By October 1, 359 individuals currently on welfare in Charlottesville, Virginia, had to secure 30 hour-a-week jobs in order to continue receiving the full level of public assistance. One of these individuals is 22-year-old Shamika (her name and that of others in this article have been changed). She is an African-American single mom with a two-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter. Shamika lives in Blue Ridge Commons, a low-income housing community of a few hundred families. Blue Ridge Commons is
also the site of the Abundant Life Family Center, a church-sponsored outreach program for children and adults, which includes a life and job skills training initiative
we call JobKEYS.
Shamika is one of six participants in our inaugural Job KEYS class. Our experience in working with her -- and many of her neighbors -- has intimately acquainted us with the complexities behind the ubiquitous "welfare to work" slogan. Our congregation is firmly convinced that our work in Blue Ridge Commons is a necessary response to the Bible's call to love our neighbors and seek justice for the poor. We are less certain about how to love our needy neighbors effectively, but we are learning.
Perhaps our church's story-in-progress may encourage other congregations as they consider how to adapt their community outreach efforts in response to welfare reform.
Most of the 1,200 white, middle-class congregants at Trinity Presbyterian Church (PCA) were unfamiliar with the Blue Ridge Commons neighborhood until 1995, when it began to develop its urban ministry. A few remembered that a two-year-old girl was killed there in a 1994 shootout between rival drug lords, but her death was only another grim crime statistic. A homicide in Blue Ridge Commons over Thanksgiving 1996 produced a dramatically different reaction. Amy Denise Carter, the mother of Michael, a first-grade boy in our tutoring program at the Abundant Life Center, was gunned down in her upstairs bathroom by an estranged boyfriend while Michael and his younger siblings sat crying in the living room downstairs.
When our pastor announced the murder from the pulpit, many in the congregation wept openly. The minister put aside his prepared sermon, and we spent the morning in prayer and intercession. Suddenly this was our tragedy. We were experiencing the painful privilege of what Church Father Gregory of Nyssa defined as true mercy: "the voluntary sorrow that joins itself to the sufferings of another."
Our participation in this suffering has been confusing and often overwhelming. Dean, a medical student at the University of Virginia, was tutoring a fifth grader, and was moved when the boy cried over the imprisonment of his older brother and then told Dean that after God, his brother and his parents, Dean was the most important person in his life. Seventy-three-year-old Miriam called me up after she'd made Mother's Day cards with third graders during a tutoring session. She reported that one girl had written, "Dear Mommy, I love you. Please, please don't leave me."
The fear is not unrealistic. A six-year-old girl in our summer camp program went home one day and found her mother gone; the child and her three younger siblings had been farmed out to foster care. Volunteers working with the adult participants in the Job KEYS program have also had their eyes opened. One participant told us that she'd been called "nigger" on the job. Another, pregnant with her first child, admitted that her boyfriend had been beating her up and had even waved a sawed-off shotgun in her face.
In some of our previous attempts to serve poor families, our church's benevolence was at arms length; we addressed material needs but seldom developed face-to-face relationships. Through our efforts in Blue Ridge Commons, we've progressed falteringly toward a richer mercy. In the words of 19th-century London poverty fighter Octavia Hill, we've become willing not only to help the poor, but to know them.
If the church is to respond effectively to the new challenges faced by families on welfare, it must initiate targeted, holistic, relationally based programs that help the poor move toward a permanent transformation. Government officials increasingly look to the churches for help because they know that poor families need intensive support in order to make the transition from welfare to work. In Jackson, Mississippi; San Diego, California; Charlotte, North Carolina; Annapolis, Maryland; and other cities across the nation, local departments of social service are creating partnerships with congregations. Welfare families are mentored by small teams of church volunteers for six to 12 months. The difference in the amount of time granted to these families by churches as compared with that given by overburdened caseworkers is staggering. According to our local department of social services, for example, case workers spend an average of 39 hours per client over a six-month time period. By contrast, a welfare-to-work program in Annapolis that matches congregations with welfare families reports that their volunteers spend an average of 400 hours with the families during the six months they work together.
In Charlottesville we are imitating several aspects of the Annapolis initiative. Each of our Job KEYS participants is linked with a Friendship Circle of three to six individuals who help the participant write a resume, complete job applications, practice for job interviews, locate affordable day care and identify employment opportunities. More important, however, is the personal, caring support that these church volunteers offer. Shamika told one woman in her Friendship Circle that without their support she'd never be making it through the JobKEYS program.
The intensive, individualized support we're trying to offer is fundamental for
women like Shamika, who face a new and daunting challenge under welfare reform: strategic planning. The time limits imposed on cash assistance (two years at any one stretch and a lifetime limit of five years of aid) mean that recipients will have to decide two things: when they most need extra financial help, and how long they should stay on the welfare rolls at any particular time. Virginia's welfare reforms will work to the advantage of savvy recipients who thoroughly acquaint themselves with the new rules and then use assistance wisely over the short term in ways that will position them for long-term financial stability. Recipients who fail to make a series of necessary adjustments in light of the reforms will be left high and dry. Consequently, churches must make it a priority to stay with welfare recipients as they navigate the new realities, and must provide transitional services.
Under the old system, most welfare recipients were penalized when they entered the work force. Money earned through new jobs reduced the amount of their AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) checks, so no one had an economic incentive to work. Under the old system, recipients also faced what has been called the "cliff effect." That is, they could not make a gradual transition from welfare to work because as soon as they accepted employment, their food stamp and housing benefits were dramatically reduced or eliminated. (One program participant in Annapolis who secured a new job saw her rent in public housing skyrocket overnight from $25 per month to over $400.) In some instances, recipients lost Medicaid benefits as well.
The government's old approach seemed to equate employment with economic self-sufficiency. But that assumption is erroneous. Most welfare recipients secure minimum-wage jobs without benefits. With the added expenses of day care and transportation, these individuals cannot "make it" without continued assistance (for example, health insurance and food stamps). As one church volunteer in the Annapolis program pointed out, welfare recipients usually lack the kinds of practical support middleclass parents provide their adult children as they make the transition into their first "real" job -- used furniture for the new apartment, free rides to work, groceries, a small loan. Put simply, most welfare recipients need a couple of years to achieve complete independence from public aid.
Virginia's reforms address the deficiencies of the old system. The reforms are in some ways strict, in some ways generous: strict, because the able-bodied must go to work within 90 days; generous, because working recipients get to keep both their paychecks and their welfare checks and are eligible, after their two years of cash assistance, for a third year of "transitional" benefits (Medicaid, food stamps, day care vouchers, housing subsidies). Thus, recipients have a cushion of two to three years of government support while they move off of welfare and into the work force.
Through our JobKEYS program, we help participants design a workable strategy for this challenge. They enhance their marketability by learning computer keyboarding and word-processing skills. Our 12-session life skills curriculum teaches them how to communicate in the office, handle conflict, manage time, relate to authority, and set short- and long-term goals. A job counselor meets individually with participants to help them inventory their strengths, skills and interests.
The most important aspect of the program, though, is the personal support provided by the Friendship Circles. These caring mentors help participants outline the long series of steps theymust take to position themselves for life after welfare. Identifying and sequencing these steps is no easy task; it requires a forward-looking, strategic mind-set and a pattern of thinking, planning and deciding that is often foreign. Actually taking the steps is even harder, since that requires an invigorated self-discipline and, in some instances, significant changes in lifestyle and attitude. The sober reality is that making the transition from welfare to work can be a Herculean task. Consider Shamika. She is quick to admit that she has made many mistakes, but is now determined to make something better for herself and her family. The obstacles she faces are considerable: she lacks a high school diploma and is the sole care-giver for her two kids. Her work history is littered with short-lived jobs and dismissals. Although her eager attitude and enthusiasm are definite strengths, they can work to her disadvantage if not channeled appropriately.
A few months into our program, Shamika accepted two part-time positions through a local temping firm. She worked several hours in the morning for a catering service and then a few hours in the evening for UPS. While we affirmed her positive attitude toward work, we found ourselves cringing at the way her schedule wrecked havoc on her home life and stole time away from pursuits that would give greater long-term payoff. For example, when an accountant from church offered JobKEYS participants one-on-one budget counseling, Shamika, who has never lived on a budget and needs to learn how, was too busy to do it.
There is a kind of artificiality in the economic life of welfare recipients. They do not have to pay full market rent, and they buy their groceries with food stamps. Recipients sometimes overlook these technically "noncash" benefits; there's a sense that such perks have always been there and always will be. But with term limits they won't always be there, and recipients need to start living in a way that takes these future realities into account. Under the new rules, some are keeping both their employment and welfare income. These people are enjoying a greater cash now than ever. But after three years they will not receive any help from the state, so recipients must use their surplus income to create a cushion for the future. They must learn now how to live on the income that they will likely be making three years down the road, when all public assistance stops.
Recipients like Shamika must also think strategically about their employment. Accepting any job now, just to have a job, is unwise. The critical question is: What job can I take that will offer me opportunities for advancement, so that in three years,
when I do not have the cushion of public aid, I will be able to earn a salary sufficient to meet my expenses? Shamika's decisions about which firm to work with and what kind of position to accept are vitally important. Her spotty work history indicates she has had trouble retaining jobs beyond six months. If she spends the next three years hopping from one job to another, that sullied work history will kill her chances of finding a stable, decent-paying job later. She needs to take a job that she can retain for two to three years to position herself for the future.
As the October 1 deadline loomed, we encouraged some people to accept 30-hour-week jobs and use the remaining ten hours of the work week to plan for their independence from welfare. Our ministry aims to help them sharpen their office skills, design a personal budget, find affordable day care, determine what kind of work they think they can stick with, evaluate employment possibilities in terms of opportunity for advancement, and work on areas of personal weakness (managing their time better, presenting themselves well to potential employers, or carefully following directions). The message of welfare reform is not solely "Get a job!" It is also, "Prepare yourself for independence from the dole, for aid will not continue forever."
Many welfare recipients are completely unfamiliar with this kind of strategic planning. We are continually struck by the "present time" focus of some Blue Ridge families. My friends at Love, Inc., a local Christian charity, are familiar with the pattern: people call when it is too late to give them much help. Individuals receive notices from the utility company, warning them that their electricity will be cut off if they do not make a payment, yet they wait until the cut-off day to ask for help. Love, Inc., workers have repeatedly counseled people to call when they receive their first cut-off warning. In five years, only a handful of people have followed that advice.
Several factors explain this present-day orientation. Some people are simply overwhelmed with their financial problems and see no way to fix them. They mark time in the hopes that somehow, by some miracle, the problems will just go away. (I know one family that simply threw away their bills when they did not have the money to pay them.) Some present-day-focused adults grew up in families where this orientation was the norm: no one ever modeled an approach to life that considers tomorrow and next month as well as today. Others believe that there is no hope for the future, so why worry about it? Still others believe that they are unable to do anything to influence their own future-the future is beyond their control and life is something that happens to you, rather than something you make happen.
The old welfare system never challenged this present-day approach to life: aid was something you were entitled to for as long as you met the eligibility requirements. There was no economic need to plan for the future. Welfare reform has radically complicated the average recipient's decision-making process. To succeed under the reforms, many recipients will need to adopt a whole new approach to life.
For its part, the church needs to adopt a new approach to benevolence. In addition to shifting to an outreach that emphasizes personal relationships over food and money, congregations should reconsider the scope of their outreach services. At Trinity we have chosen to invest our financial and volunteer resources in one neighborhood
despite the fact that there are needy families throughout the city. The "neighborhood adoption" model is certainly not the only legitimate approach, but fairly large, well-off churches may find it a good fit.
In our case, the Abundant Life Family Center has become a catalyst for reknitting the neighborhood by providing supportive small groups. The JobKEYS class is a community within a community in which students encourage and challenge one another.
Since they all live within walking distance of one another, their relationships can grow outside of class. A sense of "being in this together" is nurtured in part by the intensity of our program (during the first phase, the classmates meet twice a week for three
hours and may work a third night in the computer lab). The accessibility of the center makes it easier for the participants to manage an intense program -- commuting three times each week to a distant location might be too much.
Because the program is visible in the neighborhood, participants enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that others are aware of their initiative. While a few Blue Ridge Commons residents sneer at the JobKEYS participants, others affirm and encourage them. When two of the community grandmothers, Mrs. Knight and Mrs. Rogers, spot the participants coming and going at the Family Center, they shout out words of encouragement. Mrs. Knight comes down to the computer lab to tell the young women how proud she is of them. She has offered to babysit Shamika's children while Shamika goes out on job interviews.
We are learning that an effective job training program addresses a far broader range of issues than one might initially expect. In a few instances, all that a welfare recipient needs to secure decent employment is technical training or practical assistance such as transportation. Most of the time, however, a program that only attempts to build skills and solve logistical problems is insufficient. When we surveyed local employers prior to the beginning of the JobKEYS program, they told us over and over again that given the choice between hiring a technically skilled but undependable applicant and a not-so-skilled but reliable, courteous applicant, they'd take the latter individual every time. Though the employers appreciate the computer skills training, they are far more excited that we are providing personal and emotional support to the participants and discussing the essential character traits of a good, faithful employee.
We have heard numerous stories of single mothers who lost their jobs because they missed work when their children were sick or in trouble, or because they were unable to keep personal problems from hindering their job performance. Our physical presence in the Blue Ridge Commons neighborhood means that we are available to help JobKEYS participants deal with these sorts of issues. We comfort a mother whose teenage son is picked up for drunk driving, counsel a woman to get out of an abusive relationship, or provide respite for a woman who needs a break from caring for a disabled child. This counseling may not appear to have anything to do with job training, but since individuals are more than employees, these kinds of supports dramatically enhance their ability to manage job responsibilities.
Finally, being based in the neighborhood helps us develop strong relationships between JobKEYS participants and Friendship Circle members. The Family Center provides a safe, convenient and familiar meeting place that helps put the participants at ease. Since some lack transportation, it is a huge help that they can simply walk to our building to meet with their circles or work on their resumes in our computer lab. Since some participants lack telephones, our on-site staff can communicate between the circles and their participants. The importance of these simple, practical benefits should not be underestimated. Participants and their encouragers must meet regularly, face-to-face. when contact is more limited, relationships fail to develop and the participants fail to get off welfare.
We're not claiming any dramatic successes for JobKEYS. One of the participants is still on welfare. Two weeks into the program she discovered she was pregnant with her first child; she probably won't be working any time soon. But she decided to keep, rather than abort, the baby; she's kicked out her abusive boyfriend; she's eager for parenting advice. She trusts us and is receptive to our counsel. Two other participants have been in the same jobs for over ten years and say they have been stimulated to take the initiative and apply for jobs on the next rung up. And the computer skills they've learned give them a realistic chance of securing those jobs. Shamika has dropped one of her part-time positions and is pursuing the possibility of full-time employment with UPS. She still shows up regularly at the Family Center to practice her typing or get some advice and encouragement. We're not starting any revolutions. We're simply following the approach espoused by author Glenn Loury: we're trying to change the neighborhood "one by one, from the inside out."
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