Federal funding fuels faith-based push for chastity
Posted on Sunday, October 29, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/171060/
FORT SMITH — Sex sells, but chastity is also proving to be lucrative.
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has doled out $ 781 million to programs that discourage teenagers from having premarital sex. The steadily increasing grants, many of them to faith-based charities, are making virginity a growth industry and creating a boom for abstinence promoters like Cindy Crawford of Fort Smith.
The abstinence-until-marriage program Crawford began out of a cardboard box in the back seat of her car now boasts 10 full-time employees, a budget rich enough to fly everyone on staff to at least one conference a year and an office suite set up as a Wi-Fi zone.
With $ 2. 4 million in federal grants, Crawford’s nonprofit Tree of Life Preventive Health Maintenance Inc., is the No. 1 abstinence promoter in Arkansas.
Tree of Life’s rapid expansion demonstrates how local charities are mobilizing to take the government-financed abstinence message to schools and streets in hopes of preventing teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
It also underscores the complications that can arise when government and religion mix.
Crawford, 48, also administers Hannah House, a faithbased haven for pregnant girls. Federal dollars awarded for the abstinence program are paying for an apartment house that Tree of Life bought with the idea to expand Hannah House.
She also co-owns a Christian employment agency called Go Ye that supplies workers to carry the abstinence program’s message into classrooms.
Faith-based pregnancy centers, reliant on private donations and volunteers, typically counsel young women about alternatives to abortion. Crawford said the girls who come to stay at Hannah House — some as young as 12 — have already made up their mind to have the baby.
While Tree of Life’s abstinence program is bringing in seven-figure grants, Hannah House doesn’t draw any federal support, and isn’t likely to qualify for any. Although President Bush’s faith-based initiatives opened the door for religious charities to compete for federal grants, funded programs cannot use tax dollars to proselytize. Hannah House requires its residents to attend church services twice a week at a church of Crawford’s choosing. The girls’ daily schedule includes biblical counseling and Bible studies.
On admission applications, girls must circle any occult activities in which they have been involved — including horoscopes, Ouija boards and yoga — and explain any involvement in eastern religions or groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Many faith-based pregnancy centers are getting federal grants to run separate abstinence programs that deliver a governmentapproved abstinence message without religious overtones.
Jeffrey Trimbath, director of abstinence education in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Family and Youth Services Bureau, said he did not know how much federal abstinence money has gone to local anti-abortion and crisis pregnancy centers since Bush took office in 2001. A recent Washington Post review put the figure at more than $ 60 million. Abstinence funding began to take off under President Clinton, as a small part of welfare reform, Trimbath said. It has greatly expanded under Bush. Grant totals have risen each of the past six years, from $ 80 million in 2001 to last year’s total of $ 177 million. In Arkansas, a dozen nonprofits were awarded grants in the most recent round. Last year, Arkansas drew $ 6. 27 per publicschool student, which ranked it sixth nationally. Mississippi was first with $ 9. 89 per student.
REALITY CHECK In Fort Smith, Tree of Life’s abstinence program, called “Reality Check Abstinence Education,” has expanded from an initial target group of 140 kids in boys and girls clubs to the 4, 000 teens that Crawford said the program will reach this year.
Far from carting around a homespun curriculum in a cardboard box, the program now has six staff presenters fanning out to schools in Fort Smith and neighboring towns such as Magazine and Scranton.
The classroom presenters, equipped with laptop computers, projectors and props such as “Fatal Vision” goggles, which show kids how the world looks when drunk, and “sex is mint for marriage” candies for classroom rewards, are all screened and trained, Crawford said. They get continuing education and medical updates by regularly attending conferences held annually by the Abstinence Clearinghouse and The Medical Institute for Sexual Health in cities such as Washington and Chicago. Tree of Life flew seven people to each group’s conference last year, she said. The program’s reach extends to Berryville and Cabot, and it has plans to expand into eastern Oklahoma. Tree of Life is also producing television and radio commercials promoting chastity. There are Reality Check billboards. The program’s graphic designer updates a Web site and a page on Xanga, an online community popular with young Web surfers. Crawford, the Republican candidate for Sebastian County treasurer, said she recently broached talks with a local shopping mall about renting store space for the summer so Reality Check could set up free video games and offer snacks to attract kids who would also get an abstinence message. In a report delivered to Tree of Life earlier this month, the Institute for Research and Evaluation in Salt Lake City found that the charity has “a highly effective program” that is delivering “strong short-term effects.” Tree of Life paid $ 48, 913 for the 10-page evaluation.
CLASSROOM LESSONS In a sixth-grade class in Scranton, Reality Check presenter Demetri Mendoza, 19, went over the homework and then clicked on a video: soundbites from a hip-looking teenage boy and teenage girl discussing the boundaries they had set on dating and strategies for avoiding the temptations to have sex.
Mendoza, a sometimes student at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith wearing casual clothes and an earring in each ear, followed up. “Peer pressure in school is probably the hardest thing you’re going to have to deal with,” he told the class.
He asked them what boundaries they could set for themselves.
“Like I said earlier, don’t drink too much,” one boy said. “Nothing below the shoulders or above the toes — I learned that in church,” a girl said. The session, in a one-hour health class, ended after a skit in which boys and girls read lines on cue cards: a proposition followed by a clever but firm no. “You owe me something for all I’ve done for you,” a sixthgrade boy read from a cue card. “I didn’t know our friendship was based on ‘ pay as you go, ’” the girl responded. “So as of right now, this IOU is canceled !”
EXPANDING QUARTERS Henrietta Johnston, the school nurse, said the abstinence training, which takes up a week of one-hour classes in the lower grades and two weeks in high school, is needed in the district, where one 10 th-grader recently delivered a baby.
Mendoza and other Reality Check presenters said they practice what they preach and stay abstinent outside of marriage.
“I think that’s pretty much a given,” Mendoza said. “We’re set at a high standard because of what we teach. This is not just a job, it’s a lifestyle.”
Tree of Life hires presenters such as Chris Stephenson, 29, who went to the job after working in a youth ministry at Roland, and trainee Robin Curry, 22, a recent graduate of Oral Roberts University, at about $ 13 an hour, according to the charity’s budget.
The employment agency Crawford co-owns with her husband, Jerry, supplies some of the staff for the federally funded program. The 2005 audit shows Tree of Life paid Go Ye $ 159, 757 for the year. It says Go Ye provided the workers at cost.
Grant money is also going to pay the mortgage on an apartment house Tree of Life bought with the idea of eventually using the apartments to house girls from Hannah House.
Hannah House now operates from a storefront office building that previously sheltered accountants. Although the offices have been renovated into living quarters with seven bedrooms and a homey living room, Crawford always coveted the apartment house next door. The trim two-story house, with three private apartments, would be perfect for young women and their newborns, Crawford said. Buying the property also would put an end to the problem of tenants at upstairs windows peering down at the girls in Hannah House’s backyard and bedrooms. Crawford said she wanted for years to buy the building, but tight budgets thwarted the idea. Tree of Life is having no trouble making the mortgage payments now, however. The government is picking up the tab.
LANDLORD-TENANT DEAL With the abstinence staff fast outgrowing its rent-free temporary quarters in Hannah House, Tree of Life requested federal funding for bigger offices. In its successful grant application, Tree of Life said that an office suite had recently become available that offered “an ideal configuration of space” for the abstinence program.
Tree of Life did not disclose that it owned the 3, 200-squarefoot apartment house itself or that it intends to use it to expand the pregnancy center. The rent, covered by the abstinence grant, was $ 900 a month until this month, when the abstinence staff expanded to a second apartment and the rent rose to $ 1, 300, Crawford said. The mortgage payments on the house, which Tree of Life bought with no money down for $ 103, 000, are $ 830.
Though Tree of Life is both the landlord and the tenant of its new property, Crawford insisted that it is not paying itself the rent in a circular arrangement to buy a building, which government regulations prohibit.
Instead, she said, Tree of Life pays the rent to a separate entity with a separate taxpayer number, the Tree of Life Foundation. The foundation, created by Crawford, collects the rent because it manages the building, Crawford said.
In this way, the owner of the property is paying rent to an entity that is not the owner — at least for now. Crawford said she is working with a lawyer to transfer the deed to the foundation.
She said the rent is below market rates, and she saw no conflict in the existing arrangement. She said Tree of Life bought the apartment house in May 2005, five months before its latest and largest grant award — $ 2. 4 million over three years — was announced.
“We didn’t buy it because we thought we were going to get a grant,” she said. “We bought it for an investment.
“ Everything just happened to work out in the timing of things.”