Plan Would Give Welfare Recipients a Lift--to Work

Citing transportation as one of the largest barriers to getting welfare recipients off public assistance, county Supervisors John K. Flynn and Kathy Long are hoping a nationwide wave of volunteerism will help provide an answer.

The two supervisors on Tuesday will ask their colleagues on the Board of Supervisors to help enlist church, community organization and service club volunteers to drive welfare recipients to work.

“It’s not just another government program,” Flynn said Friday. “Welfare reform is a community program. It absolutely has to be.”

The idea comes as state lawmakers work to craft a state law implementing a welfare reform measure approved by Congress and President Clinton last year.

The sweeping measure eliminated the nation’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children program and replaced it with annual lump sum payments to states, which can then administer their own programs. The federal law requires that adults get jobs within two years.

Indeed, Flynn and Long said in a letter to the board that the best welfare reform program is a good job.

But volunteers can play a key role in helping welfare recipients regularly get to jobs on time, they said. Volunteers might also become mentors to their passengers, providing moral support and personal guidance, they said.

“What we have in this county is a very strong network of volunteers, and we’re asking them to help us be creative,” Long said Friday. “It’s a natural. I think we do have organizations and people out there who, if tapped . . . can help this population.”

Many welfare recipients who do have cars can’t depend on them, Flynn said. And bus systems in the county don’t always run early enough or late enough in the day to serve those who work odd hours.

Leana Wright of Oxnard knows that all too well.

She spent three years on the welfare rolls before finding a job at a home for the mentally disabled four months ago.

“I was tired of living on welfare,” the 32-year-old said. “It doesn’t get you anywhere.”

But the $5.50-an-hour job the single mother of two found often requires split shifts that start early in the morning and end late at night.

With no car, she was forced to walk four miles in order to get to work by 6 a.m.

She has a bicycle now. And she has moved with her children and her mother, who provides the child care Wright could not otherwise afford, into a residential motel two miles closer to her job.

Wright would gladly take advantage of a volunteer ride program and would even be willing to pay what she could to defray gasoline costs, she said.

“I’m going to make it,” she said. “I’m not letting the system beat me.”

Flynn believes such a program would have to be organized by a paid coordinator. Without some answer to the transportation problems many welfare recipients face, Flynn said, “I don’t see welfare reform working.”