Chattanooga Success Story

Strategic giving reverses high rates of divorce and absentee fathers
Karin Glendenning
March 1, 2003

In 1997 a group of Tennessee businessmen gathered to talk about the direction of their city. “We wanted to know how we could really make a difference in Chattanooga,” says Hugh O. Maclellan Jr., chairman of the board of the Maclellan Foundation. “We realized that the city’s biggest problem was the breakdown of families, and that every part of Chattanooga was being affected by it.” These civic leaders confronted grim statistics that showed Chattanooga families were suffering from unusually high rates of divorce, fatherlessness, and teen pregnancies, which were hurting not only the individuals immediately involved, but the community as a whole. Chattanooga’s numbers stood out:

• The rate of divorce in Chattanooga was 50 percent higher than the national average. (The state of Tennessee as a whole ranked fourth worst in the nation for divorce.)
• Chattanooga had the fifth worst out-of-wedlock birth rate of 128 other cities in the United States. A 1994 study showed 50 percent of births in the city and 39 percent of births in the county were to unwed mothers.
• One in three Tennessee families were headed by a single parent, compared to one in four nationwide; the state ranked third from last in the nation.

The philanthropists understood what these bleak facts meant for their city. Numerous studies demonstrated that divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and the absence of fathers greatly increased a person’s likelihood of suffering a number of ills, including:

• living in poverty
• achieving less in school and later life
• committing crime
• abusing drugs and alcohol
• having poor health
• dying younger

As David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project and professor of sociology at Rutgers University, observed in Philanthropy’s March/April 2002 issue, “Children from broken homes, compared to children from intact families, have six times the chance of growing up poor. For other youth problems like delinquency and teen pregnancies, the rates for broken-home children are two to three times what they are for children from intact families.” Public policy and philanthropic initiatives are both “doomed to failure” if they ignore the indispensable contributions of healthy marriages, Popenoe concludes.

After considering these serious problems, the group of concerned Chattanoogans realized the city’s health depended on the health of its families. They set out to found an organization that would strengthen the ties that bind.

The approach, they decided, should be proactive, not reactive—a premise that would set their organization apart from many other social service groups, which seem to assume nothing can be done to stem the erosion of family bonds. By focusing on preventive strategies, the donors hoped to stop family break-ups before the worst happened, not just devise ways to aid already-distressed families.

In August 1997, they founded First Things First (FTF), and it set to work to reach three bold strategic goals: first, to reduce the number of divorces filed in Hamilton County by 30 percent; second, to reduce out-of-wedlock births in the county by 30 percent; and third, to increase the involvement of fathers in raising their children by 30 percent.

“We knew we had to have an organization that could do marketing and public relations,” says Maclellan, whose foundation was the principal organizing donor of FTF. They spoke with Marriage Savers, a nonprofit group based in Potomac, Maryland, that helps communities devise ways to strengthen marriages and lessen divorce, “and they told us we needed two things to be successful: a sharp person to run the organization, and people to train mentors who would walk alongside married couples and advise them. We asked community leaders to join with us, and it quickly spread to every segment of our community,” Maclellan says.

Today, FTF can already claim some formidable successes in the areas it addresses (see nearby charts). From 1996 to 2002, divorce filings in Hamilton County decreased by 21 percent, and the rate of divorces decreased by 16.7 percent. Out of wedlock pregnancies decreased by 21 percent for teenage mothers. Several different programs encouraging fathers to take active roles in their children’s lives have been instituted across the community in schools, hospitals, churches, corporations, even prisons, and have drawn large enrollments. First Things First has “achieved their objective far better than I thought, especially in improving fathering and reducing divorce,” Maclellan tells Philanthropy. “You can have singles, doubles, and occasionally a home run. First Things First is a home run. It’s the best bang for our buck,” he says of the foundation’s funding, in which it matches other gifts up to a total grant of $300,000.