welfare

From Welfare to Work:  A Participant Discusses What Makes One Faith-Based Program Work

by Pamela Leong (Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California, 2004)

National studies have repeatedly suggested that welfare-to-work participants value the trust, love, support, and respect that they often experience within faith-based job training and job placement programs. Whether or not these relational characteristics can be associated with religiously-motivated commitments to compassion and justice among staff members, it is important to note their centrality in the minds of participants when they attempt to account for their own successes.  Relationships matter. Sensitivity matters.  Emotional, material, and social supports matter.

In the following paragraphs, one participant in a faith-based job training and job placement program speaks for herself.  Mary is a 45-year-old, single, African-American woman who is the mother of an 18-year-old girl. She has moved from welfare to gainful employment successfully.  She tells us what mattered in her trek into the employment market.

Although our description of Mary is intended to protect her identity, her observations are reported in a straightforward way.

• Mary expressed gratitude for the job training she received—especially for training related to resume writing and computer skills.
• Mary appreciated the various ways in which staff members offered material support. For example, when Mary’s car broke down, staff members were able to provide bus tokens. When she could not afford to pay for gasoline, they covered the bill.  When Mary could not afford the kinds of clothing that she needed for her job search, they made sure that suitable clothing was available. 
• The most important element in her successful association with the faith-based job training program, however, was the emotional and social support extended by the staff.  In a county program, Mary reported, the staff had been rude and “nasty and mean.” Two of the staff members had laughed at her attire and at her disheveled appearance. In the faith-based program, staff members were nonjudgmental and supportive. “They care,” Mary says.  “They genuinely care….I was in quick sand.  I was steadily being pulled down, and they reached out to me and pulled me out, washed me off, cleaned me up, and I haven’t looked back since….” 

Even when times were tough in the extreme, Mary remembers that the staff maintained  “faith” in her. For example, on one occasion she was sent to a job interview, which, to her surprise, required a drug test.  When she failed this test, Mary reported, “I was so embarrassed I couldn’t come in and face [the program’s staff].” She stopped coming to the program until a staff member traveled to her home and convinced her that she would be welcomed back. “[I had] let them down a couple times,” Mary said.  “And they still believed in me.  They stood by me, and they worked hard with me.  They never gave up.” 

There were other personal touches:  The staff sent Mary a Christmas card, which she treasured. When she opened a checking account and a credit card account, a dinner was held to honor her accomplishments. “You know how you take a prize home to your mom, and your mom is glowing….I mean, they were so proud of me and I felt that.  It’s just a self-esteem booster.” 

• Mary was quick to point out that the program does not encourage dependence:  “The door’s open and the opportunity is there.  It’s for you to come in.  They’ll back you up, but you gotta come in and make that first step.  If you don’t make that first step, they are not gonna push you.” The program emphasizes self-reliance, self-motivation, and self-direction.  This strategy appears to be effective, at least from Mary’s perspective. “You know, if you had somebody in your life that’s constantly telling you you’re dumb, you’re not gonna make it, you feel dumb and you feel like you’re not gonna make it. But if you’ve got somebody tellin’ you everyday, ‘You’re beautiful, you can do this, you can do that,’ you know, you start to believe after you hear it so long.  And all this time, no one was telling me that I could do that, until I came here.  No one.  And so, I mean, they help[ed] me out a lot, and I thank God for ‘em…. I feel they’ve made me Cinderella.”  They took a rag…raggly old something and made me feel like Cinderella.”

A common mistake, according to the program director, occurs when staff members intentionally or unintentionally disaggregate the various types of support needed by participants.  Welfare-to-work programs simultaneously require multiple forms of support. “We have a lot of objectives,” the director said, “ but our primary objective is to economically empower impoverished people….And how we do that under our program is through education, training, case management, but most of all, handholding.  And we emphasize the handholding, because a lot of these people have never had a helping hand.”

The emotional and social supports that are extended to participants are central in the strategies of successful welfare-to-work programs. As Mary reported over and over, the presence of these supports enabled her to move from welfare dependence onto gainful employment. She was given a realistic opportunity to reclaim her own self-esteem and dignity. 

Mary’s success illustrates the need for faith-based welfare-to-work programs to provide four general types of support[1] to its participants:

1. INSTRUMENTAL SUPPORTis help, aid, or assistance with tangible needs.  At this faith-based welfare-to-work program, instrumental support includes training related to resume writing, computer skills, as well as on-the-job training.  But program staff members also offer other forms of material support that may not be directly related to job training (e.g., bus tokens, clothing, etc.).
2. APPRAISAL/EVALUATIONrefers to the provision of appropriate feedback or assistance in the decision-making process.  At this faith-based welfare-to-work program, staff members regularly evaluated participants’ skills in basic mathematics and English writing and reading, as well as in basic computational abilities.
3. INFORMATIONAL SUPPORTrefers to the provision of advice or information in the service of particular needs. 
4. EMOTIONAL SUPPORTrefers to the emotional component:  handholding, love, care, understanding, forgiving participants for transgresses, boosting of self-esteem, being non-judgmental.  In fact, emotional support may be the single most important element in the participant experience in the welfare-to-work program.  Mary herself attributed her successful progression in the faith-based job training program to the emotional and social support extended by the staff.

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This is part of a series of Thumbnail Case Studies authored by the FASTEN research team and released by Baylor University School of Social Work as part of a 30-month research project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.  This project is designed to identify the factors that contribute to the effectiveness of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in addressing challenges of urban poverty.  The Baylor School of Social Work is leading this research team with members from BaylorUniversity’s business school, the schools of social work at the Universityof Pittsburghand VirginiaCommonwealthUniversity, and the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the Universityof Southern California.

This essay represents some of the findings from the FASTEN research project that are relevant to the planning and delivery of services by faith-based organizations.  The piece was authored by Pamela Leong (with the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the Universityof Southern California) with the FASTEN Research Team.  She can be reached at pamelale [at] usc [dot] edu.

[1]For additional discussion on the four general types of support, please refer to:  Berkman, Lisa F. and Thomas Glass.  2000.  “Social Integration, Social Networks, Social Support, and Health.”  Pp. 137-173 in Social Epidemiology, edited by Lisa F. Berkman and Ichiro Kawachi.                New York:  OxfordUniversityPress.