Transcript
MR. HASKINS: Good morning, my name is Ron Haskins. I'd like to welcome you on behalf of my colleagues here at the Welfare Reform and Beyond Program here at Brookings Institution to the sixth public event in our series examining the effects of the 1996 Welfare Reform legislation.
I would like to remind you that this forum is being web cast live, and all of you could have access to it later if you don't suffer too much the first time through and want to go through again, or check to see some outrageous statement that somebody made, you're welcome to do that. It will be permanently stored on our web site at www.brookings.edu. And those watching the web cast now can submit questions. We will have a period later where we take questions from the audience, and the audience includes our web cast audience. And if any of you viewing it live now by web cast would like to submit a question, submit it to question@brookings.edu.
Let me also remind you that our next public event will be on September 24th, and that event will mark the release of a volume of papers on welfare reform that's being published by the Brookings Press. The volume entitled The New World of Welfare is edited by the renowned scholar Rebecca Blank, and a little known political hack named Ron Haskins. Keep an eye on our web site for more information about this event.
Now, before I turn the program over to Rodney Carroll, let me make two brief points. First, Nancy Johnson was scheduled to moderate today, but last minute congressional business, especially negotiations on the Patient's Bill of Rights, has forced her to cancel. She sends her regards and regrets, and hopes to join us on a future occasion. Fortunately, realizing that this event was scheduled for the last week of Congress, indeed the day before the Congress was scheduled to adjourn for its August recess, we anticipated that Ms. Johnson might have to cancel at the last minute, so we asked Rodney Carroll, who is the CEO of the Welfare to Work Partnership if he would step in for Mrs. Johnson if she could not come, and he graciously agreed to do it.
Rodney, we really appreciate your willingness to do that.
Second, in planning this event to mark the fifth anniversary of President Clinton signing the 1996 Welfare Reform Legislation, we wanted to depart from our usual fixation on numbers, models, and evaluation, and so forth, and get a much closer and commonsense personal view of welfare reform. And who better to ask for that sort of view than mothers who have been on welfare and left, and reporters who have covered their stories. Thus, today we hope to hear specific stories about how mothers left welfare, about how daycare works, about child support enforcement and how it works, and about the nature and tone of services delivered by case workers.
So, on behalf of our staff, we want to thank all the mothers and reporters who have agreed to come today, and let me now turn it over to Rodney Carroll, who has a few brief comments.
Thank you.
MR. CARROLL: Thank you, Ron. I appreciate the invitation, and also, to Andrea Kane and the fine staff at Brookings.
My name is Rodney Carroll, and I just wanted to say welcome and thanks to everyone for attending.
The time is about five years ago, the scene is a conference room at a building at United Parcel Service, the occasion is, I'm preparing for the second graduating class of welfare recipients in about August 1996. As I'm sitting there preparing my remarks, I'm remembering that this came about because of a meeting that was held in March of 1996. It seems that there was some concern about this operation on the staffing levels. Such concern that UPS sent corporate representatives from Atlanta and the region to come into Philadelphia to talk about this issue. And as I sat in the back, I was the operations person, they were primarily HR professionals discussing and debating back and forth on how the situation could be resolved. And they really started talking about their traditional hiring methods, and how they usually recruited people, when finally I kind of shy and bashfully raised my hand in the back and asked a question. I said, how about if we hire people that would really want the job.
As I did that, I can remember one HR manager looking around as if to say, who do you think we're hiring. And I said, well, you know, I know that there are people that are growing up, they're living in welfare in Central Philadelphia that would love to have this opportunity to work at United Parcel Service. And as soon as I said that, they kind of dismissed me as if to say, you're the operations person, we're the HR people, we'll take care of it.
Shortly thereafter, the situation was still rising in concern, and finally one HR manager came to me and said, do you really think this would work? Do you really think that hiring people from welfare would be beneficial to UPS? And I said, I do. Given the right circumstances, the right training, the right support systems, I think they'll be better than what you expect.
Long story short, we began a program right around that time, and put a training program in place, and had a rising success. As a matter of fact, the retention rates of people coming off of welfare at that time was 92 percent. That compared with a 60 percent retention rate for our traditional hires. Therefore, UPS had all it needed to begin a welfare to work program.
At the time, I didn't realize, but apparently there were people here in Washington discussing back and forth in the Congress on how to pass a bill that would "end welfare as we know it." At UPS, we didn't hire people from welfare because of some act of Congress, nor was it because of social responsibility, nor was it because of charity or the right thing to do. You see, we had a business need. The need was, we wanted good people, we wanted people that would work hard, and come to work every night, and be able to process the packages that we needed to process. Therefore, it was surely and purely a business need.
Shortly thereafter, the bill was signed, as you know, and there began a partnership. This partnership began in 1997 by Eli Segal, and it began with five companies, United Parcel Service, United Airlines, Monsanto, Burger King, and Sprint. The objective was to encourage the business community to development a relationship and a partnership that all they had to do was commit to hire people from welfare.
Those five companies in those four or five years have made an impact that I'm not sure you're going to believe. You probably realize that ever since that time about 2.2 or 2.3 million adults have come off of welfare rolls. You need to understand that the welfare partnerships is saying that 1.2 of 2.2 million work at Welfare to Work Partnership's companies. Therefore, this partnership that began with five companies, it now has over 22,000 companies, have made a significant impact in reducing the rolls.
When I first came here, my goal was to go around and talk to companies and encourage them to get involved, and encourage them to hire people from welfare. The first thing I had to do was break down stereotypes. Companies like some people maybe even in this audience, and certainly around the company, had a belief about welfare recipients, thought that they were probably lazy, didn't want to work, somehow, unbelievable, thought they might even enjoy it or wanted to be on welfare. As we began to talk to companies, always talked to them from the same standpoint, never talked to them about social policy, social responsibility, charity, I told them why it would be good for their business, why it would be good for their bottom line. As a matter of fact, the tag line for the partnership is that it is a smart solution for business to hire people from welfare.
As I've traveled the country in the last three or four years, not only encouraging businesses, I've met many people coming off of welfare, and I think you'll find it interesting that those people are just like we are. They want the same things we want. They have the same ambitions, the same dreams, the same goals in their life that we all have. They want the dignity that good work brings. They're looking for a chance and opportunity. None of them I talk to are looking for a handout. They all were looking for a hand-up.
I think as we have this discussion this morning, we're talking about where we've come from year one to now year five. Many might say, we've come a long way, certainly the roles have been reduced, and certainly maybe some attitudes have changed, businesses have changed, and we really have a lot to be proud of. But I would suggest to you that we're still on the journey. Even though we've come a long way, I would say that we clearly, as a country, have not yet arrived.
I would like to just have a brief introduction of the panel members. Inside your package there is extensive bios, you're certainly welcome to read that at your leisure.
To my far right, there is Kate Boo, she is a journalist from the Washington Post. I should say an award winning journalist from the Washington Post.
Right next to her is Elizabeth Jones, she works for D.C.'s Finest. She's a police officer in the District.
And next to her is Lou Ann Cataneo, who is my friend, works for Marriott, has a very good story to tell. She's now the concierge, can help you get good reservations if you're in New York, and perhaps even tickets.
The lady in the back is Norma, she's from Florida. We had a conversation this morning, she works for the South Florida workforce. She is also a student, believes that education is the key, and is currently very close to completing her AA degree and wants to go and get her bachelor's in finance and accounting.
And sitting to my right, the man who needs no introduction is a noted journalist from the New York Times, Jason DeParle.
And I would like to begin by having Jason, if he would, come up and give us some brief remarks. I would appreciate it. Thank you.
(Applause.)
MR. DePARLE: Thank you. Ron and Rodney asked me to provide a reporter's perspective on the welfare bill and do it in five minutes or less. So, to get to the point, what I'm struck by is the contrast in two kinds of reporters' perspectives you get. The first comes when you're sitting in the office with the data, and the second is the perspective you get when you're out in the real world talking to people who are on, and have been on welfare.
The second is different from the first, it's not necessarily the opposite, I think it's more nuanced. On paper, it still looks like a great success, or at least a success. Depending on your perspective, it's somewhere between a success and a dramatic success. Welfare and poverty are way down, earnings are up, there's nothing like an obviously widespread rise in destitution that opponents of the law feared. There aren't children sleeping on grates. Instead, there are a million or two women who have moved or are in the process of moving into jobs. Some like Ms. Jones who have done so with great success.
I think had the people who had written this bill been able to see five years into the distance, in 1996, if they could see Haskins, Weaver and Sawhill Policy Brief Number 1, and see how the numbers had played out over the ensuing years, they'd either be breathing a sign of relief, or actually popping champagne corks.
Obviously, there are areas of concern, but by conventional yardsticks of measuring social legislation, so far things are working well. For me, the sense of dramatic progress hasn't really come through in the time that I've spent talking to poor single mothers. I've met lots who have managed the transition from welfare to steady work, but I've rarely encountered someone who describes her life as being fundamentally transformed by that transition. It's not to say things seem worse. On the contrary, they often seem at least a little better off for having made that move. It's just that the contrast between the old and the new isn't as dramatic as I would have expected.
As a welfare reporter, you get trained to ask questions about welfare. So, how long were you on, when did you get off, what happened, how did you get off, what happened next. And these are the questions that I started out asking. And when I put away that template and just let people talk and tell their life story the way it appeared to them, it seemed like the big event that I was focusing on, the end of AFDC and the start of a weekly paycheck, wasn't really the one they were focusing on.
The one woman I got to know was the reunion with a mother who had abandoned her as a small child into foster care. For another, the big life changing event in her life was the day her children's father went to prison. For another, it was when a man she was in love with got out of prison. For another, it was ongoing problems with her stepfather which stemmed from his sexual abuse of her as a young child. For another, it was descent into drug addiction that plagued her even when she was on AFDC. For another, it was a daughter who got pregnant.
One of the women I'm writing about had spent 12 years on AFDC, and got off three days after Bill Clinton signed the bill. So, in the course of the conversation I asked her, how did that feel? And when I asked questions that she regards as self-evidently stupid, and there are a lot of them, she twists her face into this really sour expression, like she'd just been sucking a rancid lemon. She gave me the rancid lemon look, and she said, I don't think about stuff like that. This didn't deter me, so I plod on, yes, but it must have had some meaning to you. And she said, it means I'm going to be broke the rest of my life. I asked her cousin the same question, what does it mean. She said, it means I have to use cash to buy food. She was very indignant about that.
I don't take the comments entirely at their face value because I think this woman actually is proud of her new life as a worker, both of these women actually are proud of their new lives, to some degree, as workers. And, in fact, she's not broke for the rest of her life, she's probably, in this case at least, better off, even when you try to make some complicated calculations about subtracting out the loss of welfare and food stamps and adding in tax credits, I think her income has risen. But in a larger sense, I think what she's saying is, getting off welfare is a bigger deal to you than it was to me. Before she left welfare, she was a low-income single mother raising her kids by herself in a dangerous inner city neighborhood, and now she's a low-income single mother raising her kids by herself in a dangerous inner city neighborhood.
If the story is not as dramatic as I thought it was going to be, I can think of two possible explanations. One is simply that it's still early. Maybe it's not realistic to think that somebody who gets off of welfare in 1996 is going to be a completely different person in 2000 or 2001. You may have to save a few years before you can move to a better neighborhood. You may have to put in a few years at an $8 an hour job before you can move up to a $12 an hour job, and have it seem qualitatively different to you. Maybe it takes a while to cultivate the new social contacts that might allow you to meet the kind of man who can be a responsible father to your children. Maybe it will take a whole generation, maybe to some extent, after all, this legislation was an investment in the future generation and the hope of providing more disciplined homes, and more orderly lives, and role models, so maybe it's 20 or 30 years too early to feel the dramatic impact we would hope for.
On the other hand, there's a second possibility, and that's that welfare is never as central to the lives of welfare recipients as it seems. One thing, having a big national debate about welfare does is, it puts welfare at the center of the narrative. On the left, there were great concerns that people would become dispossessed without it. And on the right, there were predictions that people would become emancipated without it. I once asked Newt Gingrich what he thought the Robert Taylor Homes were going to look like without AFDC. He said, I think you might be astonished. It's called Hong Kong. He continued, as a historian I have no doubt that requiring people to be responsible for their actions would change behavior over night.
I think journalists raised the expectations of dramatic change, too. I'm sure I wrote many stories about the dramatic change coming to a program that, there's a little key on my keyboard, that 14 million of the poorest women and children can rely on, and so when it changes, you expected something big to happen all of a sudden. I'm just not sure that the average woman on welfare assigns the program that kind of central role in her life.
I took my best shot at reconstructing family finances for one of the families I'm writing about, and I tried to do it for the four years before she left welfare. And my best guess is that AFDC accounted for something like 28 percent of her income, with the other main sources being food stamps, earnings, some of them were reported, some of them were under the table, tax credits, both federal and state, and the contributions of various boyfriends. If it's true that welfare is a smaller part of the story than we thought, I think that's both good news and bad news. The good news, of course, is that you can end it without the negative consequences that critics of the bill feared. The bad news may be that you can end it without the dramatic improvements that some people expected, at least in the short-run. With it or without it, as one of the women I'm writing about often says to me, we know how to survive, we are survivors. And for her, it's more of a story of continuity than any great change in the summer of 1996.
MS. BOO: We all went out to dinner last night, the three women here and some of the people from Brookings, and us, and we heard these women's stories, as you will in a minute, and it is easy to forget when you hear the fairly radical changes that these individuals have made in their lives, what a sheerly improbable thing it was in 1996, this Welfare Reform Act, at a time when most people wanted government just to get out of the way of the markets, and human resources people basically issue checks, and that's that.
This law presumed not just to put women to work, but to involve themselves in some of those intimate aspects of human behavior, like whether 16-year-old girls have babies or not, and how mothers monitor their children's attendance at school, and the thing that's wild, looking back, is how well this actually worked. But that's also the problem. Because it's worked so well on the front end, now we're getting to the hard part, the illiterate, the addicted, the depressed, and the unwilling at a time when the national consensus is, we're done.
Last year, the New York Times wrote eight front page stories on welfare reform, two years before that they wrote twice as many, two years before that twice as many as that. So, at a time when we're getting to the place that is really going to tax our ability as a government to engineer people's lives, I'm not sure we're paying attention to the right sort of thing. And I think the stories that you're going to hear from these women are going to raise insistent questions about implementation of the law, the nitty-gritty things like daycare provisions, child support enforcement, case management. And these implementation questions aren't, at this moment, able to be seen on these multiple cohort analyses that you think tank people do, but I think they're going to have some real world implications in the next five years.
We know from the studies, particularly the ones done by Katz and Allen here at Brookings, that welfare dependence is increasingly an inner city problem. We also know that the declining case loads have been slowing in recent months. The standard explanation of human services officials to the lagging numbers of the inner city is that the inner cities obviously have the greatest concentration of people who can't read, are addicted, are the hardest to serve. And that's certainly true. But what's also true if you're a city official is that terming your clientele deeply flawed is one way to divert attention from the flaws of your own programs, and I want to talk about some of those.
Most of the coverage that we read about in welfare is from the states that are doing the most, places where politicians careers are invested, and money and innovation is being embraced. I'm interested in the rest of America. Places like the District of Columbia where, to my knowledge, the mayor has never made a speech about welfare reform. This is the place I know best, and so by following it since 1996 I know two things.
I know, one, that contracts for welfare reform providers were delayed because of cronyism and corruption. There were no heads of major departments in the human services agency, and only in recent months have programs for the hard to serve gotten underway. That's one fact.
The other fact is that residents' clocks have been ticking since 1997. And so next year, all these people who have not been served are about to reach their five-year deadline. I think there are many places in America where that's the case, where people are about to hit their deadline with the presumption of being helped when, in reality, that help has yet to be delivered.
I've been following some of those women, and I'll mention two. One of them is a woman with five children and acute cirrhosis of the liver because of alcoholism. The other is a woman who grew up in large part at St. Elizabeth's Hospital here in the District. When she smokes a cigarette she thinks that babies are singing to her from its filter.
I've followed these women over the years, and they meet with their caseworkers regularly, they do what they're supposed to do. And nearly five years in neither of them has been referred to alcohol services or mental health services. And, in fact, they're in regular job training programs right now. These women will in all probability fail. And in the case of the woman with cirrhosis, the alcoholic, we might hope that she will fail, because she was recently referred to training as a childcare worker. I think that identification of barriers to employment, and aggressive treatment and resource provision is something that local providers are only now learning how to do right, and I think we have a long way to go on that front if we expect to push the next group of welfare recipients into the mainstream.
Another issue that inner city women talk about a lot, that I think policymakers and policy experts don't give full shrift to is the quality of daycare, subsidized daycare. It perplexes some on the federal level that we've had these enormous increases in daycare subsidies, but some women who are eligible aren't taking advantage of them. One way to answer that perplex is to visit some of the centers in the inner city that are receiving great new funds of taxpayer dollars. In the District of Columbia we had the case of dozens and dozens of centers where one agency of city government had refused to renew their licenses because of enormous fire and safety violations, while another agency, human services, was pouring in millions of dollars to those very agencies and directing poor women to put their children there.
There's a fundamental disconnect there. And there's also a fundamental injustice, because we're asking women to do a lot right now, and when you ask them to risk the well being of their children, not to mention given what we know about early childhood development, their IQs in places, in daycare that provides them little stimulation, that's an enormous amount for any woman to shoulder. And that's going to have long term implications for the rest of us.
Something else that I think is worth thinking about at the five year mark is how much of the federal funding is actually getting to the poor people's end of the street, which is of course a time honored problem in American poverty funding. But, it's something that I really feel we haven't looked at carefully with TANF, and that we should. Elizabeth is going to tell you in her story about how she was a receptionist, and all of a sudden her place of employment sent layoff notices. What she doesn't mention is that the place where she worked was a job training program for welfare recipients, and the reason there were layoffs was because the executive director, now deceased, had taken the money meant for the poor and bought living room furniture, and her own graduate studies, and various other improvements to her own life. And I don't know about Jason, but I find this time and time again as I walk through the new world of welfare.
Recently I was at a well funded program of community job training programs that had so much money that it recently flew 20 of its clients to Disney World for a relaxation vacation. And I was doing the story for the New Yorker. I said, hey, do you have any women that you've successfully helped get off welfare that I could talk to? No, they didn't, they're working on it, they said. This obviously is what discredited the war on poverty 30 years ago. It's obviously upsetting to taxpayers, but this misuse of funds is more than a fiscal issue, because when we don't monitor where this money goes, we're stealing opportunities from clients whose clocks are ticking.
The truth is, we don't know a lot about how local jurisdictions are spending money, and how they're implementing programs. That's because we haven't done the nitty-gritty work to find out. I think we have to do much better to monitor local implementation from child support to daycare, to case management, to contractor performance, to ensure that an accretion of small failures, as I certainly get indications of on the ground, don't sandbag welfare reform's early and promising returns.
I'll close with two facts that have sort of been rattling around my brain recently. The first is something that I saw in a Washington Post story recently about problems in a welfare to work program run by the Employment Services Department. It noted that officials of the DC government had stopped sending letters to welfare recipients using official DC Government stationary and envelopes. The reason they said is that welfare recipients would take one look at the envelopes, see the markings on the left hand side, and throw them out without reading it. And I think that speaks volumes to the faith that women have five years in that the government with all these millions of dollars is actually there to help them.
The other fact I'd like to mention is that today one-third of public housing residents in the District of Columbia work for more income than they receive by public assistance, which is a radical, radical change from the past. Public housing residents are obviously the most needy and often troubled residents of an urban area. And that one third of them now are earners is a staggering, staggering accomplishment beyond what we could have imagined five years ago. And that that has occurred in a city where implementation has been so fundamentally flawed is, I think, a reminder of something that we forget when talking about welfare reform these days, which is that many, many women want to work and improve their standard of living for their children, and they'll improvise and suffer in order to do so. And I think the next five years perhaps the help that we deliver these women could be a little bit smarter, and a little bit more fair.
[Applause.]
MS. JONES: Good morning, my name is Elizabeth Jones and I am a Metropolitan Police Officer. My children and I live in a small single family home east of river in Southeast Washington. So why would a DC police officer be here talking to you? Because for nine years I was on welfare. Living in the District's largest housing project, and I think my struggle to get off public assistance has something to tell to people like you who want to help other women on the path to being self-sufficient.
It is very hard when you've been on welfare for as long as I had to make the mental adjustments to work. You're pounding the pavement looking for a job. And then you're working the phone books trying to find a safe place to put your three children during the day. Then you're studying the map trying to figure out which busses go where, between school, daycare, and your job. The surprise is that after you find your willpower and make all those tough decisions, there's even tough stuff ahead.
Say you do find a decent daycare, which is not that easy in the inner city? Well, what if your vouchers just stop coming, as mine did, then you have to leave your children to fend for themselves after school in a neighborhood where crime is at an all time high. Say you go to court a dozen times and get child support orders for each of your children's fathers. What if they still don't pay? In my particular situation I even had extra help from Mr. Haskins. I met him a year and a half ago, he was concerned enough to get personally involved in helping me secure child support for my children. For more than a year after he made calls to local and federal officials, I still hadn't received a dime. So I really feel for other women who are living without child support, and who have had less help than I did in getting through the red tape.
I sometimes read in the newspapers about the way things are supposed to work for those of us making the leap from welfare mentality to work, and then there's the way things really work. It's harder to make a living out here than people think. Poor childcare, and no support from the absent parent, and high housing costs make it that much harder. When Congress passed the Welfare Reform Act in 1996 I was 27 years old, I had three children by three different fathers, and I had been the victim of domestic violence. And I was raising my family alone, as a single mother, in a housing project named East Capitol Dwellings. The government statistics say one thing, I had been on welfare for nine years, which seems like a long time. But the truth is that I was praying to God every night for the strength to become self-sufficient.
I had heard all the ugly stories about welfare mothers and living in public housing. Even my caseworker treated me like a second class citizen, and assumed I was lazy and could not read. But, I was determined not to be put in a negative category because of stereotypes. I didn't know how I was going to make a new life, I just knew that sitting at home doing nothing was not the answer for me.
At 21, after I had my third child, and because I was so young, I had to beg my doctor for a tubal ligation, because I knew if I kept having babies I'd get trapped deep in a place I didn't want to be. But, it took years of struggle and many disappointments to become self-sufficient. For instance, it took me several false starts to find a job training program that just wasn't out to get my student aid money, which one company did by giving me empty promises about being a medical assistant, and left me with no skills and a $4000 debt bill. Even when I did find a good nonprofit training program taught me to use the computer, and helped me to get my first full time job as a receptionist, I found myself struggling almost as much as before. After I got my first job I could not longer get public assistance and food stamps. And there were many nights that we ate Oodles of Noodles for dinner, and many other nights that I cried myself to sleep.
My receptionist job didn't provide health insurance to my children, and you know two of my children took that opportunity to break an arm and a leg. When the District of Columbia suddenly stopped paying my childcare subsidy, they stopped paying which was later described as a bureaucratic error, I didn't make enough money to pay for daycare myself, so for two years I had to leave my young children at home alone raising themselves. It broke my heart and I knew I had to do something better for them. So after coming home from my receptionist job every day I started spending my evenings studying and doing physical training so I could move another step up the ladder by getting a slot in the DC Police Academy.
It wasn't my lifelong dream to be a cop. My long term goal is to get my associates degree in mortuary science. My children didn't like the idea at first either. They were worried that I'd be shot on the job. But, I turned to the Police Academy, because it was the best way that I could find to get my children and myself out of public housing. My police job is sometimes dangerous, and often exhausting, but it pays more than my first job, and offers health insurance.
I know I'm luckier than many other women who left welfare. Lucky enough to have been able just this year to buy a small home not far from where I used to live, but my children have their own bedrooms and a safe street to play. Still in order to meet my mortgage and car payments, and feed my kids I have worked at least two jobs for the last three years. Usually I work from 6 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. on my police beat, sleep for a few hours, wake up to take my kids to school, then off to a part time job as a security guard. My children are 11, 12 and 14 now, and I worry about them 24/7, but I see them only in passing. My deepest wish is that there will be a way for people who are as determined as I am to make a new life not to have to rape their children's future in order to make ends meet.
Making the transition from welfare to work hasn't been easy. It also hasn't been easy for my 12 year old daughter who had to give up part of her childhood to watch her brothers, and cook and clean when I'm not there to do it. But, I make the tradeoff, because I want my children to grow up with dignity and a sense of security. I want them to know in their hearts that their mom is not going back on welfare, that we are going to keep struggling and working to make a better life than the one we started out with.
Thank you for listening, for taking the time to hear on what it's like to go from welfare to work.
[Applause.]
MS. CATANEO: Good morning. My name is Lou Ann Cataneo, and I work for the Marriott Financial Center in downtown New York. That says a great deal. They wanted me to talk a little bit about where I was five years ago, and when I really sat and thought about it I almost made myself cry, remembering making decisions between toilet paper and shampoo on $68.50 every two weeks, whether I could buy my daughter something, if I was even allowed to see her, if I had money to go see her, being horrified at the state my life was in, becoming more and more depressed over the downward spiral it was taking, and not finding any way to get out of it. My story is a hard case. I do a lot of public speaking, because I'm the poster child for every dysfunction there is.
I'm a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. I've been homeless. I'm an incest survivor, and I'm in recovery from domestic violence also. So you can't get any more dispirited and hopeless than I was, or at least I thought I was. That was the main problem, is finding out who I was, and how to become what I should be instead of continuing to live the way I was living. Gratefully, you know, you hear all these horror stories about Washington it makes me grateful I was in New York, because one of my biggest concerns is about the continuity of care, finding services to take care of the entire person. I wasn't just homeless, or addicted, or without a job, because I could always find an apartment, or find a job, or stay sober for a little while, I was just never able to function, do all three for any amount of time.
So services, and I used the system to get off of the system. I researched drug treatment facilities, and I tell women all the time, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. There are only maybe 10 percent of the population in homeless shelters that are going to get services, but only by asking and asking, and asking, and showing that you want more. I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing, I just knew it wasn't what I was doing. Living in a playground that my daughter used to play in, sleeping there at night, amongst other horrible situations that I endured.
One thing I do know is that you spoke earlier about how going from welfare to work doesn't make a dramatic difference, for me it did. It gave me a sense of self, it gave me a vision that I could look into with honesty and integrity in the morning when I brushed my teeth and washed my face. It's given me optimism, it's given me everything that I thought the real world should be, because I truly didn't believe I lived in the real world. I found that the best thing, especially with Marriott, I'm so grateful that I took the time, because I was working prior to Marriott, for minimum wage, no benefits, and not going to services because I wanted to be independent, even if it meant living week to week, literally getting sick and not being able to pay rent because I needed medication, and wanting to be independent. And welfare to work reform is not really about just independence, it's not about getting off welfare, it's about competitive living, competitive salaries, advancing careers, it's not just about jobs. It's about being part of the real world. You know, I tease my daughter that I am part of the real world now, between tuition payments and credit card debt, the only thing I need now is a mortgage. But, that's what I want. I want to be productive and I want to be responsible. And I've accomplished that.
You know, I don't want a job training program to send me to Disney World. I can do that myself now. In fact, Saturday my daughter and I are going to Disney on vacation. You know, it's the goals that everyone has, and it's striving to better yourself more and more every day. It's not about being independently wealthy, it's not about millions of dollars, it's about being independent, it's about being free, it's about being able to look yourself in the mirror every morning and be glad of what you see. And yes, part of it is about our children. My daughter sees that I'm ambitious, and she goes through some hard, trying times, but she knows where I've been. So she knows that anything she's going through she can get through.
I'm teaching her to become independent, she has a part time job, she's in college full time. She has car payments, she has a credit card to pay for her books and whatnot, and pay them off over time, to teach her to be independent, to teach her not to have to depend on anyone or any system to take care of her. So it is a cycle, and my life is in a spiral, but it's an upward spiral now, it's not that same hopelessness that I've had. I've never been more optimistic in my life, my life has never been better. I'm very concerned about what I can do to help other people now. And the most important thing is that the system does work if you research it. I mean, this is my life, this is what I needed to do for me. And I tell women, not every program is going to work for every single woman. Not every solution fits every problem. The answers are out there and we cannot stop looking, we cannot stop trying to be more than who we are. You should never stop, until ultimately we are who we are destined to be.
[Applause.]
MS. COSTA: Good morning, my name is Norma Costa, and I work for the South Florida Workforce in Miami. I ended up working for the welfare system, getting off the welfare system and going in there and starting to work there. First I'd like to thank God for loving me and my parents for supporting me through a difficult time, because they were the first ones that came to my rescue. And secondly I'd like to thank the case managers and the training programs for helping me become self-sufficient again.
During that period of my life I received childcare, AFDC, food stamps, gas cards, and training, which gave me aid and the skills that I lacked. Fortunately, my experience with the welfare system was a good one, because I found a job only after seven months. I was extremely excited to be able to see the welfare system from the opposite perspective. I currently work as part of the welfare system and have immensely enjoyed helping other welfare recipients when I've had the opportunity. I wish that I had more of an opportunity. When we did recruiting and we did different things like that I was able to be on the work force instead trying to help them and that was a very wonderful experience, because I know what it's like to be there, I know the feelings that a mother feels. So it was great to be able to give back, and be able to inform them of what I've learned through my job.
I still remember my first day at work as one of the happiest moments of my life. As I recall I was smiling for quite a long time, I was the happiest receptionist you've ever seen, I was so happy. I was able to not have to deal with the food stamps, go in the grocery store and pay with the EBT card I think it's called. I mean, it was extremely embarrassing for me, because I never thought that I would end up on welfare and I did, because I found myself alone with my two small children, and my parents were able to take me in, but they both make minimum wage, so they couldn't afford feeding me or paying my bills. At the same time I was in divorce, I had to put it on a credit card with no job, dealing with those debts. Finally, as soon as I found the job I was able to pay that, and everything in my life starting heading back in the right direction where I had started.
Also, I also recall—I remember being excited about—I already said that. Sorry, I'm a little bit nervous. I also remember feeling satisfaction after each task that I completed, and after each skill that I gained, and that I acquired, because when you're on welfare your self esteem is—well in my case at least was very low, because of all the things that have happened in my life and my marriage, so I was at the point where I didn't have self esteem. So if you don't have self esteem, then you can't go beyond that. You can't go to a job interview, you can't get dressed, you feel depressed, so there are different feelings that are involved with that, and you need help with that first before you can move on to bigger things.
Most of my coworkers were very supportive and encouraging, which helped me raise my self worth, and I believe is an important part of the healing process. Everyone is vulnerable when faced with new challenges. For the welfare recipient who has never held a job before, or who has been away from the work force for a long time, are twice as fragile. As a former recipient and mother I know what it's like to feel desperation, shame, and frustration, but I also know that the strongest cure is a desire to prosper and to give your children a better life.
A welfare recipient's recovery, as I like to call it, is a teamwork effort, from the client's willingness to the employer's sensitivity. It's important for all one stop center greeters to be polite and helpful to the recipient, or the client, for all case managers to be caring, and to have the resources and the time to correctly assess the client. Like they mentioned before, a lot of the clients are not assessed correctly. In my case, at least I had some background, I had some skills, but a lot of the clients that went to the same training program had less. They didn't know English. They hadn't finished elementary school. They hadn't gone to high school, so there's different needs that different clients have and I think that's part of the focus. It needs to be more to the individual need of the client, not overall and stereotyped, I guess, would be the word. There's different needs for everybody that goes on welfare.
It's also very important for co-workers to be kind to each other and to other workers. You find a lot of conflict at work when you get in the real world and a lot of recipients are not used to that. They're not ready to deal with that pressure that, you know, the competitiveness in the work field, be the things that you face in the real world and so we need to be sensitive to our co-workers. We need to, you know, support them and if you have a skill and you see that your co-worker does not have that skill and they're requiring to ask you for help for that, you should give that help. If you can; why not, you know, it's important to give, I think.
And most importantly for employers to encourage and help their employees reach their full potential. I think it's very important for employers to see everybody as an individual worker and see the skills that they have and use those skills to guide them, to lead them, most of all for welfare recipients that have a skill and they don't know where to go from that and the employer can encourage them and direct them and guide them in the correct direction when they see those skills.
Also, I wanted to talk a little bit about transitional benefits, benefits that the welfare system has after you get off of welfare. I've had a lot of aid with that. There's a RITA program. It's the Retention Incentive Training Account and they help you go through education. They help you pay for your books, for your childcare and transportation for school, so once you're working, you still need to move on. With what I make, I haven't been able to move on my own. I still live with my parents. I can't afford a mortgage because my child care alone is $600 to $640 dollars a month, that's my mortgage right there. So at the point where I am now, I can't move on beyond where I am.
So we need help with education, that's an important part. I mean, after you get into the work force without education, you can't move on. You need to have that Associates degree. You need to have your Bachelor's degree. It's very important. And another thing is also the universities, if they could work together with the welfare system, also providing child care, nightly child care. The University of South Florida has a program where they offer childcare at nighttime, which is something that a lot of recipients need. If you work during the daytime, you need that childcare at nighttime. You need that help. You need that aid. Miami, hopefully will, you know, pick up on that and start working with that, hopefully. But I think it's very important because you can't hold a job, go to school at nighttime. I luckily have my parents that help me with taking care of the kids and I can go two, three nights a week to school at night, but if I didn't have them, I wouldn't be able to do it. And these kind of programs only pay for agencies that are working with the welfare system. So we need more agencies to join and work with that. So that's all.
Thank you.
[Applause.]
MR. CARROLL: Okay, we're going to have some time for questions.
First, I'd like to address the panel with a few questions, but then there will be opportunity for members of the audience to also direct your questions as well. And I'd like to begin with Kate and Jason and when I think, particularly in 1998, I could think of many headlines that were making news during that time, particularly in this city. My question to you is: Why welfare reform? Why would you select the topic to really concentrate and follow behind and research reform? And one of things I was curious about. Either one of you, Kate or Jason?
MS. BOO: Well, I mean, I think for all of us here, we're here because we get it. It's, you know, one of largest acts of human engineering in America in the last 50 years, it's enormous in its implications, but I think on a personal level for journalists, a lot of us who have worked in the inner-city, you know, it can get pretty depressing and what the welfare law was to me at least, was a moment of—certainly qualified hope, but change. You know, and for the first time in a long time, we were able to watch politicians actually invest in it and seem for various reasons to care about what's happening in neighborhoods like the one Elizabeth lives in and the ones that Jason covers. So there was a little bit of hope that what we end up with was something better than what we had before.
MR. DePARLE: Why did I write about welfare reform? I guess some combination of curiosity, how it was all going to play out. Feeling of obligation that this is the kind of story where journalists could make a unique contribution and probably, really what is, I like talking to people on welfare. I think they're interesting, so. The most interesting work I could think of to do.
MR. CARROLL: Okay, fair enough. Also, for the mothers, our success stories, my question to you would be, first of all, congratulations for making the step and going forward, but I would imagine there's some challenges ahead and perhaps, you could describe for our audience what you see in your personal life, what do you think your biggest obstacles? What's your biggest challenges that lie ahead? Maybe we begin with Elizabeth.
MS. JONES: I think my biggest challenge that lies ahead is me being able to go back to school to gain more education.
MR. CARROLL: Education?
MS. JONES: Yes.
MR. CARROLL: Okay. Lou Ann?
MS. CATANEO: I have to agree. I want to continue my education, but how? When? And where? I mean, how do I juggle everything? I mean, I'm trying-how do I juggle everything? I want to succeed more, but how?
MS. COSTA: I would say the same thing, education. It's the most important thing, I think. In order to prosper, you need education, and that's my biggest challenge, along with if there was a way of making more hours in a day that would be great too.
MR. CARROLL: Great. Jason, you said you enjoy and find talking to welfare recipients interesting. My question is, before you really began to cover, I guess, as in-depth as you have and since you have, has your views changed? Did you have a different viewpoint on who the people that you were going to cover were and has that changed since you really got to know many of them?
MR. DePARLE: Not sure that my view of poor, single mothers changed as much as my view of the role that welfare played in their life changed. I thought it played a larger role than I now think.
MR. CARROLL: Kate, how about you?
MS. BOO: Yeah, I think, I mean my personal view—it's a hard question to answer. Yeah, I think that I understand now in a much more visceral way the impact, say, of 15 year olds having babies. There're certain things that I think that over the years I've come to understand as public policy problems and, you know, to a greater degree than I originally did.
MR. CARROLL: Okay. Now, Norma you know in a few short months from now, Congress is going to begin the talk about how to reauthorize the bill and what's going to be needed, what's not going to be needed. And this is part, I guess, can go throughout the panel, but we'll begin with Norma and Lou Ann and Elizabeth. What would you tell Congress? What would you tell the policymakers on what they need to do and what they perhaps would they need not to do as we go forward in trying to reduce the welfare roles and so forth?
MS. COSTA: I think they need to work with vocational training for those that don't want to continue to a Bachelor's and an AA, to work to give funds for those kind of trainings more so, and then also for those that want to continue their education and the child care. The child care is the most important thing. If you don't have child care, you can't continue school, so I would think those would be the main three things.
MR. CARROLL: Lou Ann?
MS. CATANEO: I think the greatest focus needs to be on emotional support.
MR. CARROLL: Emotional?
MS. CATANEO: Emotional support. Definitely on emotional support. If you have to believe that you can succeed, you know, and if you've been beaten up by life and by the system and you don't have that ambition, you need different assessments to complete your task. You know, not everyone, as I said earlier, needs the same thing, but everyone needs to start with some sort of mustard seed of faith.
MR. CARROLL: Any idea on how Congress would help with emotional? I mean, how—
MS. CATANEO: There's got to be better consistency of care and better assessment. Absolutely, but a lot of it has to do, you know, in the trenches. People who the system have helped need to get back in and talk to other people and tell them it can work. It is working, you know, this is what I did, and maybe that won't work for you, but let's brainstorm ideas. You have to give people faith, you know, and it's not going to come from bureaucracy, it's going to come from grassroots. It comes from people helping people. It's not about bureaucracy, it's about people.
MR. CARROLL: How about you, Elizabeth?
MS. JONES: My biggest concern about that is child support.
MR. CARROLL: We tell Congress to be tougher on child support, figure out a way—
MS. JONES: Exactly. And I think—I live at one end of East Capitol and Capitol Hill is at the other end of East Capitol, and they're there making all these laws and changes about what goes on. At the other end of East Capitol, I think, they need to come in our community and really see what's really going on and know that people, most people, don't want to be on public assistance. They're just doing it because that's what they have to do at that time. So come in the community and see what's really going on.
MR. CARROLL: Kate or Jason, any advice for Congress?
MS. BOO: I'm an investigative reporter, so I say, you know, local quality control, federal monitoring, really watch where the money is going.
MR. CARROLL: Okay.
MR. DePARLE: The place I spent the most time is Milwaukee, and they've made a huge investment there in trying to build a caseworker-centered system where your caseworker becomes the gateway to the kind of support that Norma and Lou Ann are talking about. If I've learned something, I think it's that it's a lot harder to do than it sounds in theory. One big problem they have in Milwaukee is caseworker turnover, and Milwaukee—Andy Bush is here who helped design the system. The idea was that the caseworker was going to be your all-purpose teacher/preacher/coach/cop—whatever your childcare problem, your child support problem, whatever, your boss is a jerk—you go to your caseworker and he or she helps you figure it out. I don't think that relationship—I think it's very rare that that relationship develops in that way for a variety of reasons, one, is that I don't think most people want that kind of relationship. Certainly, there are exceptions. But, in general, I think it's more typical that somebody doesn't want to have anything to do with the welfare office. And, number two, there's great turnover in caseworkers and they are low paid and low trained, so if I could think of one thing in the TANF world for Congress to focus on, I guess, I'd like to suggest they focus more on improving that kind of casework and that quality of relationship. How to do that I think is beyond my pay rate.
MR. CARROLL: Okay. My last question, I guess, to the panel would be as you know, as I said, we represent over 20,000 businesses. What advice would you give me as I talk to business leaders and HR professionals as they began and continue to hire people from welfare? What advice would you want me to take back to them as it relates to people who are either coming off or people that have been off for a while? Any advice at all? Anybody?
MS. CATANEO: Well, I think, one of the things that you need to tell businesses that attract—that you want to encourage to get involved is to look at the records. The retention rate. The loyalty level, the aspirations, the consistency. We make excellent employees. We appreciate our jobs and we work harder.
MR. CARROLL: Okay. Norma, Elizabeth, any advice for businesses?
MS. COSTA: I would agree with Lou that we're efficient workers and we want to really work, so that's —
MR. CARROLL: Anything for businesses? Kate?
MS. BOO: They're on their own.
[Laughter.]
MR. CARROLL: Okay. We're now beginning to take questions from the audience. I'd like for you to raise your hand. When you're recognized, wait for the microphone to reach you. Stand up to ask your question and please identify yourself. For those of you watching and listening through our live Webcast, if you'd like to ask a question to the panel, send your questions via e-mail to: question@brookings.edu and we'll try to include as many of your questions as possible.
MR. ARTHUR McKEE: Hi. My name is Arthur McKee. I'm from the Advisory Board Foundation. I'd like to take this sort of subtly different angle, not a policy angle, but a philanthropic angle and ask the panelists of the three basic ideas that I've heard you all mention, which would you give the most priority for as a local intervention for philanthropic dollars? One, the creation of, hopefully, ideally, a network of first-class adult education centers. Two, shedding light and putting pressure on politicians to reform the systems which are seen to be failing welfare recipients, and three, actually this is not an idea that was brought up, but when it came to my mind, possibly putting philanthropic dollars into helping develop inner-city communities?
MS. BOO: What about four? Daycare? Quality daycare, you know. If I had a million dollars, I would invest in quality daycare because that's, you know, I mean, I think the waste of intellectual potential among young children in terrible daycare is profound but, two, I think adult education is very important.
MR. CARROLL: Anybody else any comments?
MS. COSTA: I think adult education, combined with what Lou said, self-esteem, because you need the self-esteem first, like some kind of classes that help them bring up the self-worth of themselves, so they can go on with a combination of vocational classes.
MR. CARROLL: Dennis?
MR. DENNIS LIEBERMAN: I'm Dennis Lieberman, and I'm with the U.S. Department of Labor, and I run the Welfare to Work Program for the Department of Labor, and I have actually two questions for the former recipients. One is, when Rodney was talking about, you know, businesses getting involved in welfare reform, he talked about being their bottom line, not charity and didn't have to do with their corporate self-esteem or anything, it had to do with this made sense, this is a solution. It's an economic solution for them.
My question is, is it for you? Have you felt that yet? Does it pay better than being on benefits? I know that self-esteem and things like that that you've talked about, but is it an economic solution for you? Have you felt that yet?
Second question, do you feel like, if you had felt that that it's forever? What happens if the economy goes bad? What happens if people start being laid off?
[TAPE CHANGE.]
MS. CATANEO: If I may, it is—there is a stability in my life that I've never had before. I've recently taken some time off and was able because of the strides that I've made through savings, live for two months without working and as far as if I were laid off tomorrow, I have current skills. I'm confident. I give great interview, I'll get another job, you know, somebody needs me. Somebody will want me, you know, hopefully, they'll still be Marriott tomorrow, but, if not, they'll be another way for me to make my life.
MR. CARROLL: Elizabeth?
MS. JONES: I think that is a good idea for businesses to look to the welfare roles and hire welfare recipients because we are the ones who need the jobs. We have the kids. Most welfare recipients don't have the father in the house to support them, so I think that is a good idea and there will always be police officers.
[Laughter.]
That's why I choose the career path I choose because they always need a mortician also.
[Laughter.]
MS. COSTA: I also feel-I feel much more confident that I would be able to find another job. At first, I didn't even know, I just knew how to turn on a computer, now I know Excel, Microsoft. I know a lot of programs now. So they've taught me.
MR. CARROLL: The gentleman in the blue shirt.
MR. GLEN YOUNG: Good morning. My name is Glen Young; I'm with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Vocational Adult Education. It's very nice to hear all of your statements about the need for education. I have one question about that and if I could I need to ask Katherine a follow-up question on something around that.
Is it a question of formal education? Do you feel that what you need is the degrees, the AA, the Bachelor's, or is it that you need skill and that you need an investment and more skill development, rather than in actually having to complete a degree? The follow-up question around that is separate from that is that when you were describing the population that is remaining, you talked a lot about disability issues and what I wanted to follow up on that is: how extensive do you think that is? Of the remaining populations, what percentage do you think have learning disabilities and other type of disabilities that could impact their ability to go to work and be successful? And without accommodations and can assessment look at focusing on that type of issue?
MS. JONES: I think education is important. A number of points for myself is so my children can see me go to college and that would make them want to go to college and do other things in their life. Secondly, because I know their homework is going to get much harder for me, and I will need to have education more than algebra or whatever I had in high school. And because I want to be a mortician, I know I need to go to school.
MS. CATANEO: I think, primarily, you need a skill. You do need the skills. What that ends up doing though is fostering within yourself something tangible, like an education, you know, for me, that's how it worked. I had a skill, now, I want something tangible.
MS. COSTA: I would say the same thing. I think, first, you need a skill. That way, you can acquire a job, but then after, you need to move on beyond that because with a skill, you hit the ceiling at a certain point and you can't go beyond that without education.
MS. BOO: In terms of the follow-up, when you talk about statistics, I leave that to the good people at the Urban Institute and Brookings and many of you out there, but I will say that I think there's an enormous amount of untreated mental illness in the communities like East Capitol Dwellings. And it's fascinating, to me, because, you know, on one hand, as a journalist and a writer, everybody I know is on medical treatment and Prozac.
[Laughter.]
And then you see these people living with, you know, they look at the window and Jesus is telling them it's all going to be all right and they're hearing voices and they're just going through their lives and I think-you're going to find, you know, and with learning disabilities, we know that the people who tend to drop out of high school who are the people who tend to get-you know, fail in high school first and then get pregnant. Often that begins with a learning disability, which as I know very well from Elizabeth's case with her own son, a bright kid who was horrendously misdiagnosed as pretty much a hopeless case in the public schools, these disabilities aren't necessarily being diagnosed and people are now 35 and dyslexic and have no idea why they're illiterate. All they know is they can't read.
MR. TOM BRAZAITIS: I'm Tom Brazaitis with the Cleveland Plain Dealer. And I guess this question would go to the two reporters, Kate and Jason. Getting back to the economy. To what extent is the success of this program so far linked to the success of the economy? And where is the safety net if we go into a slump? All these years you've been describing have been solid economic years. Do you see a fallback position for the government, for the people who are benefiting from this program?
MS. BOO: Yeah, I mean, I'm not very good at econometrics and I was fascinated by June O'Neill's piece in The Wall Street Journal yesterday. She was attributing a great deal of success actually to welfare reform, more than I had done. I previously have given a great deal of credit to the economy, but I think, particularly, you know, one of the things that's interesting to me right now is we've reached this economic downdraft is I see the people are taking the hit in the last few months in the community that I'm interested in are mostly male, you know. And I think they're going to be the first to feel the impact of this mini-recession and obviously, that's going to have profound effects on women who are depending on child support to stay self-sufficient.
MR. DePARLE: I guess you're asking two questions. One, is to what extent has the amount of increased work levels, so far have been due to the strength of the economy and two, what's going to happen as the economy slows?
On two, what's the prediction for the future? Every prediction I've ever made about welfare reform turned out to be absolutely wrong, so I'm going to stay away from that one.
On number one, the economy in Milwaukee for one example is extremely strong for years before the 1996 bill and had no discernible, I mean no effect at all on the caseload, and then all of a sudden, they implemented a workfare program in March, 1996, and the rolls plummeted. So I think that's the clearest example I know where you could say the economy was sufficient, but a necessary, but insufficient booth in and of itself. And clearly a lot of this is the change in the welfare law.
MR. AL MILLIKAN: I'm Al Millikan, Washington Independent Writers. I want to ask the mothers how much time are you able to spend with your children? And are there significant times when they are really on their own without adult supervision? And have they had any commentary about welfare reform?
MS. CATANEO: Well, that's easy for me. My daughter lives without adult supervision. She's in a dorm at college and it scares me to death.
[Laughter.]
But I see her every weekend and I speak to her every day, and she has told me—she called me yesterday to wish me happy anniversary. I had forgotten it was my eight years of sobriety, but it's important to her, she remembers that. So the changes in me have affected her that made her more aware of what's going on. It's actually been pretty easy because my parents had her during my most difficult times.
But by the same token, when you're talking about child support, I pay child support as well as her tuition and stuff like that. So I mean it can be difficult, but she's my greatest ally, my biggest supporter.
MS. JONES: My children are raising themselves. I mean, I see them like I stated earlier in passing, I mean, they are very independent. They know how to wake up, whether it's after school, just watch out for each other and when I got off public assistance and I came home and told my kids that that we no longer are on public assistance, they really didn't see the struggles, so they really don't have that much to say about welfare.
MS. COSTA: My children are too young to know anything about what I've gone through. I have a three year old and a six year old, so they're too little, but they do know that I do go to school, and I explain to them that I'm doing this so I can give them a better life, so we can buy a house eventually and all that. So they understand that and I told them when there's no money, there's no money and that's it. And I'm not buying what you think I'm buying, so —
[Laughter.]
You know, they understand the concept of money, which I think is also important to teach from little, little, little budgeting, but I'm not away from them. I'm away from them three times a day, I mean, three days a week, when I go to school, but my parents are with them, either my mother or my father and then the rest of the days that I have, I go out with them, ride bikes, spend time with them. Good time with them and then read them a book every night and I try to do the best that I can.
MR. DePARLE: Rodney, I won't talk for the women who've been on welfare, but I have thought a lot about the question of role models, whether women going to work become role models for their children and one thing that I've noticed in the reporting that I've done in Milwaukee is you meet an awful lot of people who are now adults and have troubles in their lives, either men on drugs or in and out of jail or women who are poor and on welfare, who are the children of working women. In other words, their mothers were the women that we're now hoping for them to be, I think there's a kind of semi-conscious thought that we all had of these women grew up on welfare and never knew anything but welfare and of been on for generations and it's not the least bit unusual to find someone in that situation whose mother was the ninth cleaning women at a hospital in Milwaukee for 20 years, you know, who might have been on welfare for 2 years and got off 20 years ago. In other words, she was raised in the kind of family that we're now hoping she can raise her children in. So I think sometimes—I do think that a working parent can communicate a certain value system or discipline to her children, but sometimes we who think and write about it that assign that more meaning, I think, than it might have to somebody who is 7, or 8, or 10, or 12, or 15 years old.
MR. CARROLL: The lady right beside you.
MS. EDNA RANCK: Thank you. I'm Edna Ranck. I'm with the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies. We're a membership organization here in Washington. I want to thank everybody, actually the whole panel for sharing what you have about the idea of confidence and the idea of knowing that there is a future and that you can work very hard for it.
My question, especially to the mothers and workers is you each have spoken about childcare and much of what has been said hasn't made me really happy, but it really hasn't-the whole field is with you on this in many ways and we're really concerned about how we can improve it. To echo on another question, what would you tell Congress and employers about childcare and what they should do to improve it nationwide?
MS. JONES: I think for me, as a police officer, getting up, having to go to court to deal with cases, when I lock people up or things like that and the hours that I work, they need to have around-the-clock daycare because, to me, most non-traditional jobs are the ones that pay better and most non-traditional jobs work different hours. Midnight, shift work, things like that. So I think daycare is not just a 6:00 in the morning to 6:00 PM time slot, it should be 24 hours.
MR. CARROLL: Childcare?
MS. CATANEO: It's funny because a friend of mine was complaining about childcare and I told her that she and I were going to sell our Marriott stock and open up a 24 hour daycare in Manhattan because the need is so prevalent, you know, but that's the second time this week I've heard 24 hour daycare mentioned.
MS. COSTA: I would say also training for the women that work in childcare, maybe they need a little bit more because I had an experience where I dropped off my son at the daycare where they were providing aid for-they were helping me with the childcare and I dropped him off and I left and I came back in because I forgot to give him his pacifier. When I come in, I hear a child screaming and I walk in and the lady was dragging my baby. So I was like, okay, that's it, removing him from there.
So, you know, they need more training for childcare. The people that work there.
MR. CARROLL: The lady in the purple.
MS. JENNIFER BROOKS: I'm Jennifer Brooks. I'm a researcher at Child Trends. We just put out a research brief talking a little bit about the impacts of a few welfare to work programs that have looked specifically at adolescent children of recipients and found some signs of some negative effects and this question is specifically for Elizabeth, given the age of your kids, but for the whole panel, more generally, if you'd like to speak to this. But I was wondering what you would recommend as supports for families with adolescents in general. We talk a lot about childcare which I think is very important, but often we're talking more about the younger kids and I wondered if you have anything to say about what we could do to support families with older kids as well?
MS. JONES: My advice would be more after-school programs, organized sports and things like that. The article that Kate did on me in The New Yorker magazine talked a lot about my 12 year old daughter and I don't want her to end up the same way I did, having babies at a young age and often times when I came home, she was outside. I didn't know where she was because what is there to do in a neighborhood. So I think organized sports would be a solution.
MS. BOO: I agree with Elizabeth. I think that would be a good idea.
MS. CATANEO: Well, mentoring programs.
MR. CARROLL: The gentleman in the green. Do you have a question?
MR. DERRICK EWAN: Hi. My name is Derrick Ewan at the Community Transportation Association of America. And, Norma, you had talked about after-welfare benefits, including transportation. I was wondering if any of the other recipients had any transportation issues? And if they did, how did they overcome those issues?
MS. COSTA: I haven't heard a lot of—maybe vouchers. The vouchers not coming in, when they don't come in and then they're late on getting their bus card or their gas card. And then they have issues about that, about the distribution and time period. But besides that, they pretty much, you know, issue those out on a monthly basis. And that—I mean that helped me. I never had any problems with transportation so I don't know if anybody else had —
MR. CARROLL: Transportation, anybody?
MS. CATANEO: The training program I was in gave us Metro cards. It gave us unlimited access to the subway, but in Manhattan, you can get anywhere in 15 minutes, so it's really—transportation is not an issue.
MS. BOO: I just want to note that Elizabeth says she has no transportation problems, but when she worked her first job, she took six buses, sometimes seven, to get two miles across the District of Columbia, which is no easy task with three kids.
MR. CARROLL: The gentleman here.
MR. ALAN WEIL: I'm Alan Weil from the Urban Institute. The first three pages of the welfare law actually talk a lot more about marriage than they do about work and I'm curious about your views about this aspect of welfare reform, particularly whether the goal of marriage was communicated to you and how you would feel about the government taking a more active role in this aspect of your life?
MR. CARROLL: Okay. Now, we're rolling. Here we go. Anybody?
MS. COSTA: I think that they should support young, married couples or married couples just as much as single mothers. When I was married, I did have to go for Medicaid for my two boys when I got pregnant and they gave me food stamps, but when I went there and I was separated, they gave me much more aid. So I guess it's not—it's not divided equally between and I think it should because they need just as much help as a single mother. If they are a struggling couple, they still need the same kind of help that a single mother needs.
MR. CARROLL: No comment. No comment. One more question. How about the lady in the blue, right in the back there?
MS. JACKIE PAYNE: Hi, I'm Jackie Payne with NOW Legal Defense. I want to thank all of you who told your personal stories, and, especially, two of three of you mentioned that you experienced domestic violence, which is consistent with studies that we've done showing up to 60 percent of women on welfare have experienced domestic violence at some point in their lives. So I just wondered if you had that addressed, especially the way you talked about the need for sort of holistic or services to really help you get your whole self together and how that does so often correlate with drug or alcohol abuse and the bigger use of sort of self-worth. So I wondered if you could talk about that at all.
MS. CATANEO: Well, what I did this time around because this is not my first time through this system was as I've said before, research a treatment facility that would address my needs that had domestic violence support groups that had self-awareness groups that had, you know, therapy set up with trained specialists to handle the different concerns and issues. I was honest with myself this time. I actually decided to do what I needed to do instead of what I wanted to do. So that, you know, having some sense of honesty was the most prevalent first step. It's not easy, but I knew that my patterns—you know, it wasn't a pattern of the same type of guy. I was going back to the same guy, and I knew that that wasn't correct, you know, and he tried to kill me so many times I thought he was going to succeed and I had to do something different.
MS. COSTA: Mine was more of a—it wasn't physical, it was more mental, I guess. And what they did was when I got into the program, they actually did a session over-about domestic violence and that's when I realized, well, mine is not physical, but it's mental, so I need to get away from this because it's not helping me. So I think it's important.
MR. CARROLL: Okay. Well, that's the last question. Please give the panel a round of applause.
[Applause.]
I'd like to turn it over to Mr. Haskins for —
MR. HASKINS: Let me conclude by thanking everybody for coming, thanking Rodney for filling in so capably, reminding you of our public event on the 24th, and concluding by the way we should, which is thanking our panelists again for a wonderful, wonderful session.