Summit on Self-Sufficiency

Facing deadlines under federal welfare reform laws to find work for thousands of aid recipients, Los Angeles County authorities joined with business and community leaders Thursday in a pledge to work together to create jobs for them.

Using the San Fernando Valley as a focal point, participants in a Welfare-to-Work Summit meeting at Cal State Northridge declared that thousands of jobs can be added by local businesses. Government agencies can help by training potential employees, they said, and legislators can help by making it more economically attractive for firms to do business in the area.

County Board of Supervisors Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky, who sponsored the meeting, said that under federal reform rules, the region has no choice but to reduce the number of adults receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Failure to comply would result in financial penalties, he said.

“We have to move people from dependency to self-sufficiency as quickly as possible,” Yaroslavsky said. “It’s the biggest challenge counties face in America today.”

The meeting was primarily a brainstorming and networking opportunity, which may lead to future meetings but was not intended to produce immediate, concrete results.

Authorities said that nearly 100,000 of the adults in the county who receive AFDC--about 12,000 of them in the San Fernando Valley--must be employed by 2002.

The mostly upbeat invitation-only meeting attracted about 200 county officials, employers, economists, educators and former welfare recipients.

Many participants spoke favorably of a California program called GAIN, or Greater Avenues to Independence, which has put tens of thousands of welfare recipients to work, according to a study by a New York private corporation.

Amy Ovalle of Maywood said she was a second-generation welfare recipient whose self-esteem sank to a level she thought was impossible to remedy before she became involved in the program.

“They took me to a new level of thinking, understanding and achieving,” said Ovalle, 38, a single mother of two daughters who now works as a job developer for the program.

However, the program operates on a modest scale compared to the number of people who need jobs, officials said.

Several other participants emphasized how daunting the task of creating jobs for so many people will be without programs like tax incentives for businesses and community support for development projects. Other concerns included day care availability and whether entry-level jobs would pay enough to replace welfare payments.

“It’s a much bigger problem than has come out in the meeting here today,” said Bernard J. Luskin, chief executive officer of Luskin International Inc., a telecommunications and publishing firm, and visiting professor at Claremont Graduate School. “This is a major social shift and we’re going to have to work with it.”

Yaroslavsky said welfare reform, along with health-care issues, generates perhaps the most emotional opinions from many different points of view, but that change is mandatory.

“It’s controversial,” he said. “Now this is the set of rules we have. We’ve got to make it work. We have a responsibility to make it work.”

One goal is to dispel what he called stereotypes about welfare recipients, such as that they are lazy or unwilling to work, he said.

“Let’s de-stigmatize the welfare recipient. . . . Any one of us could find ourselves in that situation,” he said.

“We’re talking about human beings here. Every statistic is a life.”

There are about 245,000 adults in Los Angeles County receiving AFDC benefits, with about 20,000 of them in the Valley, said Lynn W. Bayer, director of the county’s Department of Public Social Services.

“As long as the economy keeps growing, we’re feeling very optimistic that we’ll be able to move our [AFDC recipients] on to work and into self-sufficiency,” Bayer said. “It’s a challenge.”