Inner-city black Chicagoans with inadequate educations and little experience in the work world have been the people least likely to benefit from Project Chance, Illinois` much-touted welfare-to-work program, state records show.
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Those records indicate that, despite the high-level rhetoric about the $43.3-million-a-year initiative, Project Chance has been a program of small successes rather than huge breakthroughs in the war on welfare dependency.
Nonetheless, as many of those who work with and lobby on behalf of low- income people acknowledge, Project Chance, for all its flaws, represents a significant shift in the way society thinks about its poor and an important recognition of government`s responsibility to help and encourage those on welfare to find work and lead self-sufficient lives.
Nearly 132,000 clients in the state program, which served as one of the principal models of recently approved federal welfare reforms, found employment during Project Chance`s first three years. But many of these were the sort who have the easiest time getting a job-Downstate whites with good job skills.
Only a third of the 53,752 Project Chance clients who found employment in the 12 months that ended June 30 were black, even though blacks comprise 72 percent of program`s caseload, according to records of the Illinois Department of Public Aid.
Similarly, only two of every five job-winners were from Cook County, even though that`s where nearly 80 percent of the Project Chance clients live.
And the Public Aid Department`s figures also show that getting a job wasn`t necessarily a ticket out of poverty.
A third of the jobs found by Project Chance participants didn`t pay enough to permit the recipient to get off welfare completely. About half of the clients with families were paid so little that their households were unable to escape poverty. And about a third of those who found jobs were back on the public aid rolls within a year and a half.
Like previous welfare-to-work programs in Illinois, Project Chance puts the primary responsibility for finding work on the shoulders of welfare recipients. That`s why the easiest-to-employ clients are the ones most likely to succeed.
But, unlike the earlier programs, Project Chance offers new support services such as job training, education opportunities and money to pay for day care and transportation costs. With these services, hundreds of thousands of public aid clients have a better-but not guaranteed-hope of struggling out of welfare.
Project Chance moved ”away from (earlier) punitive approaches to how to help,” says Rev. Richard R. Wood, director of Illinois Impact, an affiliate of the Illinois Conference of Churches, based in Springfield.
”Instead of talking about having to work off your grant in slave labor, it talked about providing child care and education.
”There has been a change in the way the debate around welfare has taken place. Whether or not that means anything is a question that has to be measured in what happens to the people who are using the system. For the great majority, nothing is happening.
”On the positive side, there is an openness and a willingness from the legislature and the administration to try to translate that talk into policies and programs that will bring change, but we`re not there yet.”
Rev. Wood and other advocates for the poor maintain that Project Chance is an imperfect program that so far has failed to adequately fulfill its promise.
It is, they say, understaffed and underfunded. They have strong philosophical differences with state officials over how much help it is providing to public aid clients and how much it should be providing. They say more support services are needed as well as efforts to create better-paying jobs that trained clients can move into.
While disagreeing with many of the assertions of welfare advocates, Randale R. Valenti, the Project Chance administrator, describes the program as an evolving one that has improved since its inception in December, 1985.
”I am aware,” he says, ”that, if you eliminated the program entirely, there would still be people going to work. Project Chance has a significant impact although I can`t scientifically come up with the exact percentage.
”The (employment) numbers are not as important to me as the program`s effect at getting people involved and believing that they can get out of the welfare system. If 1,000 mothers learn how to read but don`t get jobs, that`s a positive outcome that I can`t put a dollar value on.
”We`ve done a lot, and we`ve got a lot more to do.”
That echoes a comment by Rev. Wood. ”What I`m concerned about,” he says, ”is that (Project Chance) is seen as a process and not as a product. We`ve begun a process. We`ve begun a long journey that`s not going to bring change that`s helpful overnight.”
Priscilla Wade is one of those on the long Project Chance journey.
She is a 47-year-old mother with two children who lives in an apartment in the Stateway Gardens public housing development. It has been nearly two decades since she last held a job.
On this warm October Friday, she has traveled more than five miles to the Project Chance office at 935 W. Monroe St. to hand a letter to her caseworker, Jose Lopez.
Lopez is a soft-spoken, 32-year-old former bank loan officer who has been in his Project Chance job for a little more than a year. He is responsible for overseeing the cases of 520 welfare clients, most of them mothers. With so many cases, Lopez frequently forgets his clients` first names. He rarely ever learns the names of their children.
He isn`t sure why Wade has come to see him.
”Your orientation was on the 6th. You came in that day?”
”Yes, I did.”
”And I told you to bring in this letter?”
”Yes.”
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He looks at the letter. It shows that Wade is taking classes to obtain her high school equivalency degree. She is also enrolled in a training school for nurse`s aides.
The letter is important because, if Wade wasn`t in school, Lopez might assign her to other Project Chance components in which she might spend her days searching for a job or do unpaid work for nonprofit groups. If she refused or failed to follow the program`s detailed rules, she could be sanctioned, and the monthly grant for her and her family sharply reduced for as long as six months.
Lopez, courteous and unofficious, is supposed to counsel his clients, but, at best, he can give only cursory attention to each individual. Wade doesn`t notice this, or doesn`t expect more. She remains hopeful and even a bit excited.
”I`m getting A`s in both my classes,” she proudly tells Lopez. ”After I get over with nursing school, I`m going to get me a good job.”
Hope was the major selling point of Project Chance when the initiative was announced on Dec. 12, 1985, by Gov. James Thompson and Gregory Coler, the man who then headed the state`s Public Aid Department.
”We`ve got to stop thinking about welfare as an end unto itself,” Coler said. ”What these people need is a job.”
Thompson told reporters that he had set a goal of placing 112,500 welfare recipients in full-time jobs by June 30, 1988, adding, ”How much we`ll succeed over the next three years, no one can say.”
In fact, Thompson had good reason to expect that, based on previous experience, at least 93,000 public aid recipients would be getting jobs over the three-year span, even without the new initiative.
The number of job-winners had already increased from just under 15,000 in 1979, to 21,367 in 1984 and to 31,158 in 1985. So Thompson, who trumpeted Project Chance during his 1986 re-election campaign, wasn`t sticking his neck out too far in setting his goal.
An early complaint about the program concerned the large numbers of clients, particularly single men, who were sanctioned-83,609 during the first two years, compared with 77,459 who got jobs.
Under pressure from welfare advocates, new regulations were promulgated, resulting in a sharp drop in such penalizations to 26,046 in the 1988 fiscal year that ended June 30, compared with 53,752 participants who got jobs.
Despite that improvement, Project Chance is still far from perfect, according to advocates.
”As earnest as the public aid administration officials are in creating a helpful program,” Rev. Wood says, ”it continues to (steer clients to) jobs that are low-income, low-skill, so they don`t get people off welfare.”
Douglas Dobmeyer, executive director of the Public Welfare Coalition, says, ”We`re not opposed to Project Chance. We want these people to work. But it`s time to put this program on the table and re-create it so people can work to escape poverty, not work so they can stay there.”
The advocates contend that Project Chance should seek to prepare voluntary hard-to-employ clients for better-paying jobs rather than attempt to provide service, usually inadequate, to a monthly caseload of 158,000 mandatory participants. Welfare recipients, they say, want to work but just need the right opportunity.
Valenti, however, says those on public aid need a push. ”Most welfare recipients do not want to be on welfare, but do not know how to get off or, worse, have given up,” he says. ”They are facing a situation that they have frequently deemed hopeless.
”I value a mandatory program because I believe people need to be encouraged, talked to, counseled because many of our clients have low self-esteem.”
Public Aid Department statistics, however, indicate that, in any given month, only one of every three people registered with Project Chance is in an active component of the program.
Seventeen percent are in the job-search, 12 percent in education and 4 percent in work-experience components of the program, while the other 67 percent are just entering or leaving the welfare rolls, are under
administrative review or are in ”holding patterns,” according to Valenti.