THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 10, 1995 TAG: 9509100045
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 190 lines
The president's chair in the White House Cabinet room is very comfortable, Roberta Lamb decided. Very, very comfortable.
She was about to meet with President Clinton and Vice President Gore in the Oval Office to discuss welfare reform. Lamb knows something about the subject - only months earlier, she had been living on public assistance in Portsmouth. That was before she landed a job on Capitol Hill in Washington. But that's getting ahead of things.
Before the meeting, Donna Shalala, the president's secretary of health and human services, conducted an Executive Mansion mini-tour for Lamb and three other welfare recipients. Lamb headed straight for the top guy's chair. Call it habit - she usually sets her sights high.
This is true even when things are tough. At one point, she was a single mother of two in a homeless shelter. Then she lived in a public-housing project for three years with little money, few possessions and dismal prospects for a decent job.
``But I knew that, even though I lived in the projects, I wasn't of the projects,'' says Lamb, 31. ``There are a lot of people who live there who don't fit the stereotypes. And I was one of them.''
Linda H. Lewis, a training specialist with the Portsmouth Community Services Board, agrees that Lamb wasn't - and isn't - alone. In fact, state statistics show that the average recipient's stay on welfare in Virginia is 2 1/2 years, not the decades of popular myth.
``There are many Roberta Lambs in public housing,'' Lewis says. ``I think the general public needs to understand that.''
True, not everyone sets high goals. And many who do, fail to reach them. Life isn't always fair.
But Lamb's story shows what's possible - and what's often needed - to bust people out of poverty.
A lot of it must come from inside each person. Lamb had a ton of this ``it,'' say those who know her. But they and she agree that some outside help is necessary, and they hope that changes in welfare programs at the state and federal levels don't overlook that part of the equation.
Lamb took the long road to welfare.
She was raised in a middle-class Portsmouth family, the oldest of three kids. Her parents are college-educated - her father was a chemical worker, her mother an elementary school teacher. And she graduated from a private Catholic high school - National Honor Society, debating club, the whole bit. College was a foregone conclusion. She planned to be a newspaper reporter.
But she made some mistakes in judgment during her freshman year at Virginia Union University in Richmond. One mistake left her pregnant near the end of the spring sememster.
``I guess, like most kids who go off to school and are inquisitive and whatever about life, even though they have their parents' upbringing, they have a tendency to go up the other fork in the road, and they get caught,'' Lamb says. ``And I got caught. It brought a blot to my family. A shameful blot.''
Her parents took it hard, but supported her, and took care of her daughter, Amber, which allowed Lamb to return to college to finish her degree. In the meantime, not wanting to burden her parents with what she felt was her responsibility, Lamb steeled herself and applied for Aid to Families with Dependent Children - the basic welfare component - and Medicaid.
She was ashamed to do so.
``My parents instilled in all of us the desire to work,'' Lamb says. ``Welfare was something totally out of the norm. `If you're able-bodied, you're able to work. You earn your way.' That's what they were telling us. But the flip side of that was, if you fell down, you could help yourself up.''
After graduating, she worked part-time - telephone fund-raising, hosting birthday parties at a McDonald's - and full time, selling commercial air time for a radio station. She got off welfare. She got an apartment. She fell in love. Her life was back on track.
Then she got pregnant again. He wasn't ready for it. She couldn't work. She lost her apartment. Too ashamed to return home again, she stayed with various friends until she had her second daughter, Ashleigh.
Then she ran out of options.
Lamb was 27 and had two young children but no job, no car, no money. She again put pride aside and called Social Services for help. Carrying just a portable crib and a few clothes, she wound up in the Portsmouth Area Resource Coalition shelter. And back on welfare.
It wasn't for forever, she kept telling herself. Just until she got back on her feet.
``We saw the potential,'' says Katura Carey-Harvey, the shelter's director.
``The kind of problems that brought her to our shelter were not unlike the problems a lot of women face. The thing that was different about Roberta was she was so determined not to make the same mistakes again.''
Within six weeks, she was in Swanson Homes, a public-housing neighborhood of identical two-story, red-brick buildings set apart by small patches of grass. Lamb was surrounded by crime and illegal drugs. Someone broke into her one-bedroom apartment and stole her air conditioner. Life there was scary. But she was determined that it also was only temporary.
Lamb banded together with friends from the shelter who now lived in the complex. She made a strict budget, clipped coupons from the newspaper and shopped monthly, bought no junk food and put up with the sneers of other shoppers as she paid for her full cart with food stamps.
And she kept looking ahead. At first shy and quiet, she eventually joined the complex's tenants council.
To boost her coping and job-hunting skills - and her feelings of self-worth, which were taking a beating - she took Lewis' leadership-training course, co-sponsored by Portsmouth's Community Services Board and Redevelopment and Housing Authority.
Lamb kept applying for jobs. But they had to be nearby because she lacked transportation, and the hours had to be flexible because of her new baby. She jumped at the chance for a Volunteers in Service to America opening back at the shelter. The job, sponsored by the federal government's domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps, only paid a poverty-level stipend, but she could keep most of her housing and medical benefits, so she could afford to work. And it was work, not a handout.
For a year, she coordinated the shelter's soup kitchen on Sundays, walking two miles from her home each week, sometimes in rain and snow, never missing a day.
That experience led to another VISTA post, this one as an office manager with the Tidewater Literacy Council, helping coordinate volunteers. But Lamb wanted a real job, a full-paying job. It had been three years. She wanted off welfare.
She saw an ad in a newsletter for a VISTA leader to work with the Congressional Hunger Center, a private, nonprofit group in Washington that studies hunger issues, sends out information and trains local leaders. The center was looking for someone to help run its leadership-development effort, the Mickey Leland Hunger Fellows Program, named for a Texas congressman who was killed in a plane crash during hunger-relief efforts in Ethiopia.
This would be a full-time, fully paid position. A real job.
Lamb was ready. She sent off her resume and crossed her fingers.
When she got the call telling her that she'd gotten the job, she screamed.
Finally, she would be off welfare. Out of Swanson Homes. Reunited with her oldest daughter, who had been staying with Lamb's parents. Given a fresh start.
She started work Aug. 18, 1994 - she instantly recalls the date. The move was hard - her first apartment fell through, and she lived out of a car and in cheap hotels for a while - but within months she was in her own apartment, with both her children, supporting them with her paycheck, not the government's.
Max B. Finberg, director of the Mickey Leland program, says he hired Lamb for her qualifications. But her background intrigued him, too.
``She also has the experience of knowing what it means to be hungry,'' Finberg says. ``And no one can be a better spokesman for why hunger is wrong than someone who's been there.''
It was Finberg who offered Lamb's name to a White House aide looking for welfare recipients to meet with the president.
That's why in January, on the weekend that the nation's governors met to discuss welfare, Lamb and three other women from Maryland met with Secretary Shalala and then, nervous and giggling, were ushered into the Oval Office. Lamb wore her best black suit, and sat on one of the facing loveseats next to the secretary. Clinton and Gore sat nearby in armchairs.
It wasn't just a photo opportunity. The private meeting lasted 45 minutes.
The president asked Lamb to tell her story first. She described how VISTA - a program favored by Clinton - helped her work her way off welfare. She felt like she rambled on too long, but she saw that ``his eyes lit up, and he was really excited.''
The president asked for their suggestions about weaning people off welfare gradually, which Lamb favors. ``I don't think people should be cut off at the knees'' after two years, she says.
The federal grant that gave Lamb her first job, at the soup kitchen, later wasn't renewed.
Those who know Lamb say that, while she had a supportive family, college education and rare determination - unusual attributes among welfare recipients - she also was given opportunities to prove herself through such programs.
Those who work with the poor worry about proposed overall cuts in social programs. Self-determination requires opportunity, and vice versa, they say.
``From my vantage point, there are too few of both,'' says Carey-Harvey of the PARC shelter. ``It's really a question of timing, and making sure those opportunities are there. A lot of times, people are not open to taking advantage of opportunities that are there because they are fearful.''
``This can happen for most folks,'' Finberg agrees. ``I mean, I want to say Roberta is special, and she is. But there is very little about her that couldn't be transferred to others.''
Lamb thinks a long time when asked what she would change about her life.
``I don't regret what happened,'' she says finally. ``I regret some of the ways it happened. But I think I have learned. These are all life lessons.''
For others in the same fix, she has three words: ``Don't give up.''
``This is only temporary,'' she'd tell them. ``You're not going to die from this. And your children aren't going to die from this.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
A few early mistakes landed Roberta Lamb in Portsmouth public
housing, and, at one point, in a shelter. But with hard work and a
vow to break free of the system, she earned a job on Capitol Hill.
Photo
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Roberta Lamb, a former resident of Swanson Homes, a Portsmouth
public housing neighborhood, now has a job on Capitol Hill in
Washington. During her journey out of welfare, she says, ``I knew
that, even though I lived in the projects, I wasn't of the
projects.''
by CNB