The Creation Years: 1961 -1964
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” included new programs to prevent juvenile delinquency. The focal point was the President’s Council on Juvenile Delinquency (the PCJD – remember this acronym) was chaired by U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. In New York City, the President’s Council funded Mobilization for Youth (MfY) as did the Ford Foundation and the City of New York. MfY organized and coordinated neighborhood councils composed of local officials, service providers, and neighbors to develop plans to correct conditions that led to juvenile delinquency. It also enlisted the aid of the school board and city council members to implement those plans.
It was called COMMUNITY ACTION, and it looked like an effective and inexpensive way to solve problems for youth.
The Ford Foundation was also funding other “gray areas projects,” including one in New Haven, Connecticut, that recruited people from all sectors of the community to come together to plan and implement programs to help low-income people. The core idea in the New Haven project was the concept of the whole community working together. This idea came from the “program of community action” that had been developed by the “Chicago School” of sociologists in the 1930’s. They sought to create new social systems by linking the sectors of the community together to help youth connect with the world of work and integrate into the mainstream of society. MFY and the New Haven “gray areas project” are often cited as the “models” for a community action agency.
After the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, President Lyndon Baines Johnson expanded the policy ideas initiated during the Kennedy administration. In his State of the Union message to Congress in January, 1964, President Johnson said:
Let us carry forward the plans and programs of John F. Kennedy, not because of our sorrow or sympathy, bus because they are right....This administration today, here and now, declares an unconditional War on Poverty in America.... Our joint federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists. In city slums, in small towns, in sharecroppers’ shacks, or in migrant worker camps, on Indian reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.