The Self-Sufficiency Agenda
                    Ed Schwartz, President
             Institute for the Study of Civic Values
                     
                      I. Pervasive Poverty

A central point that increasingly emerges from discussions of
Philadelphia's problems is that poverty lies at the heart of most
of them. As of the 1980 census, 20.6% of the population--340,517
people--was below the poverty line, including 69,192 of the City's
families. Poverty in the Black community was predictably higher,
encompassing 32.16% of the individuals (202,364 people), including
43,005 Black families. Contrast these Philadelphia statistics with
those for Pennsylvania as a whole, where only 10.46% of the
population--7.77% of the families--is poor, including
Philadelphia, and a fundamental tension between the City and the
State becomes quite clear.

Poverty shapes our quality of life, our economic prospects, and
the fiscal condition of our government. Those who complain about
the homeless lying on the streets of Center City are condemning
poverty in its most virulent strain. The developers and business
leaders who wonder whether secretaries and office managers will be
found for new Market Street office buildings are commenting on the
employability of the low-income residents who could most use the
jobs. A Philadelphia without poverty would not have to spend $14
million on homeless shelters, or $154.9 million on Human Services
aimed primarily at protecting low-income children from abuse, or
$210 million for a Health Department to maintain extensive
services for those who cannot afford private health care. A City
without poverty would not be facing a massive budget deficit and
and would not need to debate which City services are "basic" and
which ought to be financed by the State and federal government.

For the past two decades, local leaders have tried a variety of techniques
to rescue the City from the poor. The Rizzo regime's strategy in the
1970's was containment. "No neighborhoood will get anything that it
doesn't want"--a central Rizzo policy--spelled "no low-income housing
here" to the middle class, mostly white, neighborhoods of the City.
Opposition to affirmative action protected older workers from newcomers on
the job. Rizzo's prediction during his fight for a third successive term
that neighborhoods like Mayfair would "go down" as soon as he wasn't Mayor
gave the game away.

The kinder, gentler medicine of economic development replaced
containment as the City's primary strategy for the poor in the
1980's. A new convention center supporting a tourist economy would
create semi-skilled jobs in hotels and restaurants that even high
school dropouts could handle. The machinists and garment workers
of the past would become the office managers and secretaries of
the future. Health institutions would open new positions for
nurses and medical aides. What remained of manfacturing in the
City would be coaxed into inner City "enterprise zones,"
surrounded by low-income residential neighborhoods, while SEPTA
would provide bus service from the inner city to factories and
office complexes now ringing the City. Over time, the theory has
gone, a new economy will absorb this new generation of employees,
as the manufacturing economy of the 1940's and 1950's did in the
past.

Unfortunately, as the 1990's begin, the poor are still very much
with us, in perhaps even greater numbers than before. Containment
remains a potent weapon. As of 1980, over 70% of the City's low
income residents were living in low-income neighborhoods. One
doubts that the 1990 census will yield a radically different
statistic, except, perhaps, for the homeless people now inhabiting
the sidewalks of center city. The hospitality industry strategy
must now be tested in the 1990's, since the convention center took
a decade longer to build than was planned. The same goes for the
new center city office buildings. Whatever the poor have gained in
employment opportunity in the 80's they have lost in dramatic
cutbacks in federally funded job training programs. Moreover,
drugs have become a new harsh reality for the poor, placing
additional barriers between hope and accomplishment in improving
their condition.

Clearly, the indirect efforts to save the City from the poor have
not worked in the 1970's and 1980's. The situation cries out for a
head-on confrontation with the problem in the 1990's.

            II. The Self-Sufficiency Goal

It is safe to say that the City's economic development agenda
drove public policy in the 1980's. From Gallery II, to the opening
of the Center City tunnel, to the Convention Center, to Liberty
Place, to Penn's Landing, to inner-City Enterprise Zones, building
a new economy was the singular foundation upon which
Philadelphia's recovery was said to depend. These projects have
been deemed crucial to the City's long-range viability. It is
self-evident that without jobs to support the population, the City
cannot hope to raise the revenues needed to preserve other aspects
of community life.

By now, however, we are beginning to see that new jobs will do us
little good as a City if the unemployed residents of the City are
not qualified to hold them. This is the tragic reality confronting
Philadelphia today. In 1992, between the two office towers on the
1900 block of Market Street, there will be 20,000 jobs. Of these,
5,000 will be new jobs. Even though Market Street is a subway ride
away from most North and West Philadelphia low-income
neighborhoods, most of the residents will not be employable here.
Indeed, we are likely to have jobs, jobs everywhere, but not the
people to fill them, as is happening in Philadelphia's suburban
office complexes.

Thus, the economic development projects of the 1980's have placed
the need for a trained workforce at the top of the City's economic
development agenda for the 1990's. Even developers who were
content to boast of the "trickle down" benefits of development a
few years ago are now acknowledging that extensive literacy and
job training is essential to the process. Gradually, the human
needs of the poor and the economic needs of the City's business
community are coming together.

The growing crisis gives us an opportunity to establish a new goal
for the next several years: total self-sufficiency for the low
income residents of the City. I am using the term "self-
sufficiency" here to mean that an individual has a job that pays
enough to meet his or her basic needs and the needs of a family
for food, clothing, and shelter. As the economic system supports
more people in meeting their basic needs, the federal, state, and
local government will no longer face this responsibility. Today's
welfare rececipients will become tomorrow's taxpayers, and the
expanded tax base can subsidize improved City services without tax
increases. This process is, in fact, what the apostles of economic
development have had in mind for the City all along.

The conclusion is inescapable: the City of Philadelphia needs to
set as a basic goal the reduction of poverty by at least 1/3--at
least 100,000 people--by the year 2000. Such a goal will mean a
concentrated effort to employ City residents in jobs created as a
result of public investment in economic development. It will
require reinvigorated job readiness and training programs for
those who cannot naturally make it in the limited period allotted
to the training programs allotted to the Private Industry Council
under the Jobs Training Partnership Act. It will mean that low-
income residents seeking other benefits --home repair loans, City
health services, homeless shelters--all will be directed to
programs that aim at empowering them to escape poverty altogether.
Unlike many of the development projects themselves, there will be
no huge building around which to celebrate this project. There
will merely be the steady improvement in our quality of life, in
the capacity of our workforce, and in the viability of our
government to meet our shared needs.

The major focus of a self-sufficiency agenda must be job training
and placement. The Private Industry Council (PIC) has done a commendable
job in placing over 17,000 area residents, 52% of them welfare recipients,
in full-time jobs with average salaries of $12,000-$15,000 over the past
four years. Yet leaders in the PIC admit that federal pressure to achieve
high placement rates in a short period has forced the agency to seek out
those low-income residents whose work attitudes are strong, and who
therefore need only skills training to enter the labor market. The
sizeable portion of the population that needs counseling, and perhaps
basic literacy training, for the most part has been unable to compete
here. A serious job training strategy for the 1990's must find a way to
reach this population.

The housing and social service agencies that work with low-income
residents must contribute by accompanying benefits (housing,
health care) with counseling aimed at strengthening self-
sufficiency and civic competence. Housing counseling has been an
understated part of the City's efforts to provide home ownership
and rental opportunities for low income residents and their
families. Such counseling must become a recognized and accepted
aspect of all housing programs. Low-income residents must receive
at least as much help in preventative medicine as middle class
health care recipients are now demanding. The fledgling literacy
centers that the Goode administration has helped established must
grow in number and effectiveness throughout the decade. All of
these efforts, in turn, must connect to the broader vision of
opportunity and self-sufficiency for those who have yet to achieve
it.

Finally, all programs working with young people must join with the
school district to ensure that the children of poverty today
escape poverty tomorrow. There are strong grounds to provide Aid
to Families for Dependent Children, related to a child's need for
parental support. Yet this object is achieved only when the
dependent child becomes a productive adult. Multi-generational
poverty does not reflect the intent of the welfare system, it is
an expression of the failure of this system. The goal always has
been to preserve a family life for a child in the interests of his
or her development.

These three basic projects--job training; community education; and
family counseling--are the major components of a self-sufficiency
agenda that has a chance to succeed. Over time, additional funding
will be essential to pursue such a strategy on a large scale, just
as millions of public dollars have been needed to produce Gallery
I and II, the Center City Rail Connection, Penn's Landing, and a
new Convention Center. Like these physical developments for an
economic recovery, funds for a self-sufficiency agenda must be
seen as an investment, with strong returns in reduced welfare
payments and an expanded tax base more than justifying the
additional outlays.

Yet before legislators can be persuaded to support such an
undertaking, we need to establish public systems to implement and
track a self-sufficiency agenda and set reasonable goals for their
operation. Once such systems demonstrate success, then it will be
possible to raise additional funds to support them.

In short, a Self-Sufficiency Agenda must build upon the strengths
of the self-sufficiency programs that are operating now. We must
integrate these individual efforts into a New Oppportunities
System that can promote self-sufficiency on a broader scale.
Finally, we must develop the mechanisms to translate the obvious
personal and social benefits of self-sufficiency into economic and
fiscal benefits, so that skeptical public officials and the
general public can see such programs as an investment, and not
just what they perceive to be a bottomless pit of welfare.

          III. Self-Sufficiency Programs Now

Given that promoting opportunity and self-sufficiency for the
City's poorest residents has been an ongoing goal of the Goode
administration, there are a number of specific programs already in
place. These need to be integrated into a larger system for
greater visibility and effectiveness. Nonetheless, there is at
least something to integrate. The Private Industry Council's Job
Training System provides a foundation for the job training
initiatives. Programs like Self-Sufficiency program of the Mayor's
Office of Community Services and Dignity Housing's work with the
homeless provide models for community-based counseling. The Step-
Up program at Community College demonstrates how a college setting
can become the vehicle for self-sufficiency among Aid to Families
with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients who were unable to
succeed in high school. Each of these programs offers hope that a
broader self-sufficiency agenda can succeed.

For all the charges that it has been a "creaming" agency, the
Private Industry Council (PIC) has achieved remarkable results
over the past five years. The overall placement is impressive
enough: 17,767 in full-time jobs since July 1, 1985. The profile
of those who have been placed makes the statistic all the more
significant:

     * 96% were low income.

     * 55% were adult welfare recipients.

     * 59% were not high school graduates.

     * 62% tested below 7th Grade levels.

The cost per trainee has been reduced from $8,000 per trainee in
1985 to $4,000 per trainee in 1990, for jobs with salaries ranging
from $12,000 to $15,000 per year on the average. Indeed, 2,532
PIC graduates have found employment with companies assisted by the
Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) through the
Community Development Block Grant. This relationship between PIDC
and the PIC provides the most direct evidence of the benefits to
low-income individuals of the CDBG investment in businesses that
we have been able to assemble.

The PIC's success has reflected a relentless attention to results
and efficiency. At the heart of the system is a performance-based
contract that requires a 70% placement rate or termination. The
leadership of the PIC has stuck to this principle even in the face
of strong criticism that it has excluded people in greatest need
of help. While acknowledging that sustained training will be
necessary to reach applicants with serious educational and skills
deficiencies, PIC Director David Lacey has argued that a limited
4-month training period is dictated by the Job Training
Partnership Act that established the PIC. He further insists that
a strong record of placement has been needed to win the confidence
of private employers. There is strong evidence for this
proposition. As a result of the PIC's work over the past five
years, there are now more than 1,500 employers in Philadelphia
and the surrounding four suburban Pennsylvania Counties that will
hire "graduates" from PIC training programs--as opposed to only
400 employers in 1985.

This is a strong foundation upon which training and self-
sufficiency programs can build in the future.

In 1988, the National Alliance of Business named the Philadelphia
PIC as the Outstanding PIC in the United States. It is an award
that deserves greater recognition within Philadelphia itself.

 
Beyond the broad-based, short term training programs coordinated by the
PIC, there are also at least two seminal programs working to achieve
self-sufficiency for low-income residents that cannot now succeed within
the PIC system. The Mayor's Office of Community Services' (MOCS) Partners
in Self-Sufficiency program is the major City initiative here. Between
January, 1988 and October, 1989, 136 households received broad case
management services, including life skills counseling, job training, and
support in securing permanent housing. 46 found full-time employment
through the program, while 79 received Section 8 Certificates for
permanent housing. The participants here have been public assistance
families with problems that could not be solved through mere job training.
Along the same lines, the City has given support to the efforts of the
Committee for Dignity and Fairness to the Homeless. Dignity has achieved
its greatest recognition for its efforts to find permanent housing for the
homeless, but housing is only part of what they provide. Their main goal
is to bring a homeless person from the streets to self-sufficiency, a
process which they contend takes between three to seven years.

Finally, the Step-Up program at Community College is showing how to
promote self-sufficiency among welfare recipients who would not ordinarily
be able even to dream of attending college. Here again without fanfare,
700 AFDC recipients are now enrolled in a five-year program subsidized by
the State Departments of Welfare and Education and Community College
itself. Under Step-Up, participants attend college classes, receive career
counselling, and work with College staff to find jobs. The Philadelphia
County Board of Assistance provides funds for child care, transportation,
and related needs. Community College provides financial aid for tuition.
This financial backing frees the Step-Up staff to concentrate its efforts
on helping the recipients achieve their personal and educational goals.
Beyond its importance as a self-sufficiency program conducted by an
educational institution, Step-Up also stands out as a major example of
partnership between the City and State in this area.

The Private Industry Council, the Mayor's Office of Community
Services, Dignity Housing, and Step-Up are demonstrating that
self-sufficiency programs can work. The PIC placement record of
over 17,000 people in five years, 9,000 of them welfare
recipients, is powerful evidence by itself. There are thousands of
low-income residents of Philadelphia who are prepared to improve
their condition if the opportunities are provided.

Yet if the goal of self-sufficiency is to become a major priority,
we must move to an integrated system with broad public visibility
and appeal. The existing programs provide the foundation for such
a system, along with the various agencies with primary
responsibility for providing services to the poor. Yet a New
Opportunities Program for self-sufficiency must become a whole
that will eclipse the sum of its parts.

         IV. Towards a New Opportunities Program

For the past 18 months, OHCD has brought together representatives
from the City's agencies serving the poor for monthly meetings to
lay groundwork for a New Opportunities Program that would promote
self-sufficiency. Included in this working group have been
representatives from the Private Industry Council, the Mayor's
Office of Community Services, Step-Up, the Mayor's Office of
Services to Homeless and Adults (OSHA), the Philadelphia Housing
Development Corporation (PHDC), the Philadelphia Housing Authority
(PHA), the Department of Human Services (DHS), and the Health
Department's Coordinating Office for Drug and Alcohol and Abuse
Programs (CODAPP). The group focused considerable attention on
strengthening existing relationships among the participating
agencies. These short-term interagency projects, in turn,
provided insight into how an integrated New Opportunities Program
might be structured and what such a program would do.

The New Opportunities Program working group already has brought about
increased cooperation among the agencies themselves. Thus, the
Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation (PHDC) now refers employable
applicants for houses under its sweat equity programs to job training
referral centers. Alternatively, OHCD and PHDC have provided extensive
information to the PIC and Step-Up staffs concerning the Homestart home
ownership program, while giving special attention to graduates of job
training programs in our selection of applicants for Homestart houses.
While these gestures have been modest, such cooperation is bound to grow
in the future. Moreover, as a result of the working group meetings, the
Commonwealth of Pa.'s Department of Labor and Industry is authorizing PHDC
to establish its own Jobs Center, as part of the Commonwealth's "one-stop
shopping" Job Center program in the City. PHDC thus becomes the first
agency to receive authorization for a Job Center beyond the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania's own centers in Philadelphia. The PHDC center will permit
the coordination of housing and job opportunity placements within PHDC
itself.

These initial steps have demonstrated that interagency cooperation
has to operate at every level if a New Opportunities Program is to
succeed. The leadership of City, State, and the major private
anti-poverty agencies must meet regularly. Participants in
individual self-sufficiency programs, in turn, need to see
themselves as part of a larger group receiving support from a
number of City agencies, just as young people taking part in the
Summer Jobs for Youth program now identify with the City-wide
program as well as their own workplace assignment. Most important,
a New Opportunities Program must contribute to staff development
in the participating agencies, helping those who work in anti-
poverty programs and organizations learn about self-sufficiency
resources available throughout the system.

One clear step will advance this process considerably: the Mayor should
appoint a New Opportunities Council to oversee the development of
self-sufficiency programs throughout the government. Such a Council would
parallel the Mayor's Development Council, which has served to foster
interagency cooperation on matters effecting economic and community
development. A New Opportunities Council would perform the same role in
relation to the various anti-poverty efforts scattered throughout the
government. Such a Council should include at least representatives from
the Office of Housing and Community Development, the Managing Director's
Office, the Commerce Department, the Mayor's Office of Community Services,
the Private Industry Couuncil, the Philadelphia Industrial Development
Corporation, Step-Up, the Mayor's Commission on Literacy, the Mayor's
Latino Commission, the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation, the
Philadelphia Housing Authority, the Philadelphia Office of Services to the
Homeless and Adults, the Department of Human Services, the Health
Department, and the School District. It should meet monthly to review
interagency efforts to coordinate self-sufficiency programs and to make
policy recommendations to the Mayor in this area. It should aim at giving
broad visibility to the self-sufficiency agenda in the City as a whole.

The first major undertaking of a New Opportunities Council should
be the identification of a New Opportunities Corps, comprised of
participants in existing self-sufficiency projects. We have
identified some of the major programs here: the Mayor's Office of
Community Services's Partners in Self-Sufficiency progam, Dignity
Housing, Step-Up. There are doubtless others. Among them there
must be at least 1,000 low income residents who could become the
first interagency New Opportunities Corps, to be supported by all
agencies cooperating with the New Opportunities Program. Such
support could take many forms. Housing counselors working under
the auspices of OHCD and PHDC would encourage participants in home
ownership and rental housing programs to take advantage of job
training opportunities. Job training enrollees could be given
priority for home ownership in City housing programs, all other
qualifications being equal. Most important, the New Opportunities
Council could itself sponsor workshops and conferences for program
participants, exposing them to educational and employment
opportunities throughout the system. Within a short time, becoming
part of Philadelphia's interagency New Opportunities Corps should
become a major objective of low-income residents throughout the
City.

Finally, the New Opportunities Council can promote interagency
staff development. Beyond their practical utility, the OHCD
meetings served to focus the collective attention of the leaders
of the City's anti-poverty efforts on the problems associated with
breaking the cycle of dependency. Discussions were powerful,
building upon the insights that each participant had gained from
his or her area of concern. If a New Opportunities Council merely
created settings for the staffs of the various agencies to learn
from each other in this way, it would be making an enormous
contribution. In the process, moreover, it would be reinforcing
relationships between the agencies that would serve to strengthen
each of them.

A New Opportunities Program, then, can emerge from a New
Opportunities Council established under the Mayor's Office. Such a
Council can define the annual goals of the program, identify
participants in agency-wide New Opportunities Corps, and encourage
the staffs of the respective agencies to cooperate with one
another. The Development Council played a crucial role in
integrating the disparate economic development projects of the
1980's. A New Opportunities Council can play the same role in
relation to the self-sufficiency projects of the 1990's.

         V. Self-Sufficiency as a Fiscal Strategy

During its first year of operation, the New Opportunities Program
should seek no funding beyond the job training, housing, and
social service support that the City is presently seeking from the
State and federal governments. The initial goals must be to
establish objectives, identify participants, and create vehicles
for interagency cooperation. The program should also be focusing
public attention on the City's self-sufficiency efforts, giving
greater visibility to job placements by the PIC or graduations
from programs like Step-Up than these presently receive. The City
first needs to create a functioning New Opportunities Program
before it can demand additional funding for it.

Yet the fiscal logic of a self-sufficiency program ought to become
the City's fiscal logic in advocating additional support for human
services now. By helping families escape from poverty, we are
ultimately working to save public dollars, especially for the
State. Nor has this logic been lost on the Casey administration.
Indeed, the support provided the Step-Up program by the Department
of Welfare and the Job Centers created by the Department of Labor
and Industry is part of an expanding State commitment to self-
sufficiency. We need to link our local self-sufficiency efforts to
this process, as part of a cooperative effort to reduce the City's
dependence on the State. To engage this argument involves an
understanding of Commonwealth welfare spending in the City that is
rarely discussed.

Beyond funds that come directly to City government, the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania spends $1.2 Billion in welfare benefits to low-income
individuals within the City. In FY 88, Aid to Families with Dependent
Children spent $389,491,998 to serve a monthly average of 260,098 welfare
mothers and their children. General assistance added up to an additional
$100,485,821, supporting 55,163 individual men and women. Overall, 392,800
people received benefits from one or more of the income maintenance,
medical aid, or food assistance programs that the Commonwealth now
administers. Since these funds go directly to individuals, they are rarely
mentioned in debates over the Commonwealth's investment in the City. Yet
$1.2 Billion in welfare payments is unquestionably on the minds of
non-City legislators as they contemplate additional aid to Philadelphia,
so perhaps it is time to confront this problem directly.

Our point should be simple: by organizing our entire system of
assistance to low income individuals and families around self-
sufficiency, we are ultimately working to reduce the City's
welfare burden on the Commonwealth. Indeed, the Philadelphia
County Board of Assistance makes this case in its own behalf. Its
1988 Annual Report boasts of reducing cash assistance cases by
3,771 during the year, thereby reducing the number of individuals
receiving benefits by 8,474. At an average payment of $1,474 per
person ($389,491,998 divided by 260,098 people), this amounted to
a savings of $12,690,001, with the barest minimum in cooperation
between the City and the State on the project. Imagine how much
the Commonwealth would save if we were working together on a broad
scale, with coordinated job training, social service, and housing
investments all aimed at turning welfare recipients into
taxpayers. I would suggest that advancing this line of argument
would have far greater power than the case that we have made for
additional funding from the Commonwealth thus far. Yet to make the
case, we need a New Opportunities Program to back it up.

Clearly, while the major rationale behind a New Opportunities Program
should reflect our effort to improve the quality of people's lives, such a
program will yield fiscal benefits as well. Advocates of economic
development in the 1970's and 80's brought forth an arsenal of statistics
to prove that public spending on their projects would yield vast returns
in the wage and real estate taxes generated by an expanding economy. The
case for a new convention center has rested largely on this foundation.
The fiscal case for a Self-Sufficiency Agenda is at least as compelling.
For each welfare recipient who finds work, there is one less case, one
more contributor. We can count the cases. We can add up the contributions.
The process would represent a fiscal revolution.


           VI. The Self-Sufficiency Agenda

The Self-Sufficiency Agenda for the 1990's ought to be clear: to
reduce the number of individuals in poverty in Philadelphia by
100,000 by the Year 2000. The vehicle for this Agenda should be a
New Opportunities Program, led by a New Opportunities Council
under the Mayor's Office. The New Opportunities Program can create
a New Opportunities Corps, involving participants in all City
programs aimed at achieving self-sufficiency for the poor. The New
Opportunities Council can also help the staffs of distinct anti-
poverty agencies support each other. It can focus public attention
on the progress made by the City in achieving its goal. The
accomplishments of agencies like the Private Industry Council and
programs like Step-Up, now largely unrecognized, will be amplified
by being part of a much larger self-sufficiency project than has
ever been tackled in Philadelphia before. We will fight for new
funds for the poor as an investment, not as more public charity.
Even if it succeeds only in part, such a program will keep hope
alive for thousands of low-residents and their families. Such a
program will be a tremendous source of pride for us all.
.