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In 1961, President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” included support for programs to prevent juvenile delinquency with the focal point, the President’s Council on Juvenile Delinquency, chaired by U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy.  In New York City, the President’s Council funded Mobilization for Youth (MFY) with 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 which led to juvenile delinquency.  It also enlisted the aid of 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.

The Ford Foundation was funding other projects, including one in New Haven, Connecticut, which recruited people from all sector of the community to come together to plan and implement programs to help low-income people.  MFY and New Haven are often sited 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 in the Kennedy Administration.  In his message to Congress on January 8, 1964, President Johnson said:

Let us carry forward the plans and programs of John F. Kennedy, not because of our sorrow or sympathy, but because they are right….This Administration today, here and now declares an unconditional War on Poverty in America….Out join 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.

The “War on Poverty” was born.  In February, R. Sargent Shriver was asked to head a task force to draft legislation.  In August, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (EOA) was passed, creating a federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) placed in the President’s Executive Office.  “Sarge” Shriver was named Director, serving until 1969.

Congress also passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, guaranteeing equal opportunity for all.  The Economic Opportunity Act, designed to implement that guarantee in the economic sector, stated in part: “It is therefore the policy of the United States to eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty in this nation by opening, to everyone, the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.”

The EOA included new education, employment and training, and work-experience programs such as the Job Corps, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, and volunteers in Service to America (VISTA, the “domestic Peace Corps”).  Congress bypassed the state and local governments and provided for direct funding of community groups: the community action concept.

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