Make a Difference: How One Man Helped Solve America's Poverty Problem (Hardcover)

by Gary MacDougal (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Since the United States welfare reforms of the late 1990s, individual states are more in charge than ever of the difficult questions posed by welfare change: How do they cut the rolls, create new jobs, and get people to work? Gary MacDougal asserts, definitively, that the answers for how to help "even the toughest longtime inner-city welfare recipients" have already been found; Make a Difference is his effort at outlining them.

MacDougal, who built a successful manufacturing company and was a partner in a management consulting firm before becoming chairman of the Governor's Task Force on Human Services Reform in Illinois, is an intelligent and passionate crusader against poverty. He has visited inner-city schools, housing projects, and prisons to interview those on welfare or raised in poverty about what they would change if they were, say, governor (a technique this conservative businessman calls "asking the customer"). Many of MacDougal's ideas are developed from a commonsense business model and will have universal appeal--connecting and streamlining the number of state and federal aid programs for poor people so that they are less wasteful, for instance. Others, such as his stands on unions and "the poverty industry," will stir controversy. Either way, Make a Difference is a revealing, accessible book that those interested in welfare reform will be unable to ignore. --Maria Dolan

From Publishers Weekly
Since the enactment of the federal welfare reform law of 1996, much of the responsibility for welfare has been shifted to the states. MacDougal chaired a governor-appointed task force (1993-1997) to revamp Illinois's welfare system, and in this buoyantly optimistic report, he contends that the Illinois model, though still a work in progress, can serve as a blueprint for other states. A former CEO of a Fortune 1000 electronics company, and a self-described conservative Republican, MacDougal favors federal block grants to states, combined with broad flexibility at the city, county and community levels in how the funds should be allocated. To critics who fear that the states will use block grants irresponsibly, he replies that most governors have done a fine job in the first phase of welfare reform. And to critics who view workfare as a demeaning scheme offering poor wages and benefits, he counters that an ex-welfare recipient's first job is only the first step on the ladder to self-sufficiency. MacDougal calls the Illinois reform drive bipartisan, and some of his proposals seem surprisingly innovative: for example, reorienting the focus to involve the whole family, including the noncustodial parents of welfare children, and creating job training and placement opportunities even for hard-to-place male ex-felons, combined with stringent child support enforcement and a stronger paternity establishment process. MacDougal's suggestions for eliminating mountains of paperwork, harmonizing eligibility requirements and using a computerized information management system to coordinate the fragmented activities of a welter of human service agencies and programs makes his book, despite its leaden prose and padded narrative, useful to policymakers, antipoverty workers and administrators. 16 pages photos. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Truman Talley Books; 1st edition (February 23, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312252234
• ISBN-13: 978-0312252236
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,445,034 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Heart-Warming Success Story, February 9, 2000

By	Robert Marik (Arlington, Virginia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Too often, discussions of our welfare system are in an ideological context - the left or the right. In this splendid and highly readable book, Gary MacDougal shows that perhaps the too-long neglected pragmatic perspective is the most important.

As a citizen-volunteer, Mr. MacDougal led the Governor's task force charged with fundamentally restructuring the Illinois welfare system, which administers a highly fragmented hodge-podge of state- and federally-funded programs. To this assignment he brought unique qualifications: He is an experienced and successful business executive. However, unlike many businessmen, he had enough political exposure to understand how things get done in the public sector. He is also a leader in the human services philanthropic sector. Finally, he took the time to go where few policy makers go, to meet the welfare "customers," and to learn first hand what happens at every level of the welfare system.

Make no mistake about it, what Mr. MacDougal and his Illinois task force accomplished is truly historic. Over many decades, in the face of widely recognized flaws and inefficiencies in our welfare system, no other state has been able to implement such a far-reaching, systemic reform. They say that legislation (and government organization studies) are like sausage - watching either one of them being made is not a pretty sight. However, this compelling book is an engaging, even at times heart-warming saga that brings to life the complexities of government in the real world. Hopefully some readers will want to step up to be part of similar initiatives in their own states.

In the end, one can't help but conclude that Mr. MacDougal's triumph was basically a tenacious exercise in common sense (albeit at the highest professional level!). Which raises the question, why doesn't the American electorate demand this level of common sense in other areas of public policy, rather than fifteen-second sound bites?

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Belying the Myths, February 25, 2000

By	Linda Mills (Chicago) - See all my reviews

One of the happy lessons of the national welfare reform experiment is that the interests of the poor and the business community need not be at odds. Both business leaders and business practices have much to offer the reform effort. Gary MacDougal is a business leader who traveled far and worked doggedly to make his own powerfully constructive offer - and to make it concrete. In doing so, MacDougal belied the myth perpetuated by those who fret that business leaders poking around social welfare programs will focus only on cutting costs and will leave the poor stranded at the doors of shuttered programs. But that was not MacDougal's vision - far from it.

In the midst of a successful business career, MacDougal went to Nepal and came down from the mountain with a desire to make a difference. After selling his business, he was free of all of the usual agendas -- whether of the left, right, party politics, turf, personal business interests, or a bureaucracy to defend, and he decided to make his contribution by offering a governor his help in leading a human services reform effort. The Governor said thanks, and MacDougal went on to challenge seven entrenched bureaucracies, the legislature, providers, and the unions. His good listening ear allowed him to hear fully from the clients of the system, as well as all the other players as they described (and often defended) the jumbled mess that called itself human services delivery. His heart told him there had to be a better way to serve families. And his business experience and acumen told him that the other way would have to be a customer first model that coordinated and redesigned the system based on the perspectives and needs of the communities to be served.

His plan was adopted by Illinois, where he focused his efforts. It puts families first. It insists on seamless service delivery of services in a now-consolidated human services agency that he helped create shape. And his plan is grounded in a from-the-ground-up local systems design intended to respond to the unique needs of each community where services are delivered. Now that most welfare families with the fewest personal and social problems are working, other states would do well to look at MacDougal's model of coordinated service delivery to address the far more complex needs of those families who remain on welfare.

-- This by an attorney who has represented the poor for twenty years.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good story with policy wonk stuff, too, February 14, 2000

By A Customer

This book speaks to more audiences than any other I've recently read.

It is, as advertised, a story about what "welfare reform" means in one state (Illinois.) But its a lot more. It is the story of one man's late mid-life crisis and how he tries to make the world a better place. (Would that Steve Forbes read this book and decided to do something with a better chance of paying off than run for president.) Its a "true story of people in inner city" Chicago in the tradition of Alex Kotlowitz and Nick Lehmann. But its also the story of the people who make up the rules faced by those real people: the street level bureaucrats who make the rules into "yes" and "no" answers, the senior bureaucrats who are between the street level bureaucrats and the legislators who make the decisions.

I especially liked having a state-level perspective on "how our laws are made." I haven't seen a book from a personal perspective as good as this since Eric Redman's "The Dance of Legislation." And its the first time I've seen one from a state-level perspective. (It will remind you all over again of why there is the adage: "Two things you don't want to see being made -- sausage and legislation.")