The Marriage Resource Center receives funding from a variety of government, private and individual sources.
“We prefer to look at what our class attendees say. As we hear people responding, anecdotally, we’ve heard them tell us that they would be divorced today if not for the training they received in our classes,” Nissley said. “We realize this is not ‘statistical,’ but we’ve seen a lot of positive results.”
The Los Angeles Times’ article cited data from the Administration for Children and Families, which stated by the end of this fiscal year, the federal government will have spent roughly $800 million of welfare budget funds on its Healthy Marriage Initiative. The article said this spending seems to have had no impact on the nation’s dropping marriage and rising divorce rates, citing a study by the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.
Those figures showed that between 2000 and 2010, marriage rates continued to drop. Divorce rates fell and rose, depending on the state, but there was little difference in the rates in states that spent a lot on the Healthy Marriage Initiative. Washington, D.C., saw its marriage rate increase by 35 percent, but researchers said rapidly changing demographics was the cause for the rise.
Nissley said locally based statistics paint a different picture.
“Here locally, we have seen divorce rates come down since 2004 at the rate of 30 to 40 percent in Clark County, and that’s looking just at the number of weddings per year vs. number of divorces,” said Nissley, citing statistics from the Ohio Supreme Court. Those statistics were based on information received from the state’s probate courts. His group tracks statistics for Clark, Greene and Champaign counties.
“Greene County is even lower, and unfortunately Champaign has been higher,” he said, adding that it takes a community, not just one organization, to make a difference. “We know we can’t claim that success just ourselves. There are many marriage counselors and marriage ministries in some of the larger churches that have helped build marriages in our area also.”
Around the turn of the century, area ratios, based on Ohio Supreme Court data, showed there were as many divorces as there were marriages. Those numbers have improved. For every 100 weddings in Clark County, there were 71.59 divorces in 2012; in 2013 that number rose to about 81 divorces.
Last year, there were 4.43 divorces per thousand citizens, and it has been as high as 6.67 per thousand.
The Marriage Resource Center recently did a “return on investment study,” using the third-party organization ICF Macro, on the impact it has made vs. dollars spent. The study concluded that the total number of divorces averted through Marriage Resource Center programs in 2010 was 30 out of 283 couples who participated.
The economic impact on the area by saving 30 marriages was estimated to be about $384,000. That was found in savings from projected improved physical and mental health, violence avoided, additional tax revenue (from improved earnings) and public costs (justice system, income/child support, nutrition, health, social services and housing). The center’s budget that year was about $192,000.
Nissley understands whatever success the center has enjoyed is due in large part to the funding it has received from the government. And with budget cuts hitting many programs, he is concerned.
“As with anything, you can’t rely definitely on government funding,” he said.
The current three-year grant that provides nearly 90 percent of Marriage Resource Center funding ends in September. The goal is to become less reliant on government help.
“Ideally, over the next number of years, we’d like to get closer to 33 percent public (funding), 33 percent private and 33 percent fee for services,” Nissley said.
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