ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, October 23, 1996 TAG: 9610230072
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
Getting people who are living on public assistance to think work instead of welfare has meant a lot less client hand-holding and a whole lot of tough love, a Lynchburg social services administrator said Tuesday.
Niceness won't necessarily work when trying to move people off the public dole and into jobs, Sharon Swedlow, Lynchburg's welfare reform coordinator, said at a Virginia Municipal League conference work session in Roanoke.
"We're so busy trying to help people that sometimes we enable them to become dysfunctional," Swedlow said.
Lynchburg is one of six central Virginia localities - including Bedford and Bedford County - that phased in the state welfare plan's work component on Oct. 1 last year. A few more than half of the region's 2,300 Aid to Families with Dependent Children recipients were required to begin working for their benefits.
For two years, they are allowed to keep their benefits while collecting a paycheck. But they also have to sign a contract agreeing to meet certain conditions, such as attending job-counseling classes or job-training sessions. If they fail to do so, they can lose their monthly checks for up to six months.
Earlier this year, Swedlow set up a keyboarding class at Central Virginia Community College for 17 welfare recipients and arranged for child care.
Only six showed up. The 11 others were mailed notices that "if they don't do what they have to do, they would lose their welfare check for one month," she said.
But even after recipients are warned and the checks don't show up in the mail, they ask why, Swedlow said.
"We tell them, `Well, there are jobs out there,''' she said. And they find those jobs, she said.
Harsh as it seems, "what we've found is that when people are sanctioned and we sit back, families come to help each other out," Swedlow said. "When we sit back, grandparents come forward. Children do not go hungry."
The work component of Virginia's welfare-to-work plan is scheduled to be phased in statewide by 1998. The Roanoke and New River areas will be phased in that year.
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