Don't give up: poverty programs that work; selling salsa, banking in the ghetto, and 11 other strategies for helping the poor.

AuthorLemann, Nicholas

Don't Give Up: Poverty Programs That Work

Selling salsa, banking in the ghetto, and 11 other strategies for helping the poor

Here come those acronyms again, you may be thinking, JTPA, CETA, and all the rest. There's reason to be skeptical when anyone starts up about poverty programs that work. Let's face it--most don't.

Historically, the poverty programs that have worked best have gone by different names, like good schools, a strong labor movement, and Social Security. Good schools are always good poverty programs, but they've become increasingly rare over the past 20 years. Membership in a labor union can still offer a ticket out of poverty, but those high-paying jobs that require little education are getting as rare as good public schools. And by enforcing restrictive work and membership rules, most unions seem more interested in their own than in reaching out to their poor nonmembers.

Of course the story of much of American history is the story of the best poverty program of all: economic growth. A strong economy remains an essential antipoverty weapon. But economic growth won't do the job alone, particularly for the mostly black underclass, whose rise in the past 20 years has presented a more intractable form of American poverty. The gulf between middle-class society, black or white, and the black underclass extends beyond economics, to values, aspirations, and behavior. It is measured in record numbers of pregnant teens, female-headed families, drug addiction, and violence, a collective social disintegration that did not exist in the ghettos of earlier generations and that responds much less readily to economic opportunity.

The programs below offer some unusual suggestions for the poor, from selling salsa to sneaking people into suburbs. Some of the ideas are addressed toward the problems of the black underclass, while others offer solutions more workable for less severe forms of disadvantage. They've been chosen by people trained to cast a skeptical eye on poverty promises, and their success is of a modest variety--experimental, limited, and local. In some instances, their success may consist only of failing less stupendously than similar efforts elsewhere.

While triumphs of this kind might not be ones we can savor, neither are they ones we can ignore. In considering them, it's important to think beyond the programs to the principles that work.

Among the ones we've spotted:

The 20 Minute Bus Ride Test. Most poverty programs can't help everyone, and even the best ones usually can't help people with no desire to help themselves. Jobs for Youth, a Chicago program that places about a thousand poor black teenagers in summer jobs each year has found a way to make sure its efforts reach the people who can benefit: applicants have to be willing to come to the business district to sign up. It's an appropriately modest challenge. Ghetto kids don't have to be rocket scientists to catch a bus downtown. But they do have to have at least the minimal motivation that makes their prospects of success feasible.

The Money Back Guarantee. Most underclass kids grow up with the idea that the only thing guaranteed is failure, a belief held so deeply that it mocks all effort. When technology tycoon Gene Lang blurted out a promise to send the kids in his old Harlem grammar school to college, he found a way to reverse the psychology of defeat: offer a sure thing. If the kids did their part, they'd be rewarded. He proved his sincerity by staying in touch with the kids, bringing them to his office and to shows in New York. The certainty of his promise unlocked a torrent of dormant ambition.

For most middle-class kids, the idea that hard work leads to reward is taken at face value. (Its truth in generations of practice is probably the thing that has most distinguished America from other societies.) But for the underclass kids, surrounded by generations of dependency and defeat, The Money Back Guarantee proved revolutionary.

After an interlude of shoulder-shrugging disillusion, the country seems ready to begin confronting the problems of the poor again. The problems we face, particularly those of the black underclass, are rooted in several centuries of American experience. (That's why, of course, it's so important to keep fighting racial and sexual discrimination.) They won't dissolve with a Jobs Club here and a training program there. But the Jobs Clubs and the training programs and the computerized literacy plans and the small business incubators and the preschool programs and the community colleges that we describe do make differences in individual lives.

For all the plentiful despair of the ghetto, the number of people willing to sign up at training centers and adult education courses across the country shows a persistence of desire. Even the drug and prostitution trades that flourish in the ghetto show a pool of organizational--even entrepreneurial--talent waiting to be tapped. A final poverty principle: Don't give up.

Give the 20-Minute Bus Ride Test

The idea behind Jobs for Youth/Chicago is extremely, almost off-puttingly, simple: it finds private-sector jobs for kids from poor families. The kids must be between the ages of 16 and 21, and their families' incomes must fall below the poverty line; practically speaking, this means that most of them come from welfare families in Chicago's black ghetto, which is the biggest in the country. Jobs for Youth, which is ten years old and funded mostly by the Labor Department (there are two loosely affiliated, and older, offices in New York and Boston), places about a thousand kids a year in jobs, and more than 90 percent hold on to them for at least three months. If they stay on the job for six months, Jobs for Youth will help them get a better job--having an employment history is the key to getting a job with a future. Fighting poverty is supposed to be more complicated than this.

The first reason Jobs for Youth works is that its participants are self-selected. Most of them have heard of the program through word of mouth, and all of them have to be motivated enough to come to the Loop and sign up. It's easier to find jobs for people who have made a commitment to getting jobs.

Second, Jobs for Youth puts its participants through a three-week pre-employment training workshop (usually taught by a volunteer who works in business) before sending them to real employers. One of the great lessons of the past 20 years about jobs programs for poor teenagers is that they work much better if there's a buffer zone between the streets and the workplace. Job training is really a short course in acculturation for people who, first of all, are not at life's zenith of self-discipline simply by virtue of being adolescents, and, second, being from welfare families, haven't spent their lives around people who work; the course at Jobs for Youth heavily emphasizes punctuality (the kids even have to punch a time clock when they arrive at the office) and grooming, in addition to explaining how to deal with employers.

Third, in Chicago (as in most big cities), the private job market, while it may be bad for steelworkers, is quite good for unskilled teenagers. Employers, on the one hand, badly need entry-level employees, but on the other hand are often automatically suspicious of black teenagers, especially boys. Having proved to employers over the years that its kids do well at work, Jobs for Youth in effect provides its graduates with a passport to the larger economy--it says to employers, you can feel confident that the people from our program are honest and reliable, and knowing this helps get employers over whatever racial barriers may exist in their minds.

You often hear that many ghetto kids don't get jobs because the jobs are too far away, and because, if all that's available is flipping burgers at McDonald's for the minimum wage, what's the use? The experience of Jobs for Youth shows that, in Chicago at least, there are jobs within reasonable commuting distance of the ghettos (especially in the Loop and at O'Hare Airport), and that there is more to the world of entry-level employment than fast food. Over the past nine months, Jobs for Youth has placed only 30 kids in fast-food jobs--the bigger categories are messengers in law firms and brokerage houses, baggage handlers at the airport, and clerks in banks, and all of these start at above the minimum wage. Even fast-food jobs are appealing to kids if it looks like they'll lead to something better, which is an idea Jobs for Youth stresses heavily and can prove through its own participants' experience. Jobs for Youth also has a six-month program preparing dropouts for the high-school equivalency exam, and this can lead to college and eventually to a profession.

In the job-training business, there is a constant temptation (created in part by the hostility of labor unions to efforts to get real jobs for poor kids) to fall into a gauzy romanticism. As a result, much effort has been wasted on creating non-jobs "in the community" (this was CETA's problem--I once visited a CETA program in a housing project where the job being created was "watching cars") and on Teddy Roosevelt-style character-building exercises in which kids are taught how to rock-climb or play tennis instead of how to fill out forms. Fostering group spirit is effective but not as an end in itself. In jobs programs it works only in conjunction with getting poor kids out of the ghetto and into real jobs and providing them with whatever instruction and emotional and practical support they need to make that considerable leap.

Borrow the Businessmen

For the past two years, Career Beginnings has served more than five thousand young people in 22 U.S. cities. Who are they? We call them "tenacious" youth. Their "tenacity" has overcome poverty (75 percent are officially poor), lousy urban schools (all are from cities over 100,000), and race (65 percent are black, 18 percent Hispanic, 8...

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