The resignation of John DiIulio as the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives wasn’t the only major personnel move at President Bush’s ill-fated agency. Also gone is the Reverend Mark Scott, the former executive director of the Ella J. Baker House in Boston, who served as the effort’s associate director for community outreach. Scott is now joining the Corporation for National Service, where he will focus on faith-based initiatives.

When Scott’s former boss, the Reverend Eugene Rivers, heard the news about DiIulio, he went ballistic, telling the Washington Post, " The message in Professor DiIulio’s departure is that the black and the poor in the inner cities can go to hell. "

But rather than criticizing it, Rivers would be wise to welcome Scott’s move from the faith-based operation to the Corporation for National Service, which runs the AmeriCorps program. An interesting idea is making the rounds in Washington: to subsume much of the work of the faith-based-initiative program under the rubric of national service. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote in August that " one idea would link the faith-based initiative to an expansion of the voluntary programs financed by the Corporation of National Service, including AmeriCorps. " Better still would be to jettison the faith-based packaging, which raises difficult First Amendment questions, and focus entirely on beefing up the service corps. The corps could focus on all the things that the faith-based initiative was supposed to — such as work with the inner-city poor and children — without raising fears about trampling the Constitution.

Issue Date: August 23 - 30, 2001