County Nudged Mother Into Work Force--and Self-Sufficiency : Welfare: A La Habra woman resisted an offer of training to help her find employment but, months later, finds herself with a job and a new outlook.

Last November, welfare recipient Cindy Lee Brooks opened a letter from the county and then threw it across the room. It began, “Welcome to the GAIN (Great Avenues for Independence) Program,” and concluded, “If you do not keep this appointment, your cash aid may be lowered or stopped.”

“I felt like calling them and telling them to go to hell,” said Brooks, 30, of La Habra, whose minimum-wage jobs never had equaled the $560 monthly welfare check she uses to feed, clothe and house herself and her 6-year-old daughter. “It didn’t seem fair. I said, this is a free country, they can’t make me.”

But Brooks, a 13-year recipient of welfare, feels differently now.

Fearing that she would lose even the meager income she had, she reluctantly signed up for GAIN--a controversial state and federal program requiring welfare parents, the vast majority of them single mothers, to obtain the education and training needed to find jobs above minimum wage.

As a result, she is now happily working at $6.55 an hour, 36 hours a week, driving a truck, bookkeeping and warehousing for Sherwin-Williams Co. in Anaheim. She will continue to receive welfare subsidies until April. Her daughter’s day care will be subsidized for more than a year.

Nudged toward an independence she said she wouldn’t have sought otherwise, Brooks embodies the hopes of American welfare reformers who hail California’s GAIN program and a similar federal program, JOBS, as the answer to poverty, particularly among single women and their children.

In California, 86% of the 670,000 families receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) are single parents--almost always women. Twenty percent of the children whose parents are on welfare for eight years or more also become welfare recipients, according to the state’s Joint Select Task Force on the Changing Family.

Welfare theory has altered radically from the 1930s when AFDC began as a widow’s pension and it was generally agreed that mothers should stay home with their children, according to Dianne Edwards, director of Adult and Employment Services with the county’s Social Services Agency.

“That’s no longer considered a norm in society. It seems to be unreasonable and not even particularly a good idea to try to perpetuate that kind of approach with women on welfare,” she said.

The new programs aim to pull dependent parents, even some mothers of infants, back into the work force.

Edwards said it is now thought that a working parent is a better role model for a child, if the child receives adequate care, than a “mother who stays home and collects AFDC.”

It is a key element to reaching the ultimate goal of the program: breaking the generational cycle of welfare dependency.

Cindy Brooks, the second of seven children, was the only one to graduate from high school.

She started on welfare at 17 after finding out she was pregnant. She said she needed Medi-Cal benefits in order to pay for a secret abortion.

She used welfare between working minimum-wage jobs at K mart, shoe stores and bars.

Seven years ago, she found out she was again pregnant. This time, she decided to have the child. She has been on AFDC ever since, spending her days in a subsidized apartment, papered with Bon Jovi posters, smoking and watching television. She has lost track of her child’s father.

Already looking back on her welfare days as if they were over, she said, “How I did it is beyond me. You’re broke all the time. With rent, utilities, phone, there’s no extra money for gas or going out or buying clothes.

“Half the time I couldn’t provide a Christmas for my child,” she said. She would accept charity, but afterward, “I’d always cry. I couldn’t do it myself. That hurt.”

She never considered work as a way out. When the GAIN workers called, she said she tried to tell them her car broke down. Or that there was no one to watch her daughter, Shannon.

But the case worker explained she would be getting a bus pass and a list of licensed day-care providers near her home, and that would be paid for too.

Finally, she said, “I had no more excuses.”

On Nov. 8, she got up at 5 a.m. to take a bus to the Santa Ana GAIN office. Her sister watched Shannon.

She took a math and English test and was told, unlike the majority of GAIN clients, that she would not need remedial classes and could report to the unemployment office immediately.

For the following five days, she rose at 5:30 a.m. to get Shannon to the sitter by 6 and board the bus by 6:30 so she could attend training.

She and her counselors figured out she would need $6.46 an hour to begin to survive without welfare. She was videotaped in mock interviews, so that she could see how she appeared to others. When she saw progress, she said, she started enjoying herself.

The next 10 days, she spent two hours a day at a phone bank answering newspaper ads and setting up job interviews. She was not required to accept any job that offered less than the amount of money she needed.

“We did worry she’d been unemployed awhile,” said her boss, Carl Santiago. “Maybe she didn’t want the job very long.” But he said: “She had a good personality and that was a good thing. We needed somebody with good people skills.”

Brooks said she explained to him that employers hiring GAIN participants get a $3,000 tax credit.

On Dec. 7 she started at Sherwin-Williams on a 30-day trial, after which she was made a permanent employee.

Brooks chose a family day-care home within walking distance of her home where the mother provides Shannon breakfast, transportation to school and makes her lunch. Brooks pays $60 a week.

By mid-December, Brooks sent an ecstatic, unsolicited thank-you letter to her social worker: “I really love this job. I’m really glad I had to go through the GAIN program. It sure paid off for me. I don’t think I could have gotten a job at this kind of money without the GAIN program.

“You know people have nothing to lose by taking the GAIN program cause you guys pay for everything we could possibly need to be able to attend it, and all it costs us is 15 short days of our time.”

Clients who need to learn English or other skills may be enrolled indefinitely, social workers said.

Brooks said she expects a raise to $7 in March and promotions after that.

After April, when new federal rules apply, the program will pay for her child care for a year. Then, she said, she’ll be able to save money.

She said she is tired of being on welfare, and she wants a better life for her daughter.

She believes she can make it on her own. “Being on welfare, you learn how to budget. You have to. You have no other choice.

“I think I can do it.”