ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 27, 1996 TAG: 9610280018
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
MEMO: ***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on October 28, 1996.
A headline in Sunday's paper incorrectly referred to the Presbyterian
Community Center as a church.
THE PRESBYTERIAN COMMUNITY CENTER is trying to help the poor prepare for changes in the welfare system.
Cindy Huffman wishes she could do better.
She wishes she could move her five children out of their Tazewell Avenue apartment in Southeast Roanoke - the one with the single entrance and the hill covered with poison ivy next to the steps.
She wishes her children wouldn't get so angry because she can't give them as much as their friends' parents give their children, when she has to borrow money so they can go skating with friends.
More than anything, Huffman, 30, wishes she could read.
"I want to learn how to read so that I can get a job and do for myself," Huffman said. "I feel like I can't do anything for my kids, for myself. The only thing I've got to give them is my love."
For several months, a volunteer tutor who works through the Presbyterian Community Center - an ecumenical service agency in Southeast Roanoke that provides emergency food and financial help for the poor - has come by once a week to help Huffman with her reading. Huffman, who dropped out of school in the fifth grade, said she couldn't pass her 8-year-old daughter's second-grade spelling test.
Because Huffman can't read, she can't get a job. Because she can't get a job, she and her children live in poverty.
Huffman, who is separated from her husband, has been on welfare but only in desperate spurts. She doesn't want to go back on it. She went to the Roanoke Department of Social Services a month ago to reapply for Aid to Families with Dependent Children when her bills fell behind. She changed her mind and left.
"I will not apply for welfare again," she said. "It's kind of embarrassing to have to have somebody else pay your way through life. But right now I can't even get a job, because I don't have an education.
"But I'm going to get a job one day. I'm going to do that. I'll be able to do something then."
* * *
Gov. George Allen last year called for religious, nonprofit and charitable organizations to pick up the slack for a state government that was reducing its role in helping the poor. He wanted churches and civic groups to become players in the state's changing welfare system.
In the 34 localities that have fully phased in the state's welfare-to-work plan - in which welfare recipients must now work to get their Aid to Families with Dependent Children checks - much of that help has come from churches and religious organizations.
"The response has been good," said Milton Giles, public relations coordinator for the Virginia Department of Social Services. Churches and organizations are setting up day care centers, food banks and job training centers. They are using church buses to transport welfare recipients to and from jobs.
There were skeptics, people who argued that the religious community was doing plenty already, with limited resources. They wondered what more they could do.
"They were looking at this as the government dropping programs in their laps," Giles said. "They must have forgotten that that was the church's function in the beginning - to feed the hungry, provide shelter and clothing. Government used to be the last place people would go to."
The Roanoke area isn't scheduled to start requiring welfare recipients to work for their monthly AFDC checks until 1998. In 2000, their AFDC benefits will be cut off. They can reapply for benefits after three years, if they choose.
Add to that the federal welfare changes that are expected to kick in within two years, affecting benefits beyond AFDC, such as food stamps and Supplemental Security Income.
The Presbyterian Community Center isn't waiting around for the next century. It already has responded to Allen's call by establishing programs that address people's reasons for living in poverty and needing welfare and emergency assistance. It is one of two religious organizations in the Roanoke area to have done so, purely in response to a state plan aimed at ending people's dependency on welfare.
The average monthly income of the families that the center served last year was $585. About 20 percent were welfare recipients. Others could be classified as the working poor.
"When welfare reform kicks in, we're a little worried we'll be overwhelmed with emergency requests," said Tom MacMichael, the center's program developer. "We're trying to put things in place and work with families ahead of time."
The 25-year-old center - supported by more than 20 Roanoke Valley churches - has expanded its emergency assistance services to include literacy training and parenting classes.
"These programs get at the root causes of poverty," MacMichael said. "We want to try to break the cycle of poverty, get at the cause of why people keep coming here in financial crisis."
The center's Good News Literacy program provides training for adults who can't read or who need to improve their reading skills. Volunteer tutors, trained by the Roanoke branch of the Literacy Volunteers of America, meet one-on-one with participants. The program also incorporates Reading Is Fundamental, a national program that encourages young people to read.
"We're taking a two-generational approach and incorporating the whole family," said Pat Dillard, the center's executive director. "We're trying to get parents to read to children, a bonding kind of approach. Across the country, they're finding that has better results than working separately with each age group."
The Good News Parenting program offers support services for parents who want to improve their parenting skills. Many of the center's clients don't have those basic skills, Dillard said. One client, for example, bought adult incontinence garments for her baby instead of diapers, she said.
"They need extra support," Dillard said. "And a lot are single parents who find consolation in knowing that they're not alone, that others are having similar problems."
The center's program expansion coincides with a long-overdue renovation of its Jamison Avenue building. The $17,000 project will, in part, increase space for donated clothing and a food pantry and create client interview and conference rooms.
"It's an atmosphere morale booster," Dillard said. Much of what clients saw when they came to the center before renovations began - a dark, dingy, crowded interior - "was how they lived," she said.
Roanoke Area Ministries invited Corinne Gott, superintendent of the Roanoke Department of Social Services, to its ecumenical board meeting two weeks ago. RAM - a 28-year-old organization that provides emergency financial assistance and operates the valley's only day shelter for the homeless - wanted to find out what it could do to help people who are moving from welfare to work.
Gott "gave us kind of a reality check on what we may or may not be able to do," said Wendy Moore, RAM's executive director. Gott told the board that the number of people who will need help "might be overwhelming during the transition period," Moore said.
RAM has applied for a private foundation grant that would be used to hire an employment counselor/caseworker to help people learn to live without government assistance. The agency currently helps clients find day work - housecleaning or construction work - through the Virginia Employment Commission and Manpower Temporary Services.
"We're looking for more permanent situations for these folks," Moore said. "We want to be able to do long-term. We want to be able to do more than we're doing now."
* * *
Huffman has been going to the Presbyterian Community Center since she was 16 - when the rent was past due, for baby formula, sometimes just for the company.
She is as close as family to center employees. They've watched her daughter Tammy - a year old when her mother came to the center for the first time, looking for diapers - become a tall 13-year-old with dark reddish hair and a teen-age fondness for the latest fashions.
They've watched the family grow. There is Donna, 12; Ashley, 8; Joyce, 5; and John, 3.
"They're good kids. I can't give them much, but I know that I'm here for them," said Huffman, who last year rushed without thinking into her burning kitchen to rescue John, scorching her hair and arms.
This summer, Tom MacMichael asked Huffman if she wanted to join the community center's literacy program.
"I said 'Yeah, oh yeah,''' Huffman said. "I've never tried to get help for reading, because I didn't want nobody to know that I didn't know how to read."
She'd hidden the fact that she couldn't read, even from people who would be most likely to understand.
"When I would go to welfare places to apply for food stamps and stuff, I would say `Can I have the papers to take home?''' she said. "And I would go get somebody else to fill them out. That's embarrassing. Here I am 30 years old, and they're looking at me like, `Gosh, she don't know how to read? What happened?'
"I don't know. It's just rough going through life not knowing how to read. It is."
LENGTH: Long : 166 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/Staff. Tom MacMichael, program developer,by CNBand Pat Dillard, executive director of the Presbyterian Community
Center, work to provide literacy, parenting, and emergency aid to
the community's poor. color.