Outgoing Anne Arundel County Executive Robert R. Neall is known as a technocrat and is often assumed to be indifferent to social issues. The image is not entirely accurate. Mr. Neall has thrown his support behind several innovative social programs, the most recent being a radical alternative to welfare.
C-DAP, which stands for Community-Directed Assistance Program, is the first program of its kind in Maryland and an experiment we'd like to see tried in other places. Granted, C-DAP's success has yet to be tested and is by no means assured. The first participants signed up just last week, and social services officials concede the program is proving much harder to get off the ground than they had hoped. But the concept -- requiring people to work quickly toward self-sufficiency and transferring responsibility for helping them do that from a government agency to the community -- is sound.
As designed by Anne Arundel's Director of Social Services Ed Bloom, C-DAP works like this: Instead of getting a monthly stipend from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, needy families get one county check equaling 12 months of welfare payments. Unlike AFDC, C-DAP involves no federal money, but contributions from the state and the county. A community sponsor -- perhaps a church, a charity, a civic group -- works with the family to set up a budget, doles out the county check and helps find jobs, housing and child care.