Job training by D.C. welfare program is criticized

City is failing to teach skills for decent-paying work, new report finds

At a time when unemployment is hitting the District hard, a new review of the city's welfare program has found that it is pushing recipients to work but is not providing the skills and support they need to land decent-paying jobs.

The study of the District's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program concluded that although the city has opportunities for substantive educational and vocational training, TANF recipients are too often kept in the dark about such help.

"These services exist," said Katie Kerstetter, an analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute and one of the authors of the report. "We need to find ways to connect TANF recipients to them."

An affiliate of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the fiscal policy institute conducts research and education on budget issues and programs affecting low-income residents. TANF, which provides cash to poor families, is one such program. In the District, it serves about 16,000 households with an average monthly payment of $428 for a family of three.

Under the work-first mandate of federal welfare law, recipients are generally required to have a job or to be learning job skills. But the report concludes that the employment training for TANF recipients is limited and that too little is being done to tailor programs to the particular needs and problems of the people TANF serves.

Just 325 TANF recipients, or about 3 percent of the adult caseload, for example, were served in fiscal 2008 by PATHS, the city's 16-week job-training and literacy program run by the University of the District of Columbia, the report notes.

Clarence H. Carter, director of the D.C. Human Services Department, did not respond to a request, relayed through the mayor's press office, to be interviewed about the new report on TANF.

Funded with city and federal money, the TANF program is part of a safety net for poor families that usually includes food stamps and can include assistance with child care, housing and health care. The District's unemployment rate is 11.4 percent, and in Ward 8, the poorest area of the city, the jobless rate is approaching 30 percent.

With more people applying for public assistance, Kerstetter and Joni Podschun, of the local anti-poverty organization So Others Might Eat, undertook an examination of the city's TANF program. They reviewed data from Human Services and conducted focus groups of current and former recipients.

The resulting report, "Voices for Change: Perspectives on Strengthening Welfare-to-Work From DC TANF Recipients," is scheduled to be released Thursday in conjunction with a welfare policy conference at the Georgetown University Law Center.

It criticizes what it calls the city's one-size-fits-all approach and its singular focus on what is known as job readiness. Such training is intended to build interviewing skills, create or update résumés, and identify potential employers.

But job-readiness training does not address more fundamental deficiencies that might represent bigger barriers to employment for many recipients, the report's authors say. Programs such as PATHS that could address those barriers are being underused, Kerstetter said. Programs that could address other significant barriers, such as substance abuse and mental illness, were unknown to many TANF recipients.

During focus group discussions, current and former TANF recipients responded in disbelief when Kerstetter described some of the programs the District offers. "Over and over, we heard that these programs do not exist," Kerstetter said.

But they do, and Kerstetter said the city needs to ensure that the people who work with the TANF program know they are available and provide that information to recipients. "It's an awareness problem," she said.