement idea into practice were made by young Englishmen of privilege and education. In an Oxford graduate named Edward Denison, the son of a bishop and nephew of a Speaker of the House of Commons, took lodgings in the slum district of Stepney.
He came to know his neighbors, offered classes for children, and worked to improve housing and sanitation conditions in the area. Two years later, in poor health, Denison had to abandon the project, and he died in The next to try was Arnold Toynbee , an Oxford-educated economist, who in moved to Whitechapel, a working-class section of East London.
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