Conference for Welfare Research and Statistics:
Purpose of Conference Off-Track

Aired August 17, 1999

This is INFOhio After Nine, I am David C. Barnett, welcoming you to Tuesday, the 17th day of August, 1999, and today we're going to do the numbers, as they say on Marketplace. But the people watching these numbers are looking for losses, losses in the number of people on Ohio's welfare rolls. That's the goal of welfare reform, after all, but some claim we're losing people because we're not sure where they went. A person named Carrie Carpenter works up in close and personal with people working their way off welfare, she works with the Cleveland center for all sorts of statistics, the director of government affairs for the Center for Families and Children, she'll join us in a second, and she'll bring some of the numbers to life for us after we try to figure out what the heck we're counting. In the business of tracking people for government assistance, the very issue of keeping track of them is concern for some people working on welfare reform. This year's annual Conference for Welfare Research and Statistics took place in Cleveland last week, and as 90.3's Yolanda Perdomo reports, according to some attendees, the purpose of having the conference itself is off-track.

Yolanda Perdomo–It was designed for those in administration in social service research and statistic gathering. Their work, involving regional and national comparisons for planning policy, were the focus of the three-day conference. Diana Redman works for the Ohio Department of Human Services in Columbus. She's also president of the National Association of Welfare Research and Statistics. Redman says discussions are centering around what happens after welfare reform.

Diana Redman–We're looking at the impact of TANF legislation, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and time limits. With the new welfare reform programs, we are much more involved and much more focused on outcome, not performance measures in the sense of how many people did we sign up or how many checks we are issuing, but what are we doing to affect the outcome, and how effectively are we managing to those outcomes?

YP–Sue Pearlmutter, an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University, served as the program chair of the conference. She says it's unique for this field because it allows different people to exchange ideas on the welfare system. She admits that accountability tracking is a problem affecting every agency in the country.

Sue Pearlmutter–What we know about people who have traditionally been on welfare is that their poverty makes it very difficult for them to retain stable housing. Often they don't have telephones over long periods of time, so it's very difficult to keep up with people who are just leaving the welfare rolls.

Eva Fausten Lee–To call it New Millennium, New Realities is a farce because where are the realities coming in at, what are we doing to change the problems? All we're doing is rehashing old problems. We're talking about statistics that were pretty much raised ten years ago, and they're just being raised all over again in this conference, but no one has actually come up with a solution.

YP–Eva Fausten Lee is the founder of Team Management 2000 in Inglewood, New Jersey, a self-sufficiency program for those coming off of welfare. She herself was a single mother on public assistance 20 years ago before going back to school and becoming an accountant on Wall Street. Lee, now working on her MBA, says very little has changed in the system itself to help people get off welfare with some motivation and dignity.

EFL–The administration is basically not treating the participants as consumers as they are. They are consumers. They're being treated, more so, as handicapped individuals that have no say so in their own process. I'd say at least 25-35% of the caseload decline are people that are just lost in society, that have fallen through the cracks, that are homeless, and that are just going to be recognized, and these statistics just meet their numbers. They're just glad, the agencies are just glad to say, "well, our head count says this, and that means we've transitioned X amount of people," when in reality they're not transitioned at all, they're homeless, they're below the poverty line.

YP–But finding out about those people in transition is where the statistical data comes in, says Allen Essick. He's the commissioner for the Department of Human Resources in Georgia. He admits it's not a problem-solving conference, but rather a way to share information on those problems.

Allen Essick–We need to know what's going on out in the field, whether sanctions work or not, whether people are getting jobs or not, whether child care or transportation problems-the research will tell us some of those answers, and it's the policymaker's job to try to develop solutions to that, so this is one-half of the story, but it's an important half. Without this initial data, we don't know what the issues are and what the problems are and what the potential solutions are.

YP–While no real solutions on tracking and the work needed to keep in touch with those getting off of welfare were part of the event, the participants gathering the information say it's part of a longer process. Their studies and findings for this year's conference will be posted at the National Association of Welfare and Statistics website at the end of September. For INFOhio, I'm Yolanda Perdomo in Cleveland.