Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 8, 1994 TAG: 9404080101
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: Long
"What he needs to do is go on welfare for six months with his wife and daughter. Let him live on the kind of monthly check we do for six months and see if he sings the same tune," said Joyce Alexander, 33, a mother of three who said she has been on and off welfare for about 10 years.
In response to a proposal that recipients be denied additional benefits if they have more children while on welfare, Sheila Booker, a 25-year-old single mother of five, suggested that policy-makers in Washington also might need some sex education. The women laughed derisively.
Punishing young mothers for unwanted pregnancies would do little to reduce illegitimate births and would force them to stretch their monthly welfare checks more thinly in order to provide for a larger family.
As for an administration proposal that unmarried teen-aged mothers lose their benefits unless they live with their parents, the recipients concluded such a step would increase the number of runaways.
Forcing a teen parent to live in a dysfunctional household or with parents who "threw her out for getting pregnant in the first place," could force many young women into prostitution, Booker said.
West Humboldt Park is one of Chicago's most impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods and is not usually associated with creative social policy-making by its inhabitants. Drug-related gang murders are so commonplace they go almost unnoticed; and more than 40 percent of the mostly black and Hispanic population of 67,500 are on welfare. Sixty-seven percent have dropped out of high school.
In terms of poverty and social disintegration, the neighborhood is consistently ranked as one of the city's worst by social agencies.
But when it comes to overhauling the nation's welfare system, recipients here say, they know what they like when they see it.
And so far, not only have they not liked what they have seen of Clinton's plan to "end welfare as we know it," but they are getting ready to lobby to change the proposal as it winds its way through Congress this year. A dozen welfare mothers have been meeting two mornings a week at the Chicago Commons Employment Training Center to draft a detailed critique of the welfare-reform proposals presented to Clinton last month by a 32-member task force.
Working with a copy of the draft plan, which, although marked "confidential - for discussion only" has circulated widely in the anti-poverty community, the women meticulously pick apart the proposals like congressional committee members at a drafting session.
With a minimum of prompting by their teacher, they engage in spirited arguments over narrow aspects of the plan until they reach a consensus on what they feel would be best for those who will be affected most by welfare reform. They then move onto the next reform proposal with a sense of urgency driven by the White House's timetable for submitting a bill in late May.
"When you aren't invited to the table, sometimes you have to set your own," is a maxim adopted by the welfare mothers, who plan to submit a copy of their analysis to White House officials when it is completed later this month.
The recipients, who are among 150 neighborhood residents participating in social-service programs at the center, are working for their general education diplomas. They use the exercise not only to try to influence national welfare policy, but also to sharpen their reading and writing skills.
Not surprisingly, their vision of welfare reform mirrors the public-assistance philosophy of the Humboldt Park welfare-to-work demonstration project. The project, a $518,000 experiment funded by state and private-foundation grants, is part of the $10 million-a-year Chicago Commons, the city's second-oldest settlement house.
The back-to-basics approach relies heavily on fundamental education, literacy training, the teaching of simple "life skills" like punctuality and organization, and individually tailored job-preparation programs.
The center provides an array of social services, including health care, day care and a Head Start program, courses leading to a high-school-equivalency diploma and parenting classes. It also offers special programs for victims of rape, incest, alcohol and drug abuse and domestic violence.
"Flexibility in meeting individual needs and not imposing one-size-fits-all solutions is what we're about, and this is where we part company with the president's welfare-reform plan," said Jody Raphael, director of the 3-year-old education and training center.
"We encounter an appalling range and depth of problems here, and that's precisely why you can't just push people through the same kind of government-formula vocational-training program in two years or less and expect them to succeed in their jobs," Raphael added.
She said 70 percent of recipients at the center need extensive education before they are able even to qualify for most job-training programs, 54 percent lived in homes with domestic violence, 13 percent were victims of rape or incest and 14 percent had severe mental-health problems.
Raphael acknowledged that the center's back-to-basics approach is relatively expensive at about $6,000 a year per participant. However, she said it produced demonstrable results: One-fifth of all recipients who entered since February 1991 are employed and off welfare, and 45 percent are still in the program.
Ninety percent of those who moved from welfare to work still have their jobs, she said.
Group members also complained that the Clinton plan is geared to forcing recipients into minimum-wage jobs - either in the private sector or in community service. They believe it is impossible to live on a minimum wage of $4.25 per hour without being heavily subsidized.
Some of the recipients said working for $680 a month, before taxes, hardly makes sense to a mother of two who knows that as long as she stays on welfare she will receive, in Illinois, $367 in Aid to Families With Dependent Children benefits, plus $145 in food stamps, day care for her children, free medical care, help in paying heating bills and other forms of assistance.
"When you go off welfare into a job you have to give up so much - Medicaid, food stamps, day care and all those things. You've got to have more than minimum wage to give up all that," said Sheila Bowen, 25, a ninth-grade dropout who has one child and who has been on welfare for seven years.
Even with an expanded earned-income tax credit raising the minimum wage to the equivalent of $6.25 an hour, the welfare mothers said, the motivation to give up public assistance might not be enough. They suggested $8 an hour as a minimum for a welfare-to-work position, along with medical care, day care and better child-support enforcement against the absent fathers of their children.
But most important to successful welfare reform, they said, is adequate preparation of unskilled and uneducated people who have little work ethic and even less work experience.
by CNB