Jumping from Welfare to Work:
An Interview with Ralph Johnson

Aired July 7, 1999

David C. Barnett–Ralph Johnson is general manager of Cuyahoga Work and Training, the county agency charged with getting people prepared for making the transition from welfare to work. Good morning, Mr. Johnson.

Ralph Johnson–Good morning, David.

DCB–The profile is said to be a single mother. Does that fit with you experience?

RJ–Oh, absolutely. Probably 95% of our clients are single women who are heading households.

DCB–So this single mother who comes into your facility there, what are the steps she goes through?

RJ–Well, the initial step that she goes through, David, is she'll be given some information, just so she'll know if she winds up applying for public assistance what it is she'll need to bring to us so that we can process her application. But the real first important step is an hour long interview, we call it an initial assessment, and this is done before we sit down and start trying to process any of her paperwork and figure out if she's eligible or not, and during this initial assessment, what we're attempting to do with her, David, is really understand what's going on in her life that caused her to need to come to our neighborhood family service center in the first place. This is a real fundamental change for us. In the past, you know, for the past 35 odd years, what we've done is that we've made sure that we process people's eligibility. Now we're actually trying to ask people, "what is it you really need from us? What caused you to need to come here in the first place, and what can we do to help you build on the strengths that you have for yourself and for your family, and what can we do to help you address any issues that might be in your way of going to work and being able to provide for yourself and your family.

DCB–Is there a general level of skills that people already have or certain deficits that you're finding in certain areas?

RJ–Well, what we're finding is that everybody does have some kind of base level of skills and capabilities, but a number of people do have some pretty significant challenges that impede their ability to make this transition easily or more smoothly, and what we've got to do is help them buttress those skills that they have and to address any deficiencies that they had. I had an interesting case that I heard about the other day, a client was talking during their initial assessment interview with their self-sufficiency coach, and during the course of the interview, it turns out that the client said that one of the things that she does and enjoys doing is she keeps the books at a small church that she's a member of. Well, that's a real skill that we need to help her develop, because clearly there's a need for that kind of skill just generally in the world, but she had never thought about that kind of interest and that kind of ability, being something she might be able to translate to work.

DCB–Do you have concerns about the availability of jobs, the sheer number of people that are going to have to be, and I hate to use the word, processed, but that's what it gets down to, we've got about a little over a year to go and do you have concerns about the amount of jobs out there to fill what's needed?

RJ–I don't really have a lot of concern about it, David, it's clearly something that I think about, but I don't know that we're tapping out on our threshold of jobs, that is, I don't know that there are a lot of folks who we have who were really ready to make the move, who are out there actively looking for months and months and not finding anything. There are probably some cases like that, I'm not crazy, I know there are some cases like that, but I don't know that there are thousands of them.

DCB–What about the folks who are out there who are not currently on welfare, but are so-called "low-skilled" people and they are suddenly now going to have the competition of this new influx of people into the market. Problems there?

RJ–Well, one of the very important, fundamental decisions that this board of commissioners made a year-and-a-half ago, David, was that we were going to move our services, our human services, from these large, kind of ivory towers downtown out into the neighborhoods and into the communities where people live, and the reason why they made that decision, which I think was a very fundamental and a very important decision, just because they said we've got to reach those folks who you just described. We've got to help make sure that all the people who might need our assistance, whether they realize it or not right now, that our assistance is available for them, and that it's more accessible for them. I read an interesting study about a year ago that was done in upstate New York, and it said that anything that you do to help people before they get on welfare is better than whatever you do once they're on welfare, so by moving out into the neighborhoods, we're hoping that those folks who do need our assistance, even if they're in a job now and they're making $5.50 an hour, and they realize that long-term they're going to need to move into something better, we want them to come into our neighborhood family service center so that we can help them increase their skills so that they can get into a better job before they have to come onto welfare.

DCB–How much closer are we to tracking what happens to people once they get their jobs, or is that beyond the scope of what you do?

RJ–Well, it's beyond the scope of what I do, but it's clearly not beyond the scope of what I'm interested in, so we have some partnerships with a number of organizations, I guess most noticeably Case Western Reserve University's Mandel School, the Center for Urban Poverty and Social Change I believe is the name of it, it's headed by Dr. Claudia Colton, and they're doing a couple of studies for us and for other organizations, one being the state of Ohio, that's really looking at what happens to people as they leave welfare. The problem, David, quite honestly, is welfare reform, not just here in Cuyahoga County but throughout this country, is still new enough that there isn't really what you'd call good research or good conclusions that have able to be drawn as yet, but Claudia and a number of other organizations like her are really working very diligently on that.

DCB–Learning as we go along.

RJ–Absolutely, absolutely.

DCB–Ralph Johnson is general manager of Cuyahoga Work and Training, thanks for joining us this morning.

RJ–Thank you, David.