Clearing Obstacles to Work: A Wise Giver's Guide to Fostering Self-Reliance

The Philanthropy Roundtable

Clearing Obstacles to Work

A Wise Giver’s Guide to Fostering Self-Reliance

By David Bass

Copyright © 2015,The Philanthropy Roundtable. All rights reserved.

Published by The Philanthropy Roundtable

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Cover: © Roel Smart/istockphoto; © aleksandarvelasevic/istockphoto

ISBN 978-0-9861474-2-5

LCCN 2015940349

First printing, June 2015

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Table of Contents

Preface: Just Do It—Because Work Works

1. Why Work Matters

• Benefits of a work-filled life

• Why donors should care about work

2. The Troubling Decline of Work

• The labor market tells the story

• The role of dependence in our work slump

• Working but struggling to make ends meet

• Overcoming the biggest barriers to work

• Why donors should help strugglers surmount barriers

3. Teaching the Skills of Life Transformation

• Cincinnati Works

• WorkFaith Connection

• Cara Program

• StepUp Ministry

• Life Learning Center

• STRIVE

• America Works

• A driving obstacle:What to do about transportation

• REDF helps strugglers by creating businesses

• Faith-based mentoring from Jobs for Life

• More faith-based training: Belay Enterprises

• Christian commerce in Milwaukee

• Sector-specific training: BioTechnical Institute

• Supporting business growth in poor neighborhoods

• Common traits of outstanding work programs

4. Reaching Disconnected Young People

• The role of education

• Connecting high-schoolers to real jobs: Genesys Works

• Urban Alliance

• Year Up

• Dealing with the toughest cases:Taller San Jose

• School-based paths to success: Pro-Vision

• Using entrepreneurship to hook the young: BUILD, Juma, Dakota

• Mentorship as a pathway to success: Colorado Uplift and Friends of the Children

5. Working Around Homelessness Substance Abuse, Disability

• Gospel Rescue Missions

• Social enterprising: Delancey Street, FareStart

• Social enterprise in NYC: the Doe Fund

• More social enterprising: Homeboy Industries

• Work-friendly solutions to substance abuse: Step 13 and Teen Challenge

• Helping disabled veterans find work

• Putting persons with serious mental or physical disabilities to work: Goodwill

• Coping with mental illness at Fountain House

6. Working Around Family Breakdown and Welfare Dependence

• The problems of single-parent life

• A comprehensive approach to helping single mothers work

• Working with welfare programs

• Manufacturing independence: the Women’s Bean Project

• Bolstering marriage, fathering, and family functioning

7. Working Around a Criminal History

• Prison Entrepreneurship Program

• Center for Employment Opportunities

• RIDGE renews family relationships to build responsibility

• Some more models

8. Investment Opportunities

• Annual support of $1,000–$100,000

• Investments of $100,000–$500,000

• Investments of $500,000 or more

Index

About The Philanthropy Roundtable

About the Author

Preface

Just Do It—Because Work Works

A Yankee, however rich he may be, works all the time and in all capacities. If he is a merchant, he takes care of his store. If he is a farmer, he himself sows, plows, and harrows...he works side by side with his hired hands and eats at the same table with them. It seems almost incredible to the European visitor that such is the case, but I assure you it is true. Respect and unprecedented passion for work—this is the invincible power of the Yankees, this will assure them a brilliant future and world leadership. I repeat once again, Yankee is synonymous with worker; be he millionaire or pauper, he is always a worker.

So wrote a Polish aristocrat (a kind of latter-day Tocqueville who went on to win a Nobel Prize for literature) after he visited the United States of America in 1876. Henryk Sienkiewicz travelled widely across our country for several years, all the while sending dispatches back to Polish newspapers about what he observed in this rising land. He was particularly struck by America’s willingness to labor and exceptionally prescient in predicting the great success that powerful work habits would eventually bring the young nation.

Sienkiewicz was also struck by American generosity and voluntary philanthropy. A man who is old and infirm, a woman, or a child, receives more assistance in the United States than anywhere else, he observed. Yet he noted that a healthy young man will almost invariably hear one piece of advice: ‘Help yourself!’ And if he does not know how to follow this advice, he may even die of starvation. Along with the powerful consensus in support of charity for the needy, there was an equally powerful American consensus that the way to hasten an able-bodied person toward a thriving existence was to lead, or push, him into energetic work.

In 2015, the American belief in work is still strong and still the source of our great successes. But there are also cracks. Whole subpopulations now exhibit a weak attachment to self-supporting labor. Researchers Isabel Sawhill and Quentin Karpilow of the liberal Brookings Institution have identified a work gap that puts certain families in peril. Among poor Americans, Sawhill and Karpilow report, some households lack an employed member, a majority lack two earners, and a high proportion work very few hours even when the economy is operating at full employment.

In other words, we now have weak links in the chain of work that has long pulled Americans out of neediness and into success. Lori Sanders and Eli Lehrer of Washington’s R Street Institute observe that any sensible anti-poverty agenda today must begin with work—which presupposes employability, habits of courtesy, responsibility, punctuality, honesty, and so on. Research shows overwhelmingly that work is central to escaping poverty. This is true not only for the obvious reasons—the wages and benefits—but also for the role work plays in cultivating healthy lifestyles, helping individuals achieve self-respect, feel happier, set an example for younger generations. Government agencies have a very checkered history when it comes to helping people who have struggled with work develop the habits and talents to do better. Statistically, most government job-training programs are quite unimpressive. There are, however, many charitable programs that have demonstrated real success at leading unskilled persons, single mothers, inexperienced minorities, released prisoners, former addicts, and other at-risk populations into lasting, transformative employment.

This book was written to help donors find those successful models and strategies. It is addressed to generous American leaders who want to lift more of our poor and distressed into mainstream success. Its purpose is to point them to the most effective work-supporting charities and approaches and to encourage them to put their shoulders to the wheel. It will be followed up next year by a second guidebook focused on what donors can do to support vocational and technical education—a field that is sometimes neglected in the push for college degrees, though it may be the most effective way for many strugglers to step onto the ladder of upward mobility (especially since employers now struggle to fill many vocational trades).

Lack of opportunity and generational progress at the bottom of our socioeconomic pyramid are now matters of concern for many Americans. The best available antidote is to help those who are lagging become effective workers. Because—as determined philanthropists in many places and all sectors have discovered—work works when it comes to curing deprivation, softening inequality, and erasing unhappiness.

Adam Meyerson

President, The Philanthropy Roundtable

Karl Zinsmeister

Vice president, publications, The Philanthropy Roundtable

Jo Kwong

Director, Economic Opportunity Programs

Chapter 1: Why Work Matters

The U.S. is the richest nation in history. To see members of our society languishing in poverty, therefore, is distressing. Many of our official responses to low income, unfortunately, offer only short-term help—and even make problems worse in the long run. Government offers checks and food stamps. Philanthropy offers hot meals and shelters and donated goods. These efforts meet temporary needs. But they seldom lead to lasting improvements in the lives of strugglers, and short-term aid can become a trap.

What if we’re looking in the wrong place for cures to poverty? If we cast about us to learn what it is that banishes needs and fills wants for most people, the answer is obvious: Work. That is the poverty solution that happens all around us, every day. The purpose of this guidebook is to help charitable providers lead people who are currently living at the economic margins into mainstream success and happiness through work.

Of course, work is much more than just a mechanism for reducing poverty. Our religious traditions teach that work has intrinsic value. In the Hebrew account of creation, God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden and instructed him to work it and keep it. In the New Testament, Paul stated that if a man will not work, he will not eat. The Calvinist work ethic brought to our shores by the Puritans equated diligent work with duty to God.

More than any other nation on Earth, the United States has a rich tradition of insisting that hard work is ennobling. In our country—unlike others—even the most mundane occupations have been viewed as bringing honor to the laborer. And this has helped every succeeding generation of Americans enjoy a brighter economic future than the one before it.

The American experience with work stands counter to most of human history. For centuries, work was a compulsory drudgery, essential for survival but seldom leading to clear and lasting improvements in living conditions. In the dynamic American economy, work effort translated much more predictably and reliably into prosperity. Work brought tangible outcomes, often quickly, that could be savored, shared, and used to build a future for one’s family, community, and the nation as a whole.

These twin benefits of the American work ethic—material betterment and a sense of personal value—have sometimes been lost sight of in recent years and are no longer experienced by all of our citizens. Amid new ideas of entitlement and guaranteed outcomes, and expanded notions of retirement and disability, there are pockets where the virtues of work are no longer understood or appreciated, or where residents have become entangled in dribbling payment programs that make active employment almost impossible. Moreover, specific jobs used as stepping stones by many people in the past have disappeared due to technological change or economic globalism. There are spatial mismatches, skill gaps, and missing habits, attitudes, and experiences that separate workers from work.

Of the 27 million persons of working age (18-64) who fell below the poverty line in 2013, 16 million didn’t hold a job for even one week during the year. So simply going to work is the first step they (and their dependents) most need. Among the 10