Home | CONTACT US

Throughout most of this century, a trip to the local welfare office has been a distasteful experience. The client would walk into a drab facility, take a number, and sit in a crowded waiting room. A parent with restless young children might have to wait hours before meeting an agency bureaucrat.

And the agony did not end there. The applicant next appeared before an eligibility worker, who sat with a questionnaire or behind a computer and asked a litany of demeaning personal questions to determine eligibility for an all-or-nothing welfare check. There was no real attempt to understand why the person needed help nor what type of assistance would work best. The endgame was process, not performance.

Federal welfare reform is changing all that. The 1996 reform law requires an increasing percentage of every state’s caseload to participate in work activities each year of the five-year block grant. To achieve this, many states are reinventing their welfare offices to help clients get ready for work.

Milwaukee is a good example of how this works. Governor Tommy Thompson (R-WI) and the Hudson Institute designed the nation’s first welfare replacement program. Since early 1998, each welfare family in Wisconsin must participate in approximately thirty hours of work per week to receive the cash benefit. The rest of the work week is spent on education and training.

To deliver these services, the governor divided Milwaukee County into six regions and invited agencies (government, nonprofit private, and for-profit) to compete for contracts to deliver welfare-to-work services through a job center network.

Wisconsin officials carefully described what the agencies have to achieve, but allowed each to decide for itself how to get things done. Each agency was given an eighteen-month block grant and invited to be as innovative as its employees’ imagination allowed. Fiscal reporting and minimum service requirements protect the program’s integrity.

The agencies have replaced the eligibility worker with a financial and employment planner responsible for assessing the applicant’s assets, not identify barriers, and for helping the client develop an action plan for self-sufficiency. A client’s first point of contact is now a problem-solver who offers critical intervention services rather than mind-numbing bureaucratic rigmarole.

The job center itself sets a different tone. By housing more than a dozen different local employment and training programs, it treats a welfare-to-work participant like any other job seeker. The job centers offer state-of-the-art career information, resources, workshops, and services in a pleasant, business-like setting.

The Milwaukee agencies are also breaking new ground in offsite job training. One agency, YW-WORKS, recently purchased a company (Generation X Plastics) to train welfare-to-work participants. Another firm, Employment Solutions, Inc. (ESI), established a partnership with the Marcus Corporation (an entertainment company) to train participants on the company’s premises. Marcus officials were so impressed with ESI’s training techniques that they hired the welfare agency to conduct all the company’s new employee training.

The welfare agency of yesterday is rapidly being replaced by the job-training firm of tomorrow. This transformation is a boon for low-income citizens who want a career rather than a welfare check, and for business managers seeking quality employees in today’s tight labor market.