Church Takes Leading Role in Children’s Health Care Initiatives
As reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Fox Chapel Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh has a history of facilitating public policy initiatives centered on improving children’s health. It all reportedly began in the midst of the 1980s downturn in the steel industry:
When [a group of former steelworkers] … showed up at the Fox Chapel Presbyterian Church in the spring of 1984, the Rev. John Galloway stopped the service and invited them to address the congregation. Their stories that day were followed by emotional meetings with church and community leaders in which they described life without medical benefits for their children, according to church records.
Charlie LaVallee, longtime executive director of the Highmark Caring Foundation and former Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield vice president, called Fox Chapel Presbyterian the “catalyst” for the program he helped develop into state law that later served as the model for the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Today, reports the Post-Gazette, the church is donating space to the Pediatric Palliative Care Coalition, formed in 2012 to assist those caring for children with life-threatening illnesses, a group of patients typically underserved by existing entities, including hospices. Partnering with the coalition seems a natural fit for the church, which is reported to have raised $50,000 in the early 2000s, “much of it going to help palliative care at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC.” The story explains that the coalition, which includes several regional hospitals, “is currently advocating for two bills in the General Assembly involving pediatric palliative care,” and focuses on “connecting families and medical providers” and “helping educate hospices about a provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires state Medicaid programs to cover both life-sustaining treatment and hospice for qualified children under 21.”
The activities of Fox Chapel Presbyterian Church serve as a helpful reminder of how nonprofits in general, and religious nonprofits in particular, serve a vital role in both the delivery of social services in this country and the shaping of the nation’s public policy. The story reports how the church listened to the voices of a segment of the population facing great needs that were not being met by either government or the nonprofit sector. The church has raised money to help meet these needs. The church has also donated physical space to aid the effort. And the church, by helping raise public awareness of a problem, has even contributed in some ways to the enactment of law and legislative proposals that have garnered broad support.
More broadly, Fox Chapel Presbyterian Church is yet another example in our country’s rich history of nonprofits, including churches, which take seriously their mission and their duty to advance their mission by exercising their rights to participate in the intersection of the private and public spheres. What this church is doing to help promote children’s health would likely garner the applause of most of us. Other efforts – such as promoting the health, and even the very lives, of children who have not yet made it out of their mothers’ bodies – would elicit a more varied response among the general population. But this is the nature of a pluralistic universe of actors in a civil society that includes nonprofit entities in all of their varied stripes. Let us not forget that, when we embrace, even support, the efforts of a nonprofit such as Fox Chapel Presbyterian Church, we are recognizing the right of every nonprofit to act similarly to advance its mission.
JRB