Small Firms Prepare Welfare Recipients for Hire Ground
A dozen San Francisco welfare recipients will stand tall Friday as they graduate from a unique welfare-to-work program created, sponsored and directed by small-business owners for small-business owners.
San Francisco’s Job Network is the only welfare-to-work program, among thousands nationwide, in which small-business owners stepped in to design something that works for them. The program has won kudos from the Small Business Administration.
“Many [welfare-to-work] programs don’t focus on the businesses that hire the workers, they’re busy just placing people,” said Amy Parkhurst, who runs Job Network. “We’re designed to be a portable human resources department, and we never lose sight of that.”
Although the tiny program has found jobs for only 36 of 53 individuals who completed training so far, program creators are not dismayed. It was intended to be a small pilot program that other communities could learn from.
“The California Small Business Assn. decided to take a role in welfare-to-work. And rather than create programs all over the state, we decided to set up a model,” said Scott Hauge, a CSBA board member who has himself hired four welfare recipients.
The program began three years ago when Hauge, with help from San Francisco’s Small Business Network, an association of 19,000 Bay Area small firms affiliated with the CSBA, surveyed more than 300 small-business owners to find out how they felt about hiring welfare recipients and what they would need to do so.
“Originally when [President] Clinton passed this thing, he said providing tax credits was the answer,” Hauge said. “But about 10% of the business owners we surveyed said, ‘You can’t pay me enough to hire a bad employee.’ ”
Small-business owners said job skills weren’t even a big consideration because their jobs were entry-level, Hauge said. Small employers wanted workers with good attitudes who would show up on time and be trainable--what are typically called “soft skills.”
In addition, the small firms lacked human resources departments and said they needed someone to handle issues such as child care or transportation, workers’ compensation or unemployment, if the welfare-to-work employee didn’t work out, and paperwork such as program forms and federal tax credits.
Armed with this information, Hauge turned to Juma Ventures, an unusual nonprofit youth employment agency with four for-profit ventures in San Francisco: Juma runs two Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shops, has a contract to sell ice cream and coffee at 3Com stadium and runs a catering business, Ice Cream on Wheels.
Juma had already created a Work Force Resources program to help its employees, about 25% of whom were former welfare recipients. Since Juma already knew the issues facing welfare workers entering the job market, Hauge asked the company to create the new, welfare-to-work program the CSBA had in mind.
Armed with $1 million from the Department of Labor, the state CalWORKS program and private foundation money, Juma began building Job Network.
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The training includes five weeks on customer service and communication skills, plus how to deal with problems such as child care and family violence that can keep welfare recipients from holding down a job, Parkhurst said. English, math and some computer skills are taught, but the program assumes job skills will be taught on the job. The next segment is spent setting short-term and long-term work goals with a workplace specialist and hunting for job leads.
A 16-member steering committee includes small-business owners who visit the classroom to clue in the welfare-to-work participants on what attitudes and skills employers seek.
Meanwhile, small employers are getting information about the program, follow-up help, site visits and hand-holding sought by the CSBA.
Job Network seeks to place individuals in jobs that pay at least $8 hourly, provide benefits and have opportunities for upward mobility. Hauge said one of his own part-time welfare-to-work employees learned enough skills to leave his firm to take a full-time job at another company.
Such help contrasts with welfare-to-work programs set up by either government agencies or nonprofit service providers, which often turn to large employers that can place more people. The larger programs usually lack the intensive personal help given by the San Francisco program.
For example, Los Angeles County’s GAIN program is now placing 4,000 individuals monthly in jobs, according to GAIN manager Raul Ramirez. But he admitted that many of those placed in employment by the county are in low-paying jobs and so remain on welfare. In addition, the kind of hands-on employer help provided by the San Francisco program has not been provided by the county.
An effort to bridge the gap between agencies and small businesses in Southern California is beginning to take shape with the Welfare-to-Work Leadership, funded by private foundations, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles Business Advisors. Instead of providing services as in San Francisco, the project offers welfare-to-work information to employers and makes referrals to more than 40 service providers that belong to a coalition called SoCalWORKS.
The small success of Job Network may simply mirror the head start San Francisco, with its 23 welfare-to-work programs, enjoys over most of the rest of the country, said Eric Evans, a spokesman for the Welfare to Work Partnership, a national coalition of 8,500 business owners who have pledged to hire at least one welfare recipient. The partnership is sponsoring a welfare-to-work conference March 1 in San Francisco that will feature Vice President Gore.
“San Francisco is on to the second step,” Evans said. “They’ve done the training that needed to take place, and now they’re doing other things: job counseling and mentoring. This is making the retention rates go up, their people are staying at jobs, the turnover is less and they’re actually getting promoted.”
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Still, even Hauge says it’s too soon to tell how the Job Network model will fare.
“The true test is a year or two down the road,” he said. “The key to any successful program is retention.”
Yet this fledgling effort demonstrates that for welfare-to-work to succeed, small businesses’ needs must be taken into consideration. Otherwise, welfare-to-work is just another burden that harried small firms have no time or patience to deal with.
For more information about welfare-to-work programs, contact San Francisco’s Job Network at (415) 247-6572, Ext. 313 or https://www.jumaventures.org; the Welfare to Work Partnership, (888) USAJOB1 or https://www.welfaretowork.org; or the Welfare-to-Work Leadership (888) 2EMPLOY or https://www.lachamber.org.
Times staff writer Vicki Torres can be reached at (213) 237-6553 or at vicki.torres@latimes.com.
