After Welfare

At the Just-a Start job training program on Columbia Street, head teacher Sara P. Fass rushes from room to room, busily ministering to the needs of her students, fielding phone calls and thwarting crises.

Meanwhile, at the Davis Square Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA) office, a crew of several clerks greets clients warmly and directs them to one of three waiting areas inside the office, where they will meet with one of the office's 57 caseworkers.

Since Dec. 1, when about 200 Cambridge families lost welfare benefits, welfare recipients have been flocking to the DTA and programs like Just-a-Start as they try to adjust to the change.

The federal reform bill of 1996 limits recipients of Transitional Assistance for Families with Dependent Children (TAFDC) to 24 months on aid out of every 60-month period. In Massachusetts, these limits went into effect in December 1996 and last December, the first round of recipients lost their benefits.

As the winter continues and as welfare recipients continue to see their benefits expire, politicians, welfare advocates and the recipients themselves are trying to figure out how to help those who can't make it without welfare.

Looking Ahead

Cambridge Mayor Francis H. Duehay '55 says the consequences of the new cutoffs became clear to him recently when a homeless man came up to him with a disturbing report.

"He had never before seen so many people on the street in Cambridge," the mayor says.

And Duehay says there are signs of the cutoffs. Shelters in Cambridge and Boston often reach capacity in the winter, but in 1998 they reached capacity for the first time ever during the summer.

Duehay says the city has already taken steps to help those who were cut off before they could find jobs, including efforts at housing, job placement and formation of support groups for those living in poverty.

Duehay says he wants to do much more in the areas of affordable childcare and housing, but simply does not have the funds. He says he believes the federal government has passed the buck on taking care of poor people.

"They are cleverly handing down federal responsibilities to local government and forgetting that it costs money," he says.

Duehay says he remains hopeful for the future, but that it will take some time to solve the problem of poverty in Cambridge.

"People have got to buy food and clothing and have an affordable place to live," he says. "These things are not in place."

Placing the Blame

Although about§§ 1,300 Massachusetts welfare recipients have lost their benefits since Dec. 1, DTA officials say the numbers could have been much worse.

In 1996 the clock started ticking for 41,039 Massachusetts families. But by last month there were only 5,103 recipients subject to the limits on the rolls.

DTA employees credit their own efforts for this drop.

"People who are facing a time limit have been our top priority over the past two years," says DTA spokesperson, Richard R. Powers.

He says caseworkers have been increasing contact with their clients, encouraging them to apply for extensions, and focusing on referring clients to sources of additional aid, such as Just-a-Start.

But opponents of the time limits say that the decreased caseload doesn't necessarily translate to a job well done on the DTA's part.

"Even though the rolls may be down, it appears as though more job training, employment opportunities and support services are needed to genuinely assist people into the working world," says Pamela A. Thomure, a Cambridge attorney who helped lead the City of Cambridge Welfare Reform Task Force.

Thomure says that as the Dec. 1 deadline approached, many welfare recipients accepted minimum-wage jobs-"jobs that will not support a family in the city of Cambridge."

"There will be social devastation in five and 10 years out of this horrendous policy," she says.

Susan E. Mintz, a planner for the Cambridge Department of Human Services, also finds the drop in caseloads less than reassuring.

She suggests that Cambridge's strong economy and soaring rents explain the drop. "I think one possible explanation is that people have continued to receive benefits but have been forced to move out of Cambridge," she says.

LeFemme Bolden, 23, is one former welfare recipient who is fed up with the welfare system.

Bolden, a Cambridge resident, left high school in 1992 because she was pregnant. She promptly signed up for welfare and has been receiving checks ever since.

In 1994, she was forced to vacate her Cambridge apartment because she couldn't pay her rent.

Bolden says she applied for space in a shelter but was told there were no spaces available in the Boston metropolitan area.

According to Bolden, she and her four-month-old daughter were placed in a shelter in Springfield, Mass. and told they had to find their own way to get there if they wanted to claim the space.

At the time of the move, Bolden was in a computer-training program. She was forced to drop out.

Bolden says she did not participate in any of the job placement and training programs offered by the DTA in Springfield because she was focused on getting back to Cambridge, where her family and friends live.

Unclean living conditions in shelters and inaccessible or indifferent caseworkers were other factors that Bolden says contributed to her exasperation.

"There is no reason to cut off some-one's check just because they forget to bring in one piece of paper," Bolden says. "They cut me off for a month. I had no money and I was starving."

Now Bolden's time is up; she received her last check Jan. 4. For the time being, Bolden is living with her grandmother and says she spends every day searching for a job.

A further tension between the DTA and welfare activists arises with their characterizations of welfare recipients.

Diane M. Younker, director of the Davis Square DTA office which serves Cambridge and the surrounding suburbs, says DTA staffers have been doing all they can for their clients, but clients are often unresponsive.

"We send out an 800-person mailing for a training program and are lucky if we get 10 responses," Younker says.

"We have people from training and job agencies who come and sit in our office all day and wait for clients," Younker adds. "We offer daycare vouchers for anyone working or in training."

She correlates the demanding nature of the training programs with the low participation rate.

"You have to get up at 7 a.m. to get there," she says. "It's like your mother telling you what to do. People have their own agendas."

Carmen Benson, who has been a caseworker at the Davis Square DTA for 14 years, says she suspects that along with strongly ingrained lifestyle habits, welfare fraud-such as when recipients don't tell the DTA that their living partner gets income-may be partly to blame for the lack of response to these programs.

"The more you push, the less you get from them," Benson says. "It's hard for me to understand why, when this source of help is coming to an end, and I'm offering them child care and a way to better themselves, they are indifferent."

But some welfare activists, like Marie Kennedy, associate professor of community planning at U. Mass-Boston's College of Public and Community Service, have been trying to fight this stereotype.

Kennedy describes the results of an informal survey she handed out to her students.

"Even among women who were on aid themselves, the most typical answer was that 25 percent of the federal budget went to welfare," Kennedy says. "There's been so much media attention to how [welfare recipients] were the 'gimme-girls' women who were lazy and had children just to get on welfare and where secretly driving Cadillacs."

Expert Opinions

Those who have studied welfare say many factors hinder recipients from becoming self-sufficient.

"Some people are going through psychological barriers-lack of self-esteem, lack of education, and the paperwork is an obstacle," Duehay says.

Kennedy says many of her students may be forced to drop out or may not be able to enroll in the first place due to the new time limits.

Kennedy, herself a former welfare mother who was arrested in a December governor's office protest of the time limits, tells of one of her students who dropped out recently.

The woman, according to Kennedy, has two teenage sons, one of whom has a learning disability and requires extra tutoring, and a toddler daughter. Though she had a daycare voucher, the woman had repeated difficulties with getting the government-provided van to pick her daughter up at the agreed-upon time. Eventually she had missed so muchschool that she was forced to quit for the time being.

Kennedy says she believes laziness is not a reason that women remain on welfare.

"There is very little that you can turn around in two years," she says.

Kennedy also discredits the notion of prevalent welfare fraud.

"To make ends meet on that income you have to be incredibly clever," Kennedy says. "You have to be working very hard. Nobody is going to stay on it if they can get off."

Other experts concur that even the most hopeful and hardworking woman may have trouble getting herself back on her feet.

"There is a cycle of poverty in this country that is very hard to break," says Andres E. Bermudez, community service coordinator for the Just-a-Start YouthBuild program.

Lisa Dodson, a fellow at the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute and co-author of a report on welfare in Cambridge and Boston, blames the lack of interest in DTA workshops on the program's futility rather than the clients' bad habits.

"People have been pushed for years to go to training programs and workshops that have not resulted in jobs," Dodson says. "If a route to economic independence was provided, people would flock to it."

Bermudez says he agrees that the programs could be more useful.

"The training programs that are put together by the state are pretty watered-down and boring," he says.

Take a Number

But DTA employees defend their attempts, pointing to the constraints on the government agency.

Benson says the size of her caseload bars her from getting to know her clients and their families as much as she would like.

Walter Kane, a supervisor at the Davis Square DTA, says personal attention is not the job of the DTA.

"I always try to deal with each person as an individual," Kane says. "But when you're dealing with any government agency you're going to get the impression that you're a number."

The Davis Square office's 57 staff members handle 1,300 cases.

Though many have expressed dismay at the DTA's unwillingness to track clients after their cases close, DTA officials say the organization does not conduct follow-up simply because they don't have the resources to do so.

"Although our caseload has only gone down by 10,000 cases in the past year, 55,000 have actually closed and 45,000 have opened," Power says.

"In order to track these closed cases," he continues, "you would have to duplicate this agency, because we're dealing with a total caseload of 58,000 families."

However, a new follow-up program is one payoff from the time limits. Workers from the Mass. Dept. of Public Health will be conducting home visits and serving as a go-between for former recipients and sources of help.

A Way Out

Programs like Just-a-Start are one such source of help, offering welfare recipients an alternative to government-run programs.

Dina D. Ronnet, a participant in Just-a-Start's YouthBuild program who has been on TAFDC since she lost her job a year ago due to an illness, says she looks forward to self-sufficiency.

"This is something I wanted to do to get myself off. I guess I'm helping them kick me off," Ronnet says.

Ronnet hopes to find a position as a corrections officer when she graduates from YouthBuild next year. She then intends to work for at least one year while saving money for college so she can become a lab technician.

The year-long program combines high-school education and community service and is open to 17-to 24-year-old residents of Boston, Cambridge and Somerville. If students complete 900 hours of community service through the program, they receive a $2,300 scholarship, redeemable for at any federally accredited educational institution or training program.

For Scarlette, a 21-year-old Charlestown resident and TAFDC recipient with an 11-month-old child, self-sufficiency is also a motivation.

She is in a nurses' aide training course at Bunker Hill Community College and is working nights. She is trying to obtain nighttime childcare through the DTA, and says she fears she will be forced to quit her job otherwise.

But she approves of the time limits.

"I believe that in two years you should be able to get back on your feet," she explains.

Debbie, 21, lives in a shelter with her two children, ages two years and three months. She was recently approved for Section 8 housing assistance and is looking for a permanent residence. She has been on TAFDC for two years and will be leaving the rolls soon of her own accord.

Debbie says she teaches preschoolers at the Peabody House in Somerville. She will soon be increasing her weekly hours from 29 to 40, but says she looks forward to the change.

"I like to work so it doesn't bother me," she says.

Debbie is fortunate enough to have the added perk of free childcare, as both of her children come to work with her every day.

She aspires to manage a daycare center someday.

Tough Love

Back in the Just-a-Start office, a student approaches Fass and asks her to borrow two dollars. "You are nickel-and-diming me to death!" Fass declares in good-natured annoyance as she hands the student the last dollar bill from her wallet.

In the next room, Bermudez overseas Ronnet and her classmates as they take a practice high school equivalency test. Ronnet's daughter Sadida, 3, looks on.

According to its staff, YouthBuild's innovative approaches and usable outcome offer a refreshing alternative to government training programs.

The YouthBuild classes are very project-oriented, says Bermudez, who teaches social studies.

"People on welfare are not traditional students so you can't teach them in a traditional way", he says.

An example is Bermudez's latest assignment, "the immigration project."

The project requires each student to interview family members to find out who the first person in his or her family was to come to the U.S.

The student then researches what types of laws affected that family member and presents his or her findings to the class, in the process learning about interviewing skills, speaking skills, political science, structure of government, economics, and his or her own family.

When Ricky found out his girlfriend was pregnant, he wanted to help support her but had no income and no diploma, so he started selling drugs.

His girlfriend applied for YouthBuild but was turned away because she was pregnant.

Around the same time, Ricky was arrested, but was allowed to join Just-a-Start rather than go to jail.

Ricky says the program differs from his South Boston high school, from which he dropped out. There, he says, "I didn't feel I was being taught anything, I was just lost."

Ricky says he expects to earn both his GED and the scholarship, which he intends to use for carpenter training. He says his girlfriend will probably participate in YouthBuild next year after she has had the baby.

Ricky says he is still worried about the immediate future. He says the $150 weekly stipend YouthBuild provides renders his girlfriend ineligible for welfare, but makes it tough to foot the bills.

He says he is dedicated to making it work anyway. "I'm doing it for my kid and my girlfriend," he says.

"And myself," he adds after pausing to think a moment.

The next day, Bermudez oversees the same students as they repaint the New School of Music in Cambridge. The project is one of many that the students will complete as part of the program's community service component.

One of the students, Jennifer E. Rice, directs pointed rebukes at several young men who stand in a corner chatting while she paints. Rice's clothes are covered in white paint but she is proud of her diligence and particularly vocal.

"If you're not doing what they ask you to do then you shouldn't be here!" Rice declares.

Rice says she hopes to use her scholarship for construction training and then go on to study child psychology.

Bermudez says YouthBuild goes out of its way to avoid coddling its participants.

According to Bermudez, only a few of the roughly 50 students who begin Youth-Build each year end up earning the community service scholarship, and only about 50 percent earn their GEDs.

"It's a combination of [dangling] a carrot and using a paddle," he jokes

Carmen Benson, who has been a caseworker at the Davis Square DTA for 14 years, says she suspects that along with strongly ingrained lifestyle habits, welfare fraud-such as when recipients don't tell the DTA that their living partner gets income-may be partly to blame for the lack of response to these programs.

"The more you push, the less you get from them," Benson says. "It's hard for me to understand why, when this source of help is coming to an end, and I'm offering them child care and a way to better themselves, they are indifferent."

But some welfare activists, like Marie Kennedy, associate professor of community planning at U. Mass-Boston's College of Public and Community Service, have been trying to fight this stereotype.

Kennedy describes the results of an informal survey she handed out to her students.

"Even among women who were on aid themselves, the most typical answer was that 25 percent of the federal budget went to welfare," Kennedy says. "There's been so much media attention to how [welfare recipients] were the 'gimme-girls' women who were lazy and had children just to get on welfare and where secretly driving Cadillacs."

Expert Opinions

Those who have studied welfare say many factors hinder recipients from becoming self-sufficient.

"Some people are going through psychological barriers-lack of self-esteem, lack of education, and the paperwork is an obstacle," Duehay says.

Kennedy says many of her students may be forced to drop out or may not be able to enroll in the first place due to the new time limits.

Kennedy, herself a former welfare mother who was arrested in a December governor's office protest of the time limits, tells of one of her students who dropped out recently.

The woman, according to Kennedy, has two teenage sons, one of whom has a learning disability and requires extra tutoring, and a toddler daughter. Though she had a daycare voucher, the woman had repeated difficulties with getting the government-provided van to pick her daughter up at the agreed-upon time. Eventually she had missed so muchschool that she was forced to quit for the time being.

Kennedy says she believes laziness is not a reason that women remain on welfare.

"There is very little that you can turn around in two years," she says.

Kennedy also discredits the notion of prevalent welfare fraud.

"To make ends meet on that income you have to be incredibly clever," Kennedy says. "You have to be working very hard. Nobody is going to stay on it if they can get off."

Other experts concur that even the most hopeful and hardworking woman may have trouble getting herself back on her feet.

"There is a cycle of poverty in this country that is very hard to break," says Andres E. Bermudez, community service coordinator for the Just-a-Start YouthBuild program.

Lisa Dodson, a fellow at the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute and co-author of a report on welfare in Cambridge and Boston, blames the lack of interest in DTA workshops on the program's futility rather than the clients' bad habits.

"People have been pushed for years to go to training programs and workshops that have not resulted in jobs," Dodson says. "If a route to economic independence was provided, people would flock to it."

Bermudez says he agrees that the programs could be more useful.

"The training programs that are put together by the state are pretty watered-down and boring," he says.

Take a Number

But DTA employees defend their attempts, pointing to the constraints on the government agency.

Benson says the size of her caseload bars her from getting to know her clients and their families as much as she would like.

Walter Kane, a supervisor at the Davis Square DTA, says personal attention is not the job of the DTA.

"I always try to deal with each person as an individual," Kane says. "But when you're dealing with any government agency you're going to get the impression that you're a number."

The Davis Square office's 57 staff members handle 1,300 cases.

Though many have expressed dismay at the DTA's unwillingness to track clients after their cases close, DTA officials say the organization does not conduct follow-up simply because they don't have the resources to do so.

"Although our caseload has only gone down by 10,000 cases in the past year, 55,000 have actually closed and 45,000 have opened," Power says.

"In order to track these closed cases," he continues, "you would have to duplicate this agency, because we're dealing with a total caseload of 58,000 families."

However, a new follow-up program is one payoff from the time limits. Workers from the Mass. Dept. of Public Health will be conducting home visits and serving as a go-between for former recipients and sources of help.

A Way Out

Programs like Just-a-Start are one such source of help, offering welfare recipients an alternative to government-run programs.

Dina D. Ronnet, a participant in Just-a-Start's YouthBuild program who has been on TAFDC since she lost her job a year ago due to an illness, says she looks forward to self-sufficiency.

"This is something I wanted to do to get myself off. I guess I'm helping them kick me off," Ronnet says.

Ronnet hopes to find a position as a corrections officer when she graduates from YouthBuild next year. She then intends to work for at least one year while saving money for college so she can become a lab technician.

The year-long program combines high-school education and community service and is open to 17-to 24-year-old residents of Boston, Cambridge and Somerville. If students complete 900 hours of community service through the program, they receive a $2,300 scholarship, redeemable for at any federally accredited educational institution or training program.

For Scarlette, a 21-year-old Charlestown resident and TAFDC recipient with an 11-month-old child, self-sufficiency is also a motivation.

She is in a nurses' aide training course at Bunker Hill Community College and is working nights. She is trying to obtain nighttime childcare through the DTA, and says she fears she will be forced to quit her job otherwise.

But she approves of the time limits.

"I believe that in two years you should be able to get back on your feet," she explains.

Debbie, 21, lives in a shelter with her two children, ages two years and three months. She was recently approved for Section 8 housing assistance and is looking for a permanent residence. She has been on TAFDC for two years and will be leaving the rolls soon of her own accord.

Debbie says she teaches preschoolers at the Peabody House in Somerville. She will soon be increasing her weekly hours from 29 to 40, but says she looks forward to the change.

"I like to work so it doesn't bother me," she says.

Debbie is fortunate enough to have the added perk of free childcare, as both of her children come to work with her every day.

She aspires to manage a daycare center someday.

Tough Love

Back in the Just-a-Start office, a student approaches Fass and asks her to borrow two dollars. "You are nickel-and-diming me to death!" Fass declares in good-natured annoyance as she hands the student the last dollar bill from her wallet.

In the next room, Bermudez overseas Ronnet and her classmates as they take a practice high school equivalency test. Ronnet's daughter Sadida, 3, looks on.

According to its staff, YouthBuild's innovative approaches and usable outcome offer a refreshing alternative to government training programs.

The YouthBuild classes are very project-oriented, says Bermudez, who teaches social studies.

"People on welfare are not traditional students so you can't teach them in a traditional way", he says.

An example is Bermudez's latest assignment, "the immigration project."

The project requires each student to interview family members to find out who the first person in his or her family was to come to the U.S.

The student then researches what types of laws affected that family member and presents his or her findings to the class, in the process learning about interviewing skills, speaking skills, political science, structure of government, economics, and his or her own family.

When Ricky found out his girlfriend was pregnant, he wanted to help support her but had no income and no diploma, so he started selling drugs.

His girlfriend applied for YouthBuild but was turned away because she was pregnant.

Around the same time, Ricky was arrested, but was allowed to join Just-a-Start rather than go to jail.

Ricky says the program differs from his South Boston high school, from which he dropped out. There, he says, "I didn't feel I was being taught anything, I was just lost."

Ricky says he expects to earn both his GED and the scholarship, which he intends to use for carpenter training. He says his girlfriend will probably participate in YouthBuild next year after she has had the baby.

Ricky says he is still worried about the immediate future. He says the $150 weekly stipend YouthBuild provides renders his girlfriend ineligible for welfare, but makes it tough to foot the bills.

He says he is dedicated to making it work anyway. "I'm doing it for my kid and my girlfriend," he says.

"And myself," he adds after pausing to think a moment.

The next day, Bermudez oversees the same students as they repaint the New School of Music in Cambridge. The project is one of many that the students will complete as part of the program's community service component.

One of the students, Jennifer E. Rice, directs pointed rebukes at several young men who stand in a corner chatting while she paints. Rice's clothes are covered in white paint but she is proud of her diligence and particularly vocal.

"If you're not doing what they ask you to do then you shouldn't be here!" Rice declares.

Rice says she hopes to use her scholarship for construction training and then go on to study child psychology.

Bermudez says YouthBuild goes out of its way to avoid coddling its participants.

According to Bermudez, only a few of the roughly 50 students who begin Youth-Build each year end up earning the community service scholarship, and only about 50 percent earn their GEDs.

"It's a combination of [dangling] a carrot and using a paddle," he jokes