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The National Fatherhood Initiative has put its stamp on the American consciousness, with savvy television commercials promoting fathering, and with its message, which might be summed up in these words: Fathers are significant.
It has programs in prisons, in the military, in churches, in YMCAs and in communities around the country. It is regularly described as a leading producer of research on fatherhood.
And it got started here in Lancaster.
NFI, which is marking its 15th anniversary, was founded by Don Eberly, an East Hempfield Township resident who served in the White House under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
Eberly said he first started thinking about the issue of "father absence" when he worked as a residential adviser and dorm leader at Girard College, a boarding school for fatherless boys in Philadelphia. In counseling the boys at Girard, Eberly found that "the thing they really cared most about was the sense of loss they felt over not being raised by their fathers," he said in a recent interview.
Eberly convened a meeting on father absence in 1993, and the National Fatherhood Initiative was founded a year later.
The consensus at that first meeting was that it would take a broad-based social movement to change American culture, which, in Eberly's view, had come to downplay the importance of fathers to the well-being of children.
NFI's first challenge was convincing people that father absence was a legitimate concern. The organization pointed to research tying father absence to a wide range of social ills, including poverty, substance abuse, child abuse and educational failure.
In 1995, the Ad Council began to create public service advertisements for the fatherhood organization.
This was a huge development, giving NFI "access to the airwaves of America," Eberly said.
The resulting TV ads "were not threatening in the way that the gender politics of the day could have made the subject threatening," Eberly said.
With slogans such as "It Takes a Man to Be a Dad," and "Have You Been a Dad Today?" the ads put NFI on the map, and provided momentum, which Eberly said carried the organization for years.
NOW scoffsThere was some suspicion of NFI from those who thought the organization sought to promote traditional gender roles.
Wade F. Horn, the initiative's first president — who later would be dubbed the "marriage czar" when he served in President George W. Bush's administration — was regarded as a staunch promoter of traditional marriage.
But Eberly insisted that NFI wanted no part of the culture wars over women's roles.
"We basically said, 'Listen to us and just watch us. This is about children,' " Eberly said, noting that his message was: "This is a new era. We want to make this fatherhood thing work, and if we succeed, this is going to be good for women, especially our daughters. ... This is not about rolling the clock back for women."
The National Organization for Women, however, remains skeptical about NFI's aims.
In 2007, NOW and a group called Legal Momentum filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, alleging that programs funded by the Bush administration, in its "Responsible Fatherhood" initiative, were illegally excluding women.
Some of those programs were run by NFI.
The women's groups also complained that it was Horn — as Bush's assistant secretary for children and families — who had directed funding to NFI.
Terry O'Neill, president of NOW, asserted that the fatherhood initiative has managed to attract federal funding for its men-only programs that she believes should have been spent on families.
And she accused NFI of cloaking what she regards to be a right-wing political agenda in soft-focus images about fatherhood, and in bland language about responsibility.
"They have nice, pretty words: 'We want to be good dads,' " O'Neill said mockingly in a phone interview. "What they want to do is divert money from families who need it."
O'Neill likened the National Fatherhood Initiative to the Promise Keepers. She asserted that both groups purport to champion male responsibility, but are really about promoting a politically conservative, traditional view of marriage and family.
"If you want kids to be parented well, let's talk about families," and try to help all kinds of families, O'Neill maintained.
She said that "insisting that the father is the center of attention when it comes to families ... strokes the egos of men, and does nothing for children."
It's bipartisanVincent DiCaro, NFI's senior director of public affairs, said NFI was "not interested in getting into a shouting match with anybody."
But DiCaro said, sarcatically, that someone should tell Oprah Winfrey and President Barack Obama "that we are a right-wing organization."
Winfrey had Roland Warren — who succeeded Horn as NFI's president in 2001 — on her show four times, and said "they were some of her best shows," DiCaro said in an e-mail.
Warren has been named to Obama's fatherhood task force, DiCaro said, noting that the Obama administration "has made responsible fatherhood a domestic policy priority."
And the late Sen. Ted Kennedy was part of NFI's bipartisan Senate task force on fatherhood for more than a decade, DiCaro said.
NFI, which has task forces in both the Senate and U.S. House of Representatives, has as many Democratic supporters in Congress as Republican ones, he said.
But NFI's liberal critics point out that the organization was launched with funding from Richard Mellon Scaife, a Pittsburgh philanthropist known for his support of right-wing causes.
Eberly said NFI started with the help of six foundations, one of which was the Scaife Family Foundation. He said the Scaife funding "quickly tapered off.
"We don't spend a lot of time being distracted by critics," Eberly said, in an e-mail. "If any organization out there wants to oppose our attempts to improve the well-being of children by increasing the number of kids raised by committed, loving fathers, then let them say so.
"But that is our mission, and we remain neutral on a whole host of other issues; we don't promote men or men's rights, we're not a political advocacy group, and after 15 years, that is plainly obvious to most."
'Three-E' strategyNFI doesn't see itself as political, but it moved from Lancaster in 1997 to Gaithersburg, Md., to be closer to the action in the nation's capital.
It now has nearly 40 people on staff. It offers community-based programming to incarcerated fathers, new fathers and military dads, and offers a wide range of fatherhood curricula. It has partnered with such organizations as the YMCA, the national PTA, the Salvation Army, the National Guard, the NBA and the NFL.
It has a federal contract to run the government's National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse, which tracks research on the effects of father absence.
NFI "has really become more than I imagined," said Eberly, who remains on the organization's board, and is the board's honorary chairman.
Warren said that instead of creating NFI chapters in every hamlet across the country, NFI forged partnerships with existing organizations where men could be found — the military, churches, health care settings, community-based organizations, prisons.
Employing what it calls its "three-E" strategy — educating, equipping and engaging — NFI created a fatherhood program, "InsideOut Dads," for incarcerated fathers. It created a character-building program called "Dadventures" for the YMCA and others. It created fathering programs that businesses can add to their employee-assistance programs.
"A flea on the back of an elephant can walk through walls," Warren said, noting, "We decided to find as many elephants as we can and climb on board."
As the organization has grown, it has expanded its focus from father absence to the promotion of responsible fathering. One aspect of this campaign drew some heat.
Bus stop ads created for NFI showed black kids delivering messages such as: "Easter Bunny. Tooth Fairy. Daddy. Eventually kids stop believing in things they don't see."
DiCaro said, "Those ads were focus-group-tested to no end," and African-Americans helped NFI to choose those messages.
But Glenn Sacks, executive director of Fathers & Families, a group pressing for family-court reform, asserted in a column that the bus stop ads unfairly targeted African-American fathers.
DiCaro said the controversy was a small one, and that the ads were mostly well-received.
Eberly said the NFI's aim has been to "challenge dads, whatever their circumstances, to do a better job of being engaged."
Warren, who is black, said other groups and researchers used to view father absence mostly in the context of the African-American "fragile family.
"We framed the issue more around how it's impacting kids," Warren said.
He noted that a father in well-to-do Scarsdale, N.Y., might be absent from his family for different reasons than a father in hardscrabble Trenton, N.J., "but the impact on the child is the same."
Warren has spoken openly about the absence of his own father when he was growing up. "You wrestle with absence," he said. "You have to frame that absence: Why is he not here? Is there something about me? ... Part of our humanity is wrestling with our history."
It is "ridiculous" to dismiss the importance of a father's absence to a child, Warren said.
Still an issueWarren said he sees NFI's current aims as these: "helping dads who are present be the best dads they can possibly be, working with boys to be the best dads they can possibly be ... and getting fathers mobilized to step into the gaps left by absent fathers."
The initiative also has sought to transform society's views of fathers. Too often, television fathers are portrayed as being "either dumb, dangerous or disaffected," Warren said, adding, "We've gone from 'Father Knows Best' to fathers know nothing."
In an NFI national survey titled "Pop's Culture," fathers cited the media as a major obstacle to fathering.
On Dec. 1, NFI released another national survey, "Mama Says," which examined the views of mothers on fatherhood. Among the findings: 93 percent of the mothers surveyed said there is a father-absence crisis in the United States.
"It gives us an on-ramp to talk to moms," Warren said, noting that more men "go to women for support on their fatherhood journey than to their own dads."
Said Warren: "Moms are in the fatherhood business whether they want to be or not."
Suzanne Cassidy is a staff writer for the Sunday News. Her e-mail address is scassidy@lnpnews.com.
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