Introduction

Strong and stable families play an integral role in advancing the welfare of children, men, women, and communities. When it comes to children, as Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan and Brookings economist Isabel Sawhill have observed, “most scholars now agree that children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms.” The research tells us that children from intact, married homes are more likely to flourish in school, to graduate from college, to be gainfully employed, and to steer clear of detours, such as incarceration and teen pregnancy, that can derail their lives. Men and women who get and remain stably married are much more likely to enjoy higher incomes, greater assets, and better physical and mental health. And, finally, communities across the U.S. with more married parents have markedly higher levels of economic mobility and median family income, as well as significantly lower levels of child poverty and crime. Strong and stable families pay large dividends for children, adults, and communities.

There’s a growing social scientific consensus, then, that such families are ideal. But this consensus coexists with two awkward social and political facts in America:

1) Over the last half century, the U.S. has witnessed a dramatic retreat from marriage, and

2) The nation has not yet identified public policies that make a dramatic difference in renewing marriage and family stability.

Since 1970, the marriage rate (per 1,000 people) dropped by about 30%, the divorce rate (per 1,000 people) rose by more than 30% (peaking around 1980), nonmarital childbearing increased from 11% to 39%, and—most importantly—the share of children living with two married parents declined from 85% to 65%.

The end result is that marriage is less likely to anchor the lives of men and women in this country and to provide children with the stability and security they need to thrive in today’s world.

What’s more, public initiatives to revive marriage and strengthen family stability have met with mixed success. Since 2006, the federal government has provided grants to community organizations to provide marriage and relationship education (MRE) services targeted primarily to disadvantaged, at-risk individuals and couples. Evaluations of these efforts have not proved consistently positive, however, and effect sizes, where they have been found, have not been large. In a study of programs in eight cities serving unmarried couples having a child together, only one site—Oklahoma City—showed that participants had greater family stability over the course of three years than a control group of similar couples, although the 20% increase in stability for couples at that one site was an important outcome. According to another rigorous study, programs targeted to low-income married couples usually yield only minor improvements in marriage and family outcomes. A third study across all 50 states found evidence that investments in these types of programs had “small changes in the percentage of married adults in the population and children living with two parents.” One state in particular—Oklahoma— made headway in building a statewide initiative to deliver MRE services to hundreds of thousands of citizens to strengthen marriages and couple relationships across the state; nevertheless, the state Introduction THE PHILANTHROPY ROUNDTABLE 4 only witnessed modest increases in family stability. Another state, Texas, witnessed a 1.5% reduction in divorce rates after it passed a number of premarital education policies. Moreover, a new study of the Parents and Children Together (PACT) program found improvements in warmth, declines in domestic violence, and increases in family stability for couples in the program, compared to a control group of couples not in the program. But another evaluation found no evidence that community-wide MRE initiatives had a significant impact. Overall, then, publicly-funded efforts to support marriage and families have had, at best, modest success thus far.

In recent decades, however, a number of private, philanthropic efforts have launched to strengthen marriage and family life in cities, towns, and counties across the U.S. One such initiative is the Culture of Freedom Initiative (COFI), which was designed to strengthen marriage and family life in three counties across America—Duval County, FL, Maricopa County, AZ (county seat Phoenix), and Montgomery County, OH (county seat Dayton). COFI was founded and funded by The Philanthropy Roundtable from 2015-2018 with the intention of being spun off as an independent organization. Indeed, in late 2018, COFI went independent, has since been renamed Communio, and is now an independently operating nonprofit.

The Roundtable asked the Institute for Family Studies to study the impact of COFI. We focus in this report on the impact that COFI had on Duval County (2017 population: 937,934), the home of Jacksonville, Florida, both because COFI devoted the most money per capita and programmatic resources there and because divorce fell dramatically in the wake of COFI’s intervention in the area. (Note: The vast majority of Duval County is constituted by Jacksonville [2017 population: 892,062]; however, the four small independent municipalities of Atlantic Beach, Baldwin, Jacksonville Beach, and Neptune Beach also are included in the county.) Furthermore, COFI withdrew its support from Montgomery County, OH, in 2017 because it was dissatisfied with the programmatic activity of its nonprofit partners in the county, and there is no evidence that COFI had a marked impact on marriage and family trends in Maricopa County, AZ. In both counties, COFI was not able to build a large and deep network of nonprofits working to strengthen marriage and family life.

Since 2016, COFI, in partnership with Live the Life, a Florida nonprofit, and three other mobilizing organizations, worked with 93 churches and other local nonprofits to serve Duval County with a range of marriage and relationship education programs, public events, and a sustained public campaign on behalf of strong marriages and families in the Jacksonville area. In fact, COFI directly served more than 11,000 adults per year from 2016-2018, with a budget of about $1,750,000 per year for its Jacksonville area efforts. From 2016-2018, the initiative and its partners also sponsored more than 28 million digital impressions advertising its services and programs and promoting a marriage-friendly message in Duval County. And from 2015-2017, the divorce rate per 1,000 people in Duval County fell 27%. (Note: The divorce rate fell 24% from 2015-2018, as divorce ticked up slightly in 2018).

Accordingly, we seek to answer three related quantitative and qualitative sets of questions in this Institute for Family Studies report:

1) What does a qualitative portrait of the COFI suggest about the initiative’s character and potential impact, if any, on marriage and family life in Jacksonville—especially the divorce rate?

2) Did the decline in the Duval County divorce rate in the wake of the introduction of COFI exceed that of the decline in the U.S., in Florida, in other roughly comparable counties with a population of about 300,000 or more nationwide, and in counties/cities with large naval bases (like Jacksonville)? Are there comparable divorce declines in other large American counties from 2015-2017? In other words, does the descriptive evidence suggest that the divorce decline in Duval County was unusual?

3) Using data from the American Community Survey and administrative data from a number of counties and cities across the U.S., does the evidence suggest the divorce decline from 2015- 2017 was statistically significantly larger in Duval than declines in other counties, after controlling for a wide range of sociodemographic factors? In other words, does Duval County’s divorce decline look particularly large compared to other counties, even after controlling for factors such as the race, education, and income of their citizens?