ABSTRACT
The theory of the poverty cycle, and the paradoxical principle of individual rehabilitation through institutional change settled into a new orthodoxy, setting new criteria of performance for government and social agencies at every level. By the spring of 1965, the original sponsors of community action were preparing to hand on their responsibilities to the poverty programme, at once proud that their movement had graduated into a major instrument of national policy, and nervous of its continuing integrity on so large a scale. The poverty programme set out knowing how politically and administratively embarrassing a strict methodology of planned experimentation could be. In San Francisco, for instance, a group of Civil Rights leaders refused to endorse the City's poverty programme until the Negro, Chinese and Spanish-speaking communities were properly represented on its Council. The civil service is to implement the wishes of the neighbourhood representatives who control the poverty programme, while it remains responsible to conventional government for its established functions.
