All in One Place, Women Get Tools to Defeat Poverty : Social Services: The Displaced Homemaker Center downtown assists single parents by showing them where to get the help they need.

By 10:30 on a Wednesday morning, a handful of single women arrive at the Displaced Homemaker Center in Long Beach, where they exchange stories about dead-end jobs and deadbeat dads.

One has an advanced degree from an Ivy League school, another is a high school dropout, the rest fall somewhere in between. They all know how devastating it is to lose their main source of income, either through divorce, ill health or desertion. They also know how hard it is to support a family on welfare. And they know how much harder it is to find and keep a good job that pays more than a government check.

The nonprofit Displaced Homemaker Resource Center, which opened an office downtown six months ago, is trying to help these women in a simple, yet unorthodox way, said Barbara Haller, executive director. “We teach them to help themselves by providing them with one place where they can find the help they need.”

The Long Beach center is one of a few in the state showing single parents in crisis how to get the assistance available to them. “There were myriad programs for displaced homemakers, but women had to go all over town to take advantage of them,” said Pat Towner, executive director of the California Commission on the Status of Women, one of the center’s founders.

So Towner and other professional women in the Long Beach area volunteered their time and opened the center. Clients are assigned a case manager, allowing the available money to be used more effectively, Towner said. The end result: “(The women) get trained and into the work force a lot quicker.”

The budget for the center--which is funded by federal, state and private grants--will nearly double in the next fiscal year, from $44,000 to $80,000, to serve a growing clientele. The number of clients has jumped in six months from a handful to more than 40, including two men. Though single men sometimes head impoverished homes, most often women carry the burden, Haller said. Few of the nation’s estimated 16 million displaced homemakers maintain middle-class lifestyles after losing spouses or companions. Because many of them have quit work to raise children, they lack the job skills to succeed in today’s competitive market.

Across the country, the number of single mothers raising families is increasing at nearly the same rate as those living in poverty, reports author Karin Stallard in the book “Poverty in the American Dream.” In California, 1.16 million single mothers live in poverty, and homes headed by women have six times the poverty rate of homes headed by couples, according to the Commission on the Status of Women. In Long Beach, more than 3,380 single mothers are living in poverty, according to the recent census.

“It can literally happen overnight,” Haller said. “One day they have money. The next day they’re homeless.”

One of those trying to escape poverty is Long Beach resident Linda Kelley, 35, mother of two children. Kelley attends the Wednesday morning support group regularly, often with her children. She gets no financial support from the children’s father, she said. He lost his sales job, they separated, and he has not been able to find work.

“I want to vent about Dan Quayle,” Kelley said at a recent Wednesday morning gathering. “He’s got some nerve.” Kelley’s toddler daughter curled up in her lap and Kelley stroked the girl’s head. “Nobody talks about absent fathers. Absent fathers have to do with the economy. The Reagan-Bush Administration did away with jobs, and that breaks up the family unit.”

The women are left with no money, no car and no way to pay for public transportation. They get food stamps but discover they are unable to use the vouchers to buy soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, deodorant or other personal necessities. To save money, they forgo telephones, and end up taking calls about jobs and child care on street corner phone booths. Without a job that pays in advance they have no money for child care. Without child care, they are unable to keep a job.

Even with education, many cannot get anything except low-paying jobs. One of the women in the Wednesday group earned a master’s degree in journalism in 1974 from Columbia University in New York. She spent nearly four years reporting for a television station in Atlanta, but lost her job after testifying for a colleague in a racial discrimination lawsuit, she said. She had a child, was unable to find another job in journalism and got divorced.

After more than a decade out of the work force, she lacks the computer skills needed in the current market. She also does not have a car or the clothes she needs to hold down what she calls “a proper job.”

She gets no child support from her daughter’s father and survives on welfare and odd jobs, from telemarketing to gift-wrapping at Bullocks, hoping to save enough money for a new start.

Despite the family’s hardships, her daughter is an honors student at a Lakewood elementary school.

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, moved back to Long Beach to be near her family, but she gets no financial help from them because they expect her to take care of herself now, she said.

“My parents have a strict belief: They sacrificed all they could to give us the best education. They’re like a lot of black families who believe parents should educate, educate, educate. Then the child goes out and does it for themselves.”

Although she gets no help from her family, she said she finds support at the Long Beach center. “I know I can get off welfare. I will get off welfare,” she said. “The center made me believe that. They’re showing me how I can do it myself.”

The center staff has been especially helpful, she said, in showing her how to find her way through the federal, state and county social service agencies that have sprung up in the last two decades.

“They have to go to one agency for food stamps, another for welfare, another for unemployment, another for a shelter, another for emergency food, another for Head Start for their children, another for job training programs,” Haller said. For low-income housing, they go to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, she said, “which in my experience takes two years to process the paperwork.”

Some government programs hamper women on the way to self-sufficiency, making it difficult for them to get health care or other benefits, Haller said. Take Toni Richard, 62, a former homemaker whose husband cannot work after having two strokes eight years ago. They lost their Newport Beach house and their upper-middle-class lifestyle.

She now holds two jobs--hostess at a snack shop and a receptionist at the center--and has a master of fine arts from Cal State Long Beach. Because she earns $1,000 a month, she is ineligible for government-subsidized health care. She goes without dental or eye care, without gynecological and breast exams. “The things most people take for granted,” Haller said.

Perhaps most difficult is overcoming a terrifying fear of the workplace, said Lynn Wronosky, who had not worked outside the home since her children were born. “I haven’t worked in four years and a lot has changed in an office. I’ve never even seen a fax machine. When you are at home with kids, you are totally cut off from the adult world.”

Her husband left two children and no forwarding address. With little money, education or skills, Wronosky, 27, lived with her children in a Long Beach homeless shelter. There, she heard about the center. She is now on her way to becoming a success story, Haller said.

“My parents think I can become CEO of any company because I’m so independent. They have no idea that I never finished college,” she said. “They have no idea how scared I am.”

The support and encouragement she has received at the center has helped her persevere, she said.

Wronosky is studying social work and has recently become a board member for a local single parents group. “All these women are coming to me for mentoring,” she told the Wednesday group. “And I’m thinking, ‘If you only knew what I’m going through inside my own head!’

“I’m sure I’m going to make some big fat mistakes along the way.” She paused. “And that’s OK, right? Because I’ll learn from them. And go on. I couldn’t have said that before. Now I can.”