Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs by Martha Shirk

Author:Martha Shirk [MARTHA SHIRK AND ANNA S. WADIA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

From Welfare to Self-Sufficiency

As a member of the vanguard of former welfare recipients who have sought financial self-sufficiency through self-employment, America is clearly a success story. A year and a half after leaving welfare, she was supporting her family without any income assistance or food stamps, and with only a modest housing subsidy (she’s paying $611 in rent, up from $90 when she first moved in).

In fact, America and the other former welfare recipients who have graduated from Acre’s training program are doing much better, as a group, than the typical former welfare recipient in Massachusetts. According to a study by the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance, just over one in ten respondents to a survey of former welfare recipients had participated in a training program. Only half of all respondents had a job a year after leaving welfare, despite the fact that Massachusetts was experiencing the lowest unemployment rate in a decade. Of these, only half were earning more than $250 a week.

Elsewhere in the United States, many other organizations have had difficulty helping welfare recipients become self-supporting through microenterprise alone. The Self-Employment Learning Project (SELP), the definitive study of the impact over five years of microenterprise programs on low-income people, concluded in a 1999 report that for former welfare recipients, microenterprise serves mainly as a crucial supplemental income, “possibly being the ‘patch’ that brings a household out of poverty.”

In that context, Acre’s record is exemplary. Of the fifty-nine providers Acre trained between 1996 and 1999, forty-one (or 70 percent) had been welfare recipients. Of these, twenty-one are still running child-care businesses full-time through the Acre network and two are employed at Head Start centers. More than half have been at their jobs for three or more years. Acre’s record in assisting low-income women to succeed as entrepreneurs earned it one of sixty-five Vision 2000 Model of Excellence awards from the U.S. Small Business Administration in November 1999.

Anita Moeller thinks that the Acre providers who were once welfare recipients have been able to succeed in self-employment partly because of the extensive support that Acre provides. “One year, the state put a lot of money into training welfare recipients to be child care providers and it was a huge flop, except for our program and one other in Springfield,” she says. “In my opinion, it’s because they didn’t focus on hooking providers into a system. The providers got no support after they finished the training.”

In contrast, she notes, Acre’s providers “can call us at any time with concerns or questions. They get one-on-one technical assistance during the monthly visits by our staff. We have a bilingual social worker on retainer who can come out and observe a specific child. And we have monthly meetings of all the providers on topics that they want information on—taxes, record keeping, marketing, curriculum development. Once you’ve finished our training, that’s really only the beginning.”

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