The Urban League and Welfare:
An Interview with Myron Robinson

Aired March 31, 1999

David C. Barnett–The Urban League of Greater Cleveland traces its origins back to 1917, when its mission was to overcome economic barriers that faced thousands of African Americans who had settled here after the Great Migration from the South, which followed World War I. Now, we're at the other end of the 20th century and welfare recipients represent another group of economically disadvantaged people that need help. Urban League director Myron Robinson joins us this morning in Studio B to discuss how his organization has adapted. Thanks for stopping by, Mr. Robinson.

Myron Robinson–Well, Dave, it's good to be here.

DCB–I understand you had some involvement on the state level in helping plan welfare reform to begin with.

MR–Somewhat, Dave. It seems as I look back and as I look at my career, I worked in the state of South Carolina as well as Connecticut and Wisconsin, and came back to Ohio in 1991, and one thing that I noticed when I came back to my home state of Ohio, is that we had no real strategy to attract business into the state of Ohio. I was fortunate to serve on the governor's Workforce Development Board for over a year, and that board had the responsibility of trying to come up with a strategy to attract businesses back to Ohio and also to look at the workforce we have in Ohio, and how we can link that workforce to businesses.

DCB–Now what kind of perception did you get, I mean, here you were coming in with this world, this national experience, did you feel that the folks back here had a good handle on what was going on?

MR–Well, I think we moved in a good direction, and I'm happy to report that under the new governor, Governor Taft, what we did under Governor Voinovich is come into fruition, that is, to merge the Department of Human Services with the OBES, the Ohio Bureau of Employment Services. It seemed to us that there was a lot of turf fighting, if you will, on the state level in terms of who was going to control the money. I'd say that the resources are there, in the state of Ohio, in the terms of money, but it's a question of us understanding that we're in a global economy, that we cannot be myopic any more on the state level, on the county level, or on the city level, that we must work together, there must be coordination of efforts to work towards the common good which is the citizens of the state of Ohio. In this case, we're talking about welfare recipients. We must utilize the family as a focal point and to work with the family. For example, I'm happy to report that we have been working locally in what we call an alliance, an alliance that came together out of the Community Planning Foundation here in Cleveland, and we're working with about six agencies such as Goodwill and Salvation Army and the VGS and Towards Employment and Cleveland Works as well as the Urban League. What we're saying is that all those six agencies together have an annual budget of almost $43 million, and that we have a capacity to serve at least 10,000 people together, and that we have, physically, 18 locations throughout the county and we have about 1300 people on all of our staffs, and we have all these attributes, we want to pull that together to serve welfare recipients, to serve families in Ohio.

DCB–But how do you do that exactly?

MR–Well, you do that by looking at who has what strengths, and that's what we're in the process of doing right now. Once we pull that together, and have the family as a focal point, then we go to either utilize our existing staff, our existing budget, or trying to find new monies to serve more people. But, as we talked about earlier, we're not talking about a dead-end job. What we're talking about is an assessment process, and from that assessment we're talking about a career development process, so the person knows that if they go to work for McDonald's, their first step might be cooking hamburgers, flipping hamburgers, but we've got to bring the next step to that person, so they know what the next step is, and hopefully the last step will be ownership of that McDonald's.

DCB–We've got less than a minute left, many argue that there simply aren't enough jobs out there for the thousands of people that are coming off the rolls. Do you have thoughts on that?

MR–Well, we're saying that we can identify roughly 10,000 in this alliance. If we start with 10,000 jobs, then we'll see where we go from there. We also need to look at other avenues. We've got to look at entrepreneurship and businesses. You go from welfare to ownership. What we've got to do really, Dave, is instill in our clientele, instill within the minority community and the poor community the desire to achieve, the ability to achieve. We want them to be enthusiastically involved in America, to understand America, to be exposed to the various possibilities they could have in this country.

DCB–Myron Robinson is the executive director of the Urban League of Greater Cleveland. Thanks for joining us.

MR–Thank you so much.