Help for the Housebound : Head Start family centers are teaching women with limited English, few skills and no child-care options how to become entrepreneurs--at home.

Kelly Donaldson sits pensively across the desk from a young woman who quietly assures her that she wants to work and earn money but just doesn’t see how it’s possible. She has three children, all under the age of 5, limited English and no idea of what she’s capable of doing.

“Well”--Donaldson takes a deep breath and smiles--”have you thought about self-employment?”

Self-employment? For a housebound, unemployed mother living on government checks? Yes, indeed. It has been an important part of employment training for two years at the government-supported agency where I work. We are helping people learn to be cottage entrepreneurs, running small businesses in their homes.

My agency is part of a network of 66 Head Start family service centers, created in 1991 as an offshoot of the federal program for low-income preschool children. Staffed by six people, including Kelly Donaldson, it tries to address some of the root causes of the poverty of the children in Head Start: substance abuse, illiteracy and, its highest priority, unemployability. Women from about one-third of the 230 predominantly Armenian and Latino Head Start families in our area seek our assistance and support. Men are eligible, but it’s mostly the women who feel comfortable enough to reach out and chart a new destination for their lives.

Head Start family service centers have wide latitude in setting up programs. Self-employment training, along with English as a second language, has become the cornerstone of ours. The concept grew out of the realization that cultural traditions and unresolved child-care needs dictated that many women can’t work outside the home.

We started traditionally, with classes in resume writing and dressing for success. This approach assumes that people have basic skills, that they’ll be able to go to work outside the home and that jobs will be waiting for them. Those assumptions proved wrong in many cases. A lot of people learned to dress for success but had no success in the marketplace afterward.

A lot of our women had resigned themselves to staying home--welfare does that. For those wanting to learn a traditional skill such as being a medical assistant or a preschool child-care assistant, we had plenty of outside classes available. We were looking for innovation.

In addition to these traditional classes being offered as viable employment training possibilities, we started our three home-based entrepreneurship courses in early 1992. They are:

* Home entertainment and decoration consulting. In 15 weeks of classes taught by outside consultants, our women learn to sew everything from lingerie to living room drapes. They learn to design flower arrangements, gift baskets, jewelry and T-shirts; to decorate cakes, and how to be wedding and party consultants.

Twenty-one women have completed the technical classes, and 11 are now in eight weeks of workshops on marketing, accounting, inventory maintenance and licensing. We’re also about to lease space in shopping malls and private boutiques where they can display their goods until they accumulate enough money to be on their own.

* Licensed family day care. This is an eight-week course focusing on the rules for operating a family day-care center and basic child-development skills that include age-appropriate activities for the children. Participants are supported through the actual fingerprinting and licensing process, which includes extensive paperwork. Because of the shortage of affordable day care, the women feel confident of attracting customers. Eight women have enrolled in the course. One recently got her license and has four infants under her care. Two other women are in the licensing process.

* Word processing. We have outside consultants who teach our clients, one on one, to publish newsletters, prepare reports and do general typing at home. Some who take this have no typing background but their desire to learn propels them forward. This is an open-ended program with, at present, seven students. One deterrent to self-employment in this area is that mothers on welfare do not have the resources to buy computers. We are trying to get together some money to help them get set up.

As far as I know, we are the only Head Start family service center doing what we are doing. We have taken our show on the road, describing the center’s work before the National Head Start Bureau in Washington and Atlanta and the National Assn. for the Education of Young Children in Anaheim.

Self-employment may not be for everyone, but I recommend that it be part of any agency’s job-training strategy. Entrepreneurship is for everyone.