Page 5 of 6
"You know what strengths you want to present, what green flags you want to wave, exactly what you have to offer the company."
"You walk into the room with your shoulders back, you are smiling, and you introduce yourself. You use the employer's name, and you remember why you are here."
"The interview is coming to a close. You shake the employer's hand and say you really want to work for this company."
Several of the women are smiling. Moore switches the lights back on.
"OK. So now we're going to practice interviewing."
Day 6: Incentives to Succeed
On this final day of the "Steps" program, the class is watching a video hosted by a handsome, well-dressed African-American man, a motivational speaker and former Ohio state assemblyman named Les Brown. His message: "This Is Your Decade."
"Now repeat after me," Brown says to the studio audience. "I deserve the best life has to offer. I deserve to find my purpose in life. Now shake hands with the person on your left and right and say, 'Find your purpose.' " The women at 30 Van Ness are captivated, and obediently follow Brown's instructions.
He advises members of his audience to follow their "inner conversations" to fulfill their potentials.
"How are you going to do it? That will come to you in time. What makes you feel good?" ("Shopping," someone in Moore's class says solemnly.)
The women listen intently as he fires off a rapid succession of slogans.
"You go through life being casual, you're going to end up a casualty."
"You've got to start saying, 'Yes,' to your dream, 'Yes,' to your unfolding potential, 'Yes,' to your future!"
"When you're not fulfilling your potential, you are committing spiritual suicide."
"You have greatness within you!"
Stirred by Brown's motivational message, Moore's class embarks on the final exercise in "Steps." It is called "completion." Each of Moore's students takes a turn coming to the front of the classroom and "selling" herself to an imaginary employer. Then classmates write assessments and comments on Post-It notes that they give to one another. The Post-Its convey messages such as "You Go Momma!" and "Very Smart." The notes are affixed to sheets of paper, providing each participant with a memento of sorts, like a high school yearbook.
The next day, they will begin working the phones at the Job Network Center. Participants are strongly encouraged to use the Yellow Pages as a job solicitation reference, starting with the first letters of their first names. (In practice, however, the phones are primarily used to call home and check that children are where they are supposed to be.)
Moore's class will be expected to apply the techniques they have learned over the past six days to their Yellow Pages-guided job search. They have assembled resumes and learned interview "control techniques." They have learned the difference between NOIPs and POIPs and found new ways to cope with conflict. They have new "assertion tools" and at least five master job applications. Most significant, they feel really good.
San Francisco officials are feeling pretty good, too. They cite high job placements and short-term savings as evidence of the success of Express to Success. In fact, they are so impressed with the program that they want to expand it.
Although the city has not committed any additional money for the fiscal year that begins in July, the DHS is already planning to use state money to finance a $1.5 million expansion for Express to Success at either the Van Ness Avenue facility or at a location in Bayview-Hunters Point.
Without a reliable measure of the program's long-term effects, however, welfare bureaucrats are hard pressed to make broad claims about the program's efficacy. Simply put, the Express program is unproven. And none of the tracking that would provide proof -- pro or con -- is being done. It is as if San Francisco's welfare administrators were determined to remake the mistakes of the Great Society programs that welfare reform was expected to redesign or eliminate.
The Manpower Demonstration Research Corp., a nonprofit social policy think tank, has documented success at some California work-first programs. But social welfare experts say no single program is a panacea, and they point out that the Express to Success program is significantly different from the work-first programs that have been studied.
Jill Duerr Berrick, who heads UC Berkeley's Center for Social Services Research and the National Child Welfare Research Center, cautions that work-first programs like the Curtis model simply won't help the many AFDC recipients who have specialized educational or health care needs.
"It's not just a matter of a quick-fix program that is going to help welfare recipients catch up with everyone else out there who has years of social and educational experience," says Berrick. "You have people who have a complex set of needs, who are not going to be able to easily jump into a job tomorrow and have all that disappear."
But San Francisco's welfare bureaucrats have "motivation," as Dean Curtis might say, to go with Express to Success, and go big. The clock is ticking. Under new welfare rules required by federal reform efforts, states that fail to move 50 percent of their AFDC caseload off government aid by the year 2002 face sizable cuts in their federal welfare funding. Less welfare money for Sacramento means less money for San Francisco. The incentives are clear.
Just Find It
Back in Moore's classroom at 30 Van Ness Ave., the women are flushed with the excitement of "completion." Lupe, a broad-shouldered Latina with a passion for cars and a movie-star smile, has just received a certificate and a rainbow-colored ribbon that says she is both a graduate and a POIP. She dedicates her certificate to her four daughters and to the memory of her grandmother.
