Making Welfare Work With Job Training

Maria Albarran wants many things. She has lived in a Costa Mesa shelter and wants a home. She has long been on welfare, and wants clothes and better food for her five children. But most of all, she wants work.

But Albarran has found it difficult to find a job because she has few skills, and even harder to keep one because of her child-care difficulties.

Albarran is among more than 2,000 welfare recipients who have still not found steady employment as part of the county’s three-year effort to move people from welfare to work. The county is hoping to embark on a new program aimed at helping these recipients with the difficult transition.

The program would give highly structured job training and day-care to the fraction of Orange County’s 22,000 welfare-to-work recipients who have the most trouble holding down jobs. These so-called “hard cases” would be rewarded for continued work by being allowed to supplement their aid money with extra income.

This program marks a philosophic departure by Orange County from the statewide treatment of such “hard cases” and is designed to be more productive, officials said. After 18 to 24 months without steady work, aid recipients are required by state law to perform community service, typically menial labor such as picking up trash along the highway.

But Angelo Doti, the county’s welfare reform director, said such “make-work” jobs can be perceived as punishment that doesn’t offer recipients the skills they need to make them more employable. Instead, Doti and other officials plan to modify the community service requirement into a program that helps their clients become productive workers.

“Our clients have proven to us that they can’t keep a job. What makes us think that if we fling them into another make-work job they’ll be successful?” Doti said.

The county’s plan assigns a team of experts to find out why clients can’t find work. The reasons may range from mental health problems to domestic abuse. Most are single mothers, and large percentages have learning disabilities, officials said. Others simply don’t know how to keep a job once they get one.

After the evaluation, clients are put into an open-ended, individualized job training program in one of seven vocations experiencing growth in Orange County. The vocations range from nurses’ aids to child-care services. Upon completion, recipients take a job with a salary that supplements the aid they already receive. The county covers child-care costs.

Currently, the massive welfare reform program has recipients moving toward jobs, rather than job training, said Lynne Stedman, a training expert who was on the new program’s task force.

“The county was able to get a lot of people off welfare rolls and into jobs without going to schools,” she said. “To move up the career ladder, though, they’re going to obviously need to improve their skills.”

About 68% of the county’s welfare caseload is now employed.

The rest, like Michele Nacoste of Santa Ana, are still looking for work. A single mother with seven children, Nacoste was once on welfare for a stretch of nine years. She’s on it again now, after losing her last job as a delivery truck driver because she missed work to care for a sick child.

This time, she plans to find work quickly. But she supports a program like the proposed community service project.

“Nine years was too long to be on welfare,” she said. “ It kept me from a job. It kept me from experiencing things. It kept me from living a life.”