Program Helping Women Break Cycle of Welfare Dependency

One is a former crack addict. Another dropped out of the sixth grade, began having children and never held a job. There are two ex-prostitutes, battered girlfriends and wives.

They are what is euphemistically described by policymakers in Washington, D.C., and Sacramento as hard-core welfare recipients, the least-educated, least-skilled and least-employable of all.

These nine Ventura County women, and thousands like them across the nation, represent the most profound challenge to the sweeping welfare reforms enacted in the last few years. While the mix of job training programs and adult education classes offered under the reforms may help many people get off government aid, skeptics say they will do little to improve the prospects and lives of women like these.

Now, Ventura County is testing this conventional wisdom. These nine single mothers are participating in a one-of-a-kind experimental program aimed at ushering what the county calls the “hardest-to-serve” welfare recipients into jobs. The 3-month-old program hasn’t been around long enough for officials to know how well the combination of group therapy, upbeat sloganeering and skill training will work.

But some longtime welfare users are feeling good about their future for the first time in years.

“People have said to me, ‘That program is for losers and slow people,’ ” said Shani Jackson, 28, of Oxnard, a mother of three who has been on welfare for four years but is now learning computer programming. “I tell them, ‘Hello! Look at me. I’m learning. And, girl, you would not believe what I can do now.’ ”

Trying to break the cycle of welfare dependency that has enveloped generations of families, many states and the federal government have adopted laws forcing those on welfare to get jobs. California’s law, which took effect a year ago, requires current recipients to find work within two years. Those new to the welfare rolls are restricted to 18 months.

In order to continue receiving welfare funding from Washington, counties are required by law to place 75% of two-parent welfare families and 30% of their adult caseload into the work force by October.

To meet this goal, the county has instituted a $17-million welfare-to-work effort called CalWORKS. That program includes seven one-stop career centers, job training classes and mentoring programs. Money has also been set aside to help the jobless buy cars cheaply and to help with child care.

So far, the total caseload in Ventura County has dropped 22%, from 6,431 to 5,029. Officials say they are having difficulty meeting the 75% mandate for two-parent families.

The greatest challenge is the 600 or so people defined as chronic, or hard-core, welfare users. Getting them into the job force is the goal of the Employment Readiness Demonstration Project, which started in January at the Goodwill Industries headquarters in Oxnard.

The women in the state-funded program receive intensive training in assertiveness, managing emotions, resume writing and interviewing skills. A counselor is also on hand to help the women deal with crises that erupt over everything from drugs to violent boyfriends.

The program hopes to move 180 hard-core recipients off welfare within three years.

The program’s mantra is, “Get a job, get a better job, get a career.”

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Sorting tangled jewelry on a table at Goodwill, Maria Guerrero hopes that motto will work for her.

Born in the cobblestoned village of El Sapote, Mexico, she moved with her parents to Ventura County to work the fields when she was 6. By 13, she had dropped out of sixth grade and was married. A year later she had her first child.

At 27, she is single and five months pregnant with her fourth child. Like others in the experimental program, Guerrero has never worked outside the home. Although her husband abandoned the family and lives somewhere in Mexico, she said she is happy to be rid of a man who repeatedly cheated on her.

“It’s hard, but I’m glad I’m finally on my own,” said Guerrero, a six-year welfare recipient who lives in federally subsidized housing in La Colonia. “I feel like I’ve been released.”

She is eager to start working. “I want to get off assistance. I’m sick of it,” Guerrero said.

But it won’t be easy. Guerrero has no high school diploma and scored zero on a sixth-grade math test that would have qualified her for the program’s computer training course.

Officials believe Guerrero may have a learning disability, but she refuses to be tested.

Although clients are expected to “graduate” in 13 weeks, program director Maureen Ludwig Wiggins thinks Guerrero will need more time to prepare herself to work.

“In some cases, we will need longer than that just to build up their confidence,” Ludwig Wiggins said. “Some of these women were victims of domestic violence. They’ve been held at gunpoint or beaten up. They can develop here.”

Less hopeful than Guerrero is Josie Garcia, a 29-year-old mother of three who has been on aid four years. At a group therapy sharing session one morning she confessed that just getting to the Goodwill center was a trial. After getting herself and her children ready, then walking them to the sitter’s house, she rode a bus for an hour to the center.

“I’m so tired,” she told the group, gathered around her on metal folding chairs. “And it’s only 8:30 a.m.”

Resume writing instructor Keith Austin then launched into a passionate lecture about the importance of finding a career goal and having the stick-to-itiveness to reach it.

Crouching eye-to-eye with Garcia, he asked, “Now, how are you going to get there?”

“By bus?” Garcia joked wearily.

Garcia is skeptical that the program will help her out of poverty. She already knows how to get a job that pays minimum wage. She has worked at McDonald’s, a belt factory and at a Mexican restaurant as a waitress, so she knows how hard it is to survive on low pay. She would like to get a job as a bank teller, but knows that is out of reach.

“What’s scary is not having the skills to get a good-paying job,” Garcia said. “To make enough to support a family of four will be tough.”

CalWORKS officials say Garcia is too pessimistic. In Ventura County, a family of four receives up to $1,157 a month in cash and food stamps. A single mother of three working 30 hours a week at minimum wage--$5.75 an hour--would earn $690 a month gross, plus receive $496 in government payments for the working poor, said Maria Older, a CalWORKS administrator.

Also, a low-wage earner receives child-care aid and medical insurance for up to two years.

Still, Garcia worries about what will happen after that. Her youngest will be a toddler and his child care would cost about $700 a month.

“As a single mother, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it,” Garcia said, beginning her afternoon shift sorting books at the warehouse. She reached into a bin filled with yellow-paged paperbacks and joked, “Maybe I’ll get lucky and find some money in here.”

CalWORKS officials say the low-paying position Garcia fears she will be stuck in is only the first step--the “get-a-job” portion of the mantra.

“That’s the family’s first hurdle,” Older said. “That’s when the real work begins. They still have a number of hurdles to jump over and this time, with limited resources. It would be easy to give up, but we don’t want them to.”

The key to keeping up the spirits of people such as Garcia is the mentoring program, which pairs clients with people who have good jobs. The mentors offer advice and support, and even donate hand-me-down suits and dresses.

“We’re determined to get them out of poverty,” said Randall Feltman, deputy director in charge of implementing CalWORKS. “It’s not like all they have to do is get a job and we will dump them off aid. . . . We will continue to work with them until they are self-sufficient and out of poverty.”

The county is still grappling with how clients will be able to obtain child care, transportation and affordable housing while pursuing better-paying jobs, Feltman said.

“Medical insurance is still a serious issue at the income levels we’re talking about,” he said.

When the nine women in the experimental program graduate and get their first jobs, they will embark on Phase 2, the “get-a-better-job” portion of the CalWORKS slogan.

Martha Cantos, 31, is at that stage, but getting the next leg up seems almost impossible to the mother of two.

She attended the county’s first welfare-to-work course offered at Oxnard College last May, was trained as a child-care provider and placed in a job.

Though halfway to success, Cantos feels as though she has hit a wall.

Now working full time, she said she and her family are not economically better off, despite promises from CalWORKS officials that they would be.

She earns about $1,100 a month and gets $85 a month in cash aid. She would like to earn more, but if she makes an additional $200 a month, her husband will lose his state disability insurance, she said.

For Lino Cantos, 37, a former electrical engineer in need of a kidney transplant, the insurance is a matter of life and death. He lost his sight nine years ago because of complications from diabetes.

Despite all the talk of a two-year transitional period, Martha Cantos said that once she got a job she was given a one-year child-care limit for her son, Paolo, 4. His child-care benefits will expire in July, she said.

“They don’t give you much time,” Cantos said one recent afternoon, after putting the children down for a nap at a center in Thousand Oaks. “I’m trying to do the best I can with the time I have. After that, I guess it’s tough luck.”

Jill McDonald, 29, is also in the second phase of the CalWORKS program. After attending the welfare-to-work child development course with Cantos, she also got work as a child care provider.

But she is more optimistic about her future, a CalWORKS success story. Her earnings have enabled her and her daughter, Rhiannon, 4, to move from her mother’s home into a two-bedroom house of their own in Santa Paula.

At $7.75 an hour, she is earning about the same as she received on aid. She is still qualified for a few extra federal dollars a month, but would rather be done with welfare.

Even arriving for work one day to find egg dripping down the wall of the child-care center in Ventura didn’t faze her.

“Good morning, how are you?” she chirped happily, concealing her disgust, as the children arrived.

Workday woes are a small price to pay for independence.

“I give all the credit to God,” McDonald said of her ability to make ends meet. “He turns a loaf of bread into an abundance. . . . And I’m pretty good at budgeting.”

Although it’s still early, the results of the welfare-to-work program are at best mixed. In January 1998, before all the programs got underway, 237 welfare recipients in Ventura County went to work. A year later in January, 268 found jobs.

Feltman attributed the slow start to a transitional period.

“This is going to take some time,” he said. “It will be awhile before the clients take advantage of our resources or even know that they exist.”

The problems of some women in the experimental program are even more overwhelming than the day-to-day struggles of Jackson, Guerrero and Garcia.

Three of the remaining six women are recovering heroin or crack addicts. The two recovering heroin users supported their addictions through prostitution, Ludwig Wiggins said.

One of the recovering heroin addicts lives in a Ventura County motel with two of her eight children.

“Even getting here in the morning is a major breakthrough for her,” Ludwig Wiggins said.

After her boyfriend held her hostage at gunpoint, the recovering crack addict left the work program--temporarily, Ludwig Wiggins hopes.

But each failure hurts. Lillian Manning, director of Oxnard College’s Child Development Center, could not conceal her disappointment about Mary Alice Macias.

Macias, 43, was supposed to have beaten the odds, Manning said. Though a welfare recipient half her life who had never worked outside the home, Macias had the kind of enthusiasm that prompted Manning to believe the mother of three would succeed.

“I saw the red flags, and I chose to take Mary,” Manning said. “I do believe people can change and turn their lives around. And she was really changing.”

As she walked to the bus stop one morning for the two-hour ride from Ventura to Oxnard College, Macias admitted that she was frightened. But she always arrived early and used the extra time to study, Manning said.

Several weeks into the course, her appearance and social skills became more polished and her confidence improved.

“I’m going to make it,” she said confidently.

Then, shortly before the end of the 16-week class, when she was about to be placed in a job, Macias dropped out. She left town with a man who had a criminal record, Manning and Macias’ former neighbors said.

“It broke my heart,” Manning said. “She had come so far.”

Manning said the CalWORKS one-stop center scheduled to open on campus in mid-May will help in such cases.