the right track? NCJW is convinced that we are clearly moving in the righ direction at last—trying new ideas and methods, building avenues for reaching those people who most need help and have not gotten it through establishe channels.

For example, one new idea under discussion is "maximum feasible participa tion" of the poor. Much stress is placed on the great value of allowing the people who know their own problems best to decide on their solution. But let us not underestimate another great value this difficult OEO proviso has nur tured. The good, public-spirited, dedicated people who serve in social agencies and sit on their boards are coming to a new and different view of the problems of the poor. Already, we are viewing the people we serve less as "clients" and more as "colleagues." This change is a profound one, with a potentially profound effect on our communities. This new outlook alone may one day provide the bridge that will link the isolated poverty community to the mainstream of American life.

The general observations I make here are based on direct experience with a number of aspects of the anti-poverty program. NCJW's years of pioneering pre-school programs for disadvantaged children put us in a good position to judge how revolutionary and far-reaching have been the consequences of Fed eral entry into this crucial aspect of education. Indeed, we take special pride in the success of Project Head Start, since our own work in the field has convinced us of the tremendous value of pre-schooling, but our small resources could barely dent the problem.

Voluntary organizations know of numerous programs like Head Start that are good, obvious, appealing and answer a tremendous need. We, however. can only demonstrate them on a small scale, and press for their wider adoption. To operate fully and most advantageously, even the best anti-poverty programs need the stimulus and support of Federal planning and funds. It would have taken decades to match the progress made this past year in Project Head Start had the initiative for pre-school programs been left exclusively to private agencies, individual states and communities.

The benefits to the youngsters in Head Start programs are obvious. The offshoot benefits, we are convinced, will prove even more beneficial and far-reaching over the years. Many of the communities with Head Start programs have never had kindergartens, no less pre-school facilities for youngsters of low-income families. Already Project Head Start has stimulated countless communities to begin to fill these longstanding lacks. Our own NCJW Section in Nashville, Tenn., can claim credit for persuading that city to introduce kindergartens in its public schools for the first time. In other instances we know of, mothers of Head Start youngsters are becoming involved directly in school and community affairs. joining new community programs of far-reaching importance. We are proud too of the contribution our members are making as volunteers in Head Start and of the growing number of auxiliary services they are providing in their communities. For this means that Project Head Start can become the starting point for a great variety of anti-poverty programs of importance at the community level. The total community, underprivileged and privileged alike, are drawn into action to enrich the lives of the communities' youngsters and their families.

A vast proportion of the poor are elderly, and Council, with its longstanding record of service to the aging, is deeply concerned over current efforts to direct anti-poverty resources into much-needed solutions to the complex problems of the aged. Council Sections are urging local Community Action Programs (CAP's) to develop programs which will meet needs of the elderly poor. NCJW members took an active role in the OEO's Medicare Alert, using this emergency program as an opportunity to discern and spotlight specific needs of this neglected age group, among the hardest hit by poverty. Our participation in Medicare Alert and exploration with groups of elderly poor have pointed up a two-fold need in our communities: for a wide variety of services, and for income-maintenance programs. We, therefore, urge that OEO continue the development of national programs such as Foster Grandparents, the proposed Home Health Aides, and other part-time employment programs in community services. We also urged that increased funds be made available to local CAP's to set up services par ticularly needed by the elderly poor. With extension of the Economic Opportu nity Act, NCJW looks forward to pushing forward on the many essential programs that are needed to combat poverty among the elderly.

We have been deeply involved in another key OEO program: the Women's Job Corps. As one of the four major women's organizations in Women in Community Service (WICS), we have involved hundreds of our members in the volunteer screening and recruiting of girls 16-21 for enrollment in the Job Corps.

There has been much talk about the high cost per Job Corps enrollee, about the relatively small number in Centers, and about a few highly publicized instances of community friction. We are indeed disappointed. We believe that every effort must be exerted to establish more Centers and reach more girls. Even at best, we realize, this program will serve only a small fraction of those eligible for benefits under the EOA. Thus we would like on this occassion to warn against seeking a "mass" solution to the "mass" problem of poverty. The numbers of people to be reached are so large that there is a tendency to provide a little of the same for everyone. This is probably one of the major reasons why welfare programs have not been more successful.

If we in NCJW have learned anything from our experience with WICS and other OEO programs, it is that there is no such entity as "the poor". There are simply people, with a multitude of serious problems and handicaps that prevent them from coping with modern life. At this point, most, even with a decent income, would not be able to perform in the way society expects them to.

For the most part, the girls we have met need basic education, skill training, help in learning how to be homemakers and mothers and, above all, a sense of their own worth. WICS' contract with the OEO has, we submit, made a tremendous difference in the lives of the girls reached. There is quite a difference between an unemployment office referral to a training program or job—and the total services offered by WICS and the Women's Job Corps.

The WICS volunteers take a direct interest in the girl and her family from the day she walks into the office. They not only see her through the screening process, but see her off on the plane, make sure she has clothes and luggage, keep in touch with her at the Center, welcome her home and keep track of her career after she leaves the Center. These is a vast difference too between Job Corps and neighborhood job training a few hours a day; in the latter, a girl must then return to a most difficult environment. The first Christmas holiday from Job Corps Centers proved this point dramatically. A number of enrollees who came home for vacation returned early to the Centers, unwilling to face their homes and neighborhoods any longer than necessary. At a Job Corps Center, the girl has a chance to find herself in a completely new environment, where her whole life is the concern of kind and capable professional workers. I am by no means minimizing the difficulties and problems of the Centers, but let us not lose sight of the major values.

It is certainly not my intention to downgrade community job training or education programs. We believe that these too must be expanded and strengthened. WICS' contract with the OEO, originally confined to Job Corps screening and recruitment, has been extended. Now our members have begun to work with the young girls they have grown to know, and their families, helping them better their lives right at home through available community resources and, when needed, new programs and facilities created to meet express needs. In cooperation with Community Action Programs, WICS volunteers are mounting programs to serve the special needs of impoverished girls and women in their own home neighborhoods. Because of this, we are deeply concerned by recent action taken by the House endangering the future of many valuable CAP programs. We thus urge the Senate to increase authorization for CAP programs so that many of these activities may be continued.

For many reasons, we urge you to measure the OEO's Women's Job Corps program not on the rigid grounds of the number of girls directly enrolled. For there have been unexpected dividends in working on this program which should not be underestimated.

An inestimable gain has accrued, we submit, from what the Job Corps program has done for us, middle-class women volunteers, in making us directly cognizant of the problems of our communities' least privileged young girls and their families and friends. We are involved, and participating, directly and on a person-to-person basis, in the war against poverty. And once we've gotten started on this realistic, human basis, we are not about to stop.

In 135 communities, Catholic, Negro, Protestant and Jewish women volunteers are joined together, many for the first time, in a concerted effort to support a national movement to eliimnate poverty. Women in Community Service, by

seeking out the girls who could benefit most from the opportunity to join the Job Corps, began to reach the once-unreachable segments of the population National Council of Jewish Women is convinced that this represents an im portant step forward, and has based a major portion of its current program on further efforts to work with the OEO and community groups against poverty. Let me conclude with a simple illustration of the kind of thing that is happen. ing. In the beginning of our work together, one of our most difficult assignments was to find a representative of the poor who could sit on WICS planning councils. Our members did not know how to find such a person; indeed, they were almost embarrassed to look. This is no longer the case. As volunteers got to know the mothers of the girls who pass through WICS office, they soon found themselves plannig and working together without any strain or effort. An accom plishment like this cannot be measured in dollars. But you can be sure that highly professionalized and expensive programs, specifically designed to achieve these ends, could not be more successful.

In the community, women of all backgrounds are just beginning to know and understand one another. Extension of the Economic Opportunity Act will enable us to build on these new relationships, and to extend our new ways of working in the community to answer the direct needs of women and girls at the bottom of the economic and social ladder. This is much to be desired, after decades of isolation in separate groups demarked by race, social status, income level, religion.

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DOROTHY I. HEIGHT, NATIONAL PRESIDENT, NATIONAL COUNCIL OF NEGRO WOMEN, INC.

Mr. Chairman and members of the senate subcommittee, I am happy to have this opportunity to meet with this distinguished committee which has played such a prominent role in expanding educational, welfare and work opportunities for all the people of our country.

Through the Economic Opportunity Act hope and help have been made possible for the "one fifth of our citizens" who, only a year ago were well on their way to a life of hopelessness and despair, too often with welfare their only inheritance. Whatever the administrative problems of initiating a program of this magnitude, there is clear evidence that the existence of the legislation itself has begun to create a climate of expectation.

I am Dorothy I. Height, National President of the National Council of Negro Women. We are 3,850,000 women in all walks of life we are housewives. working women, women in business and in the professions. We know first hand what it is to live in all kinds of neighborhoods but overwhelmingly, we find ourselves living in the ghettos and blighted areas across the country.

As president of the National Council of Negro Women, I speak from the vantage point of an organization begun by a great American, Mary McLeod Bethune.

Mrs. Bethune, born poor of slave parents, knew well that only with a unity of purpose and action between relatively advantaged and deprived Negroes could produce the resources necessary to wage an effective war on mankind's ancient enemies-poverty, illness, illiteracy and discrimination. In 1935 she organized the NCNW, as her dream of a kind of national recovery act because both the trained and the untrained Negro woman were outside the mainstream of American decision and opportunity.

For years we have provided for ourselves, services that our white sisters could take for granted. We are not a new resource in our communities. We have been there all the time working with our neighbors and neighborhoods. But even the middle class Negro woman has been deprived of participation in the mainstream of voluntarism that has made America great.

Today we are at work in forty-seven states, and represent twenty-seven national organizations, a true cross section. One common threat has always kept us together-privileged and underprivileged-the desire to continue an historic involvement in "self help projects".

In a real sense, poverty statistics are close to the Negro woman's life. Current statistical data suggest that Negro women are the "poorest of the work ing poor". Fourteen million women sixteen years old and over-more than a fifth of all women in the United States-are among the thirty-five million

people living in poverty. An estimated three million non-white women, or two-fifths of all non-white women are poor, in contrast to about one-fifth of all white women. Their median income is the lowest in the nation.

Negro women marry at a high rate only three percent being single at the age of 65. Yet they have a harder time maintaining a stable family life. They have more children, are in the labor market longer, have less education, earn less, are widowed earlier and carry a heavier economic burden as a family head than their white counterpart.

Whenever the Negro woman works-and she is likely to work most of her life-she is paid less, on the average, than Negro and white men and white women. Forty-four percent of all Negro women work outside their homes. In 1960, nearly 900,000 Negro women, one-third of all Negro female workers worked as service workers or "domestics"; marketing still the skills of their ancestors who toiled as slaves in the homes of their masters.

Over 25% of all non-white families in America today are headed by women and the median wage for white families headed by women was only $3,000 in 1961. Families in the non-white group earn proportionally less. Negro female workers are triply handicapped. They are concentrated in non-union employment, with discrimination on the basis of both race and sex and inadequate education and training standing between them and successful competition in the market place. In 1960, a little over half of all non-white women had completed eight grades of elementary school (56.7%) as compared to (82.1%) of the white women. More significantly, less than a fourth the number of Negro women completed college as white women.

As women, we can truly say that something new has come into our lives through the Economic Opportunity Act. The Poverty Program has made possible a positive approach to many of our problems. The shame is no longer ours; it is shared by the nation. Often we can be the connecting link to different neighborhoods. At last there are funds to do the job as it needs to be done.

Our women have taken hold as sponsors of day care centers, Head Start projects, Kindergarten Alerts, and a wide range of community services. New opportunities confront us every day.

The poverty program enjoins our natural interests. For example, we look to community action for help in upgrading the skills of the household workers— for over 50% of all Negro women who work are in household service. We look to Project Headstart for help with small children-many of whom grow up in fatherless homes with working mothers who need assistance in preparing children for a lifetime of learning.

We are especially interested in the 500.000 girls between 16 and 21 who are out of work, out of school and in poverty. The Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor reports that the most unemployed group in the U.S.A. is the teen-age non-white girl. It concerns us that across the country so little is done with girls.

The Women's Job Corps and the experience as a part of Women in Community Service have brought a new dimension to our lives. At last something has caught the imagination of thousands of girls. Their response to the Job Corps gives women the handle they have needed to take hold.

We have new appreciation of the values of a residential training program. The residential experience of the Job Corps provides these proven values: an opportunity to be lifted out of an environment of despair to make a fresh start; an opportunity to live in a community where homemaking skills and human relations are practiced and can be carried over into her own family, and a chance to learn occupational skills that she can market for a fair wage; and the opportunity to learn from others in building the strengths that are in the

group.

We join in the plea for more Job Corps Centers to meet the need felt by so many girls. Whatever it takes to get a variety of contractors, universities as well as businesses, private agencies as well as industrial firms, deserves to be tried with full appreciation of their demonstrated ability and dedication to work with this population. Organizations like the Y.W.C.A., for example, came into being to provide similar residential programs for girls. They have over 111 years of experience training girls for jobs, homemaking skills and other

aspects of Job Corps. In many quarters the question is asked: "Is it not pos sible to give technical assistance for the development of such educational centers?"

We found, Mr. Chairman, both north and south our work in WICS is helping to bring Negro women volunteers into the mainstream of volunteer service. We, therefore, welcomed the opportunity to join as women of different races and faiths to work on the problem of the 16-21 year old disadvantaged girls We have strentghened religious and interracial ties in communities across the land. We ourselves are a kind of demonstration project. This has helped us to become better Americans, and it has given poverty stricken girls necessary community support to lift their heads high and go on for a second chance. Thanks to the Economic Opportunity Act, the challenge of the Job Corps, and our involvement in WICS-we have reached some girls in poverty-but what is more important, we have a new commitment against poverty and we have found each other.

PREPARED STATEMENT OF MISS MARGARET MEALEY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CATHOLIC WOMEN

My name is Miss Margaret Mealey. I am Executive Director of the National Council of Catholic Women.

The National Council of Catholic Women is a federation of 14,000 national and local Catholic organizations of women throughout the United States and on American military bases overseas. NCCW unites these organizations and provides them with a variety of adult education materials and service program. The local organizations operate within a framework of 117 Diocesan Councils of Catholic Women across the country.

At our 32nd national convention held here in the nation's capitol in November 1964, we adopted the following resolution:

Because one-fifth of our brothers live in conditions of degradation and hopelessness-a poverty of hunger, sickness, illiteracy and joblessness-we call upon Catholic women to support all efforts in the war against poverty. We urge them to take their places in the forefront of community action programs designed to help the young people, the elderly, the poverty stricken families out of their vicious circle of poverty. We recommend that Catholic women involve themselves in their community's programs to attack poverty at its source and to eliminate its causes-poor education, lack of skills, unsafe housing, lack of medical care.

Our members across the country have backed their resolution with action. They are serving on local community action boards and on migrant councils. They have volunteered their services for Head Start and Neighborhood Youth Corps programs.

They are involved in literacy programs and employment surveys in their

communities.

By the thousands, they are actively participating in the program closest to our organization-Women In Community Service. WICS was formed by mem bers of NCCW, NCJW, NCNW and UCW in their common concern for the educa tional, social, economic and spiritual welfare of young girls and women. In carving out the special role which concerned women might play in the war on poverty, WICS contracted with the Office of Economic Opportunity to recruit and screen disadvantaged young women, 16 through 21, for the Women's Job Corps.

From the start, WICS intended to be more than the official screening agency for the girls. We realized these girls and their families would need the continuing support of women who cared about them and their problems. WICS has established person to person relationships which have provided motivation and encouragement to the girls and reassurance to their families. We feel a great sense of responsibility to the girls and their families, and we want the very best kind of training centers for the girls.

I am sure WICS volunteers across the country shares with me the thrill of seeing our Job Corps girls when they were home on Christmas leave. Poised well groomed, animated with a new spirit of hope and accomplishment, they