The Alternative Work Experience Program: Unemployed Parents Initiative (AWEP-UP) is a model program for people on public assistance which combines on-the-job-training through community service experience in non-profit organizations with a seminar which helps participants prepare to find work, deal with life problems which make it difficult to find and keep a job, learn to work with people from different backgrounds, develop conflict resolutions skills, build critical thinking skills, understand the economics of the Philadelphia area, and foster a sense of citizenship. AWEP-UP also provides counseling and support services for program participants. The program works closely with the agencies which host AWEP-UP interns to ensure that the experience benefits both the intern and the agency.
AWEP-UP provides its participants with current work experience which could lead to employment, helps them build job specific skills, and the critical thinking and people skills essential to become productive employees, and empowers them to become more effective citizens.
As mandated by the federal Family Support Act of 1988 two parent families on public assistance are required to perform community service in order to receive cash benefits. As a program funded to carry out this mandate, AWEP-UP is a workfare program. However, by including an educational component in our program design and endeavoring to partner our program with other education, training and job search activities, the AWEP-UP model differs from standard workfare programs. Unlike most welfare to work programs, which involve participants in a progression of activities one at a time which will hopefully lead to full time employment, AWEP-UP stresses the value of simultaneous participation in education and work experience activities.
The first two years of this project offer insights into the benefits and limitations of workfare. The unique aspects of our program offer alternative methods to prepare welfare recipients for work. Our experience also outlines the kinds of supports needed to carry out an effective workfare program.
The current debate about welfare reform often sees education and work experience as separate and competing strategies to move public assistance recipients from welfare to work. The AWEP-UP program takes a middle ground in this debate. Both education and work experience are important components in fostering long term self-sufficiency.
AWEP-UP is an integrated service learning model. The seminar uses the community service experience as the basis for job readiness training, citizenship and other lessons. Classroom training and internship experience work off of each other. For example, our conflict resolution seminars encourage participants to bring in potential conflicts from their internship sites for discussion. The alternative ways to approach disputes learned in seminar are then applied at the worksite. In this way, the combination of classroom experience and community service help participants become better employees both at their internship sites and in their future careers.
AWEP-UP case management works from a capacity building model. Capacity building focuses on helping to develop participants' skills at resolving their own problems. For example, rather than call a housing counselor to resolve a landlord problem for a participant, AWEP-UP counselors give the participant the phone number and instruct them on the kind of information which the agency will require to advocate for the participant. Our case management role is to empower the participant to find the resources necessary to deal with problems throughout their lifetime rather than view problems as barriers to self-sufficiency which will vanish once the participant finds a paying job.
Realizing that entrepreneurship provides a potential avenue to self-sufficiency for AWEP-UP participants, the program design includes seminars on small business development provided by the organizations funded to help develop these businesses. AWEP-UP participants who show particular interest in this option are encouraged to enroll in more intensive seminars offered by these organizations.
Our participants are placed in community service internships which most closely match their skills or career aspirations. Placements take into account language and cultural needs as well as travel time to the worksite. We work with 18 organizations at 25 locations throughout Philadelphia. We currently offer 126 placement slots: 41 percent maintenance/construction/ semi-skilled labor, 27 percent clerical/bookkeeping, 12 percent professional or quasi-professional positions working with children and youth (e.g. child care aid, music teacher), 16 percent professional or quasi-professional positions working with adults (e.g. ABE tutor, conveyancer, translator), and 4 percent other opportunities. We are also committed to providing opportunity to people with limited English: 3 sites provide opportunities for Russian speakers and 6 sites have placements for Spanish speakers. We also have a Spanish speaking staff person.
AWEP-UP is not contracted for job placement, but we do post openings, offer job club activities as part of the seminar and provide ongoing counseling for job seekers. Our goal is to motivate participants toward economic self-sufficiency through the internship experience.
While our worksites are not required to hire AWEP-UP interns, participating agencies do sign a contract stipulating that interns will be considered for appropriate positions. To date, one-third of our agencies have offered employment to AWEP-UP interns and three have hired two people or more. Given that the majority of these organizations have total workforces of less than 20 employees, the impact of employment from this program is very significant.
The AWEP-UP program served 154 individuals in the past two program years. The number of people enrolled at a particular point in time varied depending on referrals from the Department of Public Welfare and the number of people who had left the program during a given month. During the first year (October 1993 - September 1994), a maximum of 45 people were enrolled in the program at one time. In total, 75 people participated in the program that year. Forty-one people were carried over into the second contract year (October 1994 - September 1995). During the 1994-1995 program year, we served a maximum of 60 people at one time. That year, a total of 120 individuals participated in the program. On average, AWEP-UP enrolled six new participants and six people left the program every month.
| Education | 93-94 | 94-95 |
|---|---|---|
| LT High School | 1 1% | 8 7% |
| Some High School | 20 27% | 35 29% |
| High School | 24 32% | 36 30% |
| Post Secondary | 30 40% | 41 34% |
| Total | 75 100% | 120 100% |
AWEP-UP serves an extraordinarily diverse population. Our participants range from people with less than 9th grade education to people with graduate and professional degrees. The majority have worked in the past, and many have years of paid work experience. Nearly half of our participants are refugees or migrants whose first language is not English. Approximately 40 percent of our participants who were born in the United States are white, the remainder are African American or Latino. Our participants come to welfare through several different paths and need diverse strategies to become tax paying citizens again. In all cases, their experience with welfare and work involves the strategies of households, not just the decisions of individuals. Our experience shows that efforts to move people from dependency to self-sufficiency must focus on the needs of the household rather than simply prepare an individual to go to work.
Program participants fall into several general categories:
Policy makers can not assume that all participants in workfare programs will have the same results as the AWEP-UP population because our participants differ from the general public assistance population in several important ways. First, all of the participants in our program at present are members of two parent households. AWEP-UP participants also include many more refugees and a smaller percentage of African American participants than most programs. This difference makes our results particularly important because we can compare the experience of groups of people who come into the system with different education and work experience as well as different goals.
Overall, participants were in the program an average of 3.5 months in the 1993-94 program year and 5.28 months in the 1994-95 program year. Differences between the two years in the amount of time that people with different outcomes were in the program were not statistically significant. Most of the people who continued with the program at the end of the second year had entered late in the 1994-95 program year. The people who had stayed in the program over one year fell into two categories. Half were displaced workers over the age of fifty and the other half were educated refugees attempting to pass professional licensing exams.
In total, 53 percent of the participants who left the program in 1993-94 left because someone in the family entered paid employment. In 1994-95, 50 percent of the people who left fell into this category. Our employment statistics are not comparable to that collected for other studies of welfare to work programs because our employment category measures only people who left the program to accept employment. The various studies of welfare to work program note the percentage of participants who had ever worked during a given follow-up period. According to informal estimates, over half of AWEP-UP participants work temporary or part-time jobs while enrolled in our program. If these people were counted as employed in our data, somewhere between 60 and 75 percent would have worked for wages.
| Both Years (Info. Missing on 4 People) | Less than $6.00/part time | Less than $6.00/full time | More than $6.00/part time | More than $600/full time | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1993-94 | 2 13% | 3 20% | 1 7% | 9 60% | 15 100% |
| 1994-95 | 9 35% | 2 8% | 5 19% | 10 38% | 26 100% |
In the first program year, 80 percent of our participants found full time work, 67 percent were paid $6.00 an hour or more, and 76 percent of those jobs offered health insurance benefits. In 1994-95, 46 percent of the jobs were full time, 57 percent paid $6.00 an hour or more, and 31 percent offered health insurance benefits. In 1994-95, within six months of accepting a 20 hour a week job at more than $6.00 an hour, 21 percent (3) participants had moved up to full time work with benefits in the same company. If we count these stepping stone jobs as full time, 50 percent of the jobs in the second year offered full time wages with benefits.
While we have divided the employment statistics into greater than $6.00 an hour and less than $6.00 an hour, the majority of our participants who found work were paid much more. In 1993-94, the average wage for all jobs was $9.18 per hour and in 1994-95, the average wage was $7.26 per hour. There is no clear pattern for wage levels in the first year. In the second year, wages over $6.00 an hour fell into two groups. Most of the people taking semi-skilled or skilled blue collar positions began work at wages of $7.00 or $8.00 an hour. The professionals accepted positions paying between $12.00 and $15.00 an hour.
In reviewing these statistics, it is important to note that several of our most successful participants refused to provide employment information. If we assume that these individuals reentered jobs paying greater than $6.00 an hour, 71 percent of the 1993-94 participants and 61 percent of the 1994-95 participants took jobs at $6.00 an hour or more. Over 93 percent of the 93-94 employed participants would have found full-time work and over 50 percent of the 1994-95 participants.
Employment trends fell into three groups: 1) people who used the AWEP-UP experience to find work through worksite related contacts, 2) people with significant skills already actively on the path to employment in their fields, and 3) low skill workers who found employment similar to their previous experience.
For some of our participants, the internship work sites provided an important link to a new career. In the 1993-94 program year, 12 percent of our participants (2) found work at their worksites and 21 percent (6) in 1994-95. These included several displaced workers who had previously worked in factories who found jobs in either maintenance or social service and clerical workers who returned to their previous careers or were able to move into new directions. Employment at the worksites has had a snowball effect. As the positive reputation of the program grows, more interns are offered employment at the worksites. Halfway through the 1995-96 program year, we have nearly matched the number of people employed by their internship sites last year and at-least four more are likely to be offered employment in the next few months.
In 1994-95 we began long-term tracking of our participants who had found work. We contacted people who had been on the job six months or more. The difference between people who took jobs that paid less than $6.00 an hour and those who took jobs paying more than $6.00 an hour is striking. We obtained information on 22 participants from the 1994-95 program year. Fifty-eight percent of the participants who had taken jobs paying $6.00 an hour or more had received promotions or raises. The rest were in the same positions at the same wages.
In contrast, only 18 percent of the people who had left the program to start jobs which paid less than $6.00 an hour had experienced a change for the better. Forty-five percent were in the same position at the same wages.
These employment data compare quite favorably with the results from most welfare to work programs. Unlike the Hull (1992) study and the Project Match data (Berg et al 1991) where nearly 80 percent of the participants have lost their jobs before a year is up, 88 percent of our participants were still working and the majority had improved their position at the same firm.
The significance of the difference in work patterns is most clear when looking at earnings. The West Virginia CWEP AFDC-U participants earned an average of $2,582 over 15 months (Brock et al 1993: 35). In contrast, AWEP-UP participants worked an average of 31 hours per week and earned an average of $11,700 per year. In reality, annual earnings for most participants were probably closer $14,000 to $18,000. Participants with this level of earnings contribute to the economy through taxes and increased purchasing power. In contrast, people who earn small amounts each year simply cost the government less in public assistance benefits.
While seminar attendance is a required component of the program, some interns do not place as much importance on regular seminar attendance because it is not a mandatory requirement to receive their benefits. Ten percent of our population is exempt from the seminar because they are also enrolled in another structured educational program which conflicts with both seminars. We began tracking regular seminar attendance during the 1994-95 program year. People who regularly attended three or more seminars per month we considered regular attendees. In total, 54 percent (65) of our 1994-95 participants attended the seminar on a regular basis. Given that 10 percent of the participants are exempt, 36 percent do not attend the seminar on a regular basis.
Attending the seminar made a very significant difference in the ability to get a job. Seventy-one percent of the people who found employment attended the seminar regularly. People who left the program for non-cooperation also did not attend the seminar regularly. Ninety-four percent of the people who were terminated for poor attendance at the worksite also did not attend the seminar regularly. However, several people at risk of termination for non-cooperation who attended the seminar regularly were able to use new skills gained through this experience to turn their performance around.
AWEP-UP employs two full time case managers. Our counselors estimate that their time is divided as follows: 35 percent spent on record keeping, 30 percent spent on counseling participants, 15 percent spent on screening, interviewing and placing new participants, and 10 percent focusing on issues at a particular worksite.
Quality case management clearly makes a difference in the ability to successfully maintain program compliance. If one of the goals of a workfare program is to instill on time and consistent work behavior, ongoing monitoring is extremely important. Throughout most of the two years of the program, between 80 and over 90 percent of our participants had completed the number of hours required per month. The lowest months, at 70 percent full compliance, were months with bad weather where participants missed hours at their internship site because they had trouble getting there. In comparison, the West Virginia program assigned AFDC-U participants to an average of 76 hours per month. AFDC-U participants actually worked an average of 56 hours per month, a much lower participation rate (Brock et al 1993: 31).
Worksite supervisors estimate that they spend between 5 and 10 hours a week supervising people involved in 17 hours of community service activity. Interns must also be trained to use equipment at the worksite as well as in agency procedures. Participants with lower skills or less developed work habits require much more supervision than those with higher skills.
Our program shows how a workfare program can become a key component in a system which uses community service combined with education to prepare public assistance recipients for long-term paid employment. We do not see this program as an all or nothing option, but as a stepping stone to prepare participants for a wide variety of options for self sufficiency.
In order to create a workfare experience which plays a significant role in moving participants toward self-sufficiency, several elements need to be in place:
The AWEP-UP experience provides three important lessons for welfare reform:
Partnering community service with education and training makes training much more effective because participants come out of the program with real world experience using classroom skills and the work experience which employers want as a prerequisite to paid employment.
Copies of Making Workfare a Success, by Jo Anne Schneider are available for $8.00 from the Institute for the Study of Civic Values, 1218 Chestnut St., Rm. 702, Philadelphia, Pa. 19107 215-238-1434; fax: 215-238-0530
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