“What’s going on?” she asks pointedly. Several of the women exchange looks. “Nothing,” one woman says in a sullen voice. TLC’s case managers, Lisa Wright and Phyllis Green, listen silently as Burks probes, urging the women to speak up. Soon the resentment comes pouring out: the unrelenting pressure to obey the rules is oppressive, the caseworkers are riding them too hard. The mood turns defiant. Some women admit they’ve been smoking pot, which violates the behavior contracts they signed when they entered TLC. “I’m bored, I’m lonely, I got four kids!” one woman shouts. “So kick me out! I don’t care!” Another grouses: “Lisa and Phyllis are putting too much control on us!”
Two women admit they’ve been shoplifting clothes. Another says she hosted wild parties. “I ain’t perfect,” someone says. “I got so much s–t in my life.” Green confronts the group. “If there’s this many secrets, there have to be more,” she says, prodding them. Sure enough, one woman accuses another of prostitution.
Wright and Green try to ease the tensions. Without conceding an inch to the mutineers’ complaints, they contrive to end the meeting on a positive note. “You’re all doing a lot of wonderful new things,” Wright tells them. “But we want to see more!” The next day, after a talk with Mary Evans, the founder and director of TLC, the managers decide not to throw any of the rebels out. Instead, they’ll crack down even harder. “Phyllis,” Wright says with a tight smile, “we got to get us a big can of whup-a–.”
Nobody got whupped, of course–but in the world after welfare, getting a boot in the rear can be the first step toward getting a life. Nationwide, the welfare caseload has dropped by 44 percent since 1996, from 4.3 million families to 2.4 million families. The obvious questions are how these millions of former welfare clients are adjusting to life off the dole, and what, if anything, society should do to make the transition successful. In Wisconsin, where welfare reform started more than a decade ago, experience suggests that teaching the poor how to take charge of their lives is a hands-on, time-consuming job. Follow-up studies indicate that about two thirds of those who leave public assistance in Wisconsin have part-time or full-time jobs a year later. But the rest are going nowhere. The most distressed families are single women with children, whose lives are made chaotic by overlapping personal problems–lack of education, lack of job skills, lack of confidence that things can change for the better. Some abuse alcohol and drugs, some have psychological problems and almost all have histories of destructive romances with irresponsible men. Many have been intermittently homeless for years.
These toughest cases are the women Mary Evans aimed to help when she founded the TLC in 1999. Because she runs a homeless shelter called the Family Crisis Center, Evans was well aware that some families were cycling through her shelter over and over again. She got a three-year, $1.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, then lined up 15 apartments for her experiment. The idea was to select families from the homeless shelter, move them into the apartments and give them 12 months of intensive and demanding help. (All the families include children and a few include fathers.) Once they’ve signed a contract agreeing to permit unannounced inspections, keep friends or relatives from moving in and avoid illegal behavior, the families get free housing, new furniture, psychological counseling, schooling, job training, help for their kids, even a grandmotherly “family friend” who drops by several hours each week to help build parenting and homemaking skills. In return, families agree to give case managers Wright and Green 30 percent of their income–from state aid or employment–every month. At the end of a year, Evans returns the money so each family can afford an apartment outside TLC.
What can be hardest for young parents to accept is having Wright and Green in their faces, coaching and cajoling them to stand on their own. When three of the women complained that Wright was pushing them too hard, she set them straight. “I let them attack me–and then I let them have it,” she says. “I told them, ‘You need to be more serious about your futures and about your kids’ futures. You need to get GEDs and get jobs. This isn’t a free ride’.”
Mary Evans is a gentle and soft-spoken woman, but she doesn’t apologize for her case managers’ strong tactics. “Our clients come from families who spent generations on AFDC,” she says, referring to the old federal welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. “They don’t have skills, or educations, or values of working hard, because their own parents couldn’t teach them.”
Shannon Tate, 28, pitched up at the homeless shelter last fall. She’d been living with the family of a man who fathered five of her eight children. Tate even has his nickname, Sexy Dave, tattooed on her forearm. But Sexy Dave’s family, she claims, got too much of the $700 in food stamps she received every month. “I was like a bag in the street,” says Tate. “They were taking everything.” Finally she rebelled and moved to the shelter. Living with her kids in a tiny room at the old monastery was a strain. But Wright and Green, whose offices are down the hall, noticed that Tate put her brood to bed early every night, then ironed their school clothes and neatly laid out their underwear.
Tate’s sense of order amid chaos impressed the two case managers, and they offered her a spot in TLC. They moved the family three miles southwest to a clean, three-bedroom apartment at a complex called Johnson Square. To Tate, Johnson Square looked like heaven. “I took pictures of my place and sent them to my mom in Chicago,” she says. “I’m livin’ large.”
Angered by Tate’s steps toward independence, Sexy Dave tried to get her back. One day Wright dropped by and found him sitting on Tate’s couch in his boxer shorts, looking as if he’d moved in. That would violate the contract Tate signed, and Wright guessed that his motive was to get Tate evicted. Wright plopped down beside Dave for a friendly chat. “I talked a lot,” she says. “I embarrassed him.” Sexy Dave left soon. “I broke free of that ball and chain,” Tate says. “He calls now and I give him the dial tone quick.”
Tate recently finished schooling to become a certified nursing assistant. She got a 95 on her final exam and hopes to land a good job soon. She’s set a new goal of becoming a licensed practical nurse. But Wright still watches Tate’s every move and says she won’t be satisfied until Tate has “RN” behind her name. “See this?” she says, doing a little half-kick with her right foot. “I’m keeping my 8is right on Shannon’s butt.”
For other women, opportunity and encouragement aren’t enough. They have to undo bad choices they’ve made before arriving at the center. Teyona Thompson, 22, lived in a TLC apartment for four months before she confided to Green that she’d violated a court order back in Michigan by spiriting her two daughters away from their father. That broke the rules, and it meant Thompson had to leave Johnson Square and TLC. Wright and Green showed up at Thompson’s apartment to pack her up and move her out. Thompson was stunned and furious. “You told me to be honest with you!” she stormed. “And now you’re kicking me out!”
A few weeks later Wright heard that Thompson had resolved her legal problems in Michigan and was back in Milwaukee. The case manager hunted her down and offered her a second chance in TLC. In May, Thompson moved back to Johnson Square. She’s finishing her GED. She wants to learn to write software and hopes to own a day-care center.
Keeping tabs on the program’s clients is a full-time job–and it can be endlessly frustrating for the two case managers. Consider Sheri Totton, a 29-year-old mother of three daughters. When Totton first told NEWSWEEK her story in the spring of 1999, she was marooned in the homeless shelter. She quit high school before her senior year to have a baby and survived on welfare for eight years. She’d recently been evicted for not paying rent, lived briefly with her mother, then came to the shelter with her kids, blaming everyone but herself for her predicament.
Evans somehow saw a spark of promise. She moved Totton into TLC in June of 1999–and for a year got little in return. Totton didn’t complete her GED, didn’t take courses to learn new skills, didn’t come to counseling sessions and didn’t save much money. Green came to view her as “the excuse machine.” Totton did get a part-time job as a cashier at a Target store–but she also lost her family’s food stamps because she failed to show up for a routine appointment. As her year in TLC neared an end, Totton still hadn’t found a place of her own. Evans extended her for another month.
With just 15 days left, Totton had no idea where she and her kids were going to live. “I’m not a very strong-willed person,” she said. “I don’t complete anything.” Green pushed her to take responsibility for herself and her family. But Green was frustrated; too many of her attempts to help Totton had been rebuffed. The one encouraging sign was that Totton wasn’t blaming Green.
Finally, Totton responded to Green’s prodding. With just two days left in her extended stay with TLC, Totton got approval to rent an apartment on her own at Johnson Square. A friend agreed to cosign her lease and she started working full time to pay the rent. “It’s a gigantic step for Sheri,” Green said. If Totton could get her act together, Green thought, there was hope for other families who had fallen through the cracks.
Of nine families that have finished TLC so far, eight now live independently in apartments they can afford to rent. Three more families will complete the program next month. Those are important successes for families who’ve been in and out of countless programs that didn’t change their lives. Mary Evans is sure enough of her track record that she’s renting 15 additional apartments. She needs another $2 million to rehab the old homeless shelter and erect her own apartment building next door for TLC families. But if she and her caseworkers can pull the most difficult cases out of poverty–something welfare reform hasn’t been able to do–that would be a bargain.
