Introduction
Over the past couple of decades, poverty prevention advocates have become aware that it takes more than just emergency services to alleviate poverty. While such sources of aid as rent assistance, food stamps, food bank provisions, utility assistance and the like can help a family subsist from one month to the next, they do not help families escape the poverty cycle and move up to a better standard of living. As Hutson (2004) noted, “social service providers have increasingly recognized that families seeking assistance often face multiple, complex needs and that they require the services of more than one program” (p. 1). In addition to food, clothing and shelter, families often need assistance with “helping move clients into jobs” as well as “substance, domestic violence, or mental health issues” (Hutson 2004, p. 1). In many instances, families have to shuttle from one organization to the next to find the complete suite of services that they need, not just to survive, but especially when it comes to bringing themselves and their children out of the poverty cycle. Because “the fragmentation and complexitymakes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for many families to obtain the services that they need,” (Hutson 2004, p. 2), agencies have emerged to provide a more complete suite of services so that families can receive most or all of the assistance they need from one organization, which is dedicated to helping them move out of poverty to an elevated standard of living.
Family Gateway is one of many agencies that have developed this multi-tiered service system in order to help families that are stuck in the poverty cycle. They are the only homeless shelter in the Dallas area that only serves families. They have a shelter in downtown Dallas, and to qualify, a family unit has to have one or two parents and at least one child. The shelter downtown is a six-story building that also contains classroom space, a cafeteria and programming space for children’s activities. For families that need a longer term approach, the organization also owns two small apartment complexes in east Dallas where families can move and stay for up to seven years, so long as the parent(s) are taking part in the organization’s adult learning services and the children (if necessary) are taking part in the organization’s tutoring programs. According to the Family Gateway website, the adult learning services include resume assistance, practice with job interviews, job search skills, time management, financial literacy, parenting education and self-care workshops (Family Gateway 2016). In cases where the programming staff finds it necessary, these classes can also lead to mental health support referrals. The organization also offers a suite of classes for children, but as this paper focuses on adult education classes, those programs are beyond the scope of this report.
The Key Stakeholders
At Family Gateway, there is a staff of four people who make the decisions for the adult education programs. Rosa Greenlee is the Director of Programs, and on her staff are Priscilla Torres (Family Services Manager), Anastasia Nixon (Education Manager), and Amanda Dycus (Permanent Supportive Housing Manager). Kathy Kidwell, the Director of Community Engagement, also collaborates with the group in some of their planning, and Ellen Magnis, the Executive Director, has final approval over all initiatives. I first reached out to Ms. Greenlee via email, and she agreed to talk to me over the telephone. I interviewed her to find out about how the adult educational programming works.
Family Gateway’s Adult Education Coursework
Family Gateway receives a great deal of their funding from individual contributions, but the majority of their funding comes from grants from private and public entities. An example of a private entity that funds their programs would be the Communities Foundation of Dallas, which focuses on efforts to help combat poverty in a variety of areas. In the case of Family Gateway, the Communities Foundation of Dallas has provided them with a grant that funds their classes that help people develop the skills they need to do well in writing a resume and succeeding in a job interview. The grant that Family Gateway is currently using for this lasts for three years and is renewable, and they use the funds to pay for the salary of Ms. Nixon (the Education Manager) and for all of the materials for their resume assistance classes and job interview assistance classes. This includes three computers with printers, which the participants in the program can use in order to write and edit their resumes. It also included the purchase of a multimedia projector which instructors can use for instructional support (R. Greenlee, personal communication, July 13, 2016). The organization also has received donations from a number of upscale resale clothing stores in the Dallas area, as well as from Dallas residents who have donated their clothing directly, so they have a wide variety of clothing available for their participants to wear to job interviews.
This introductory application skills class is just one of the courses that Family Gateway provides. Such job skills courses as basic computing skills (Microsoft Office being one of their most popular classes) and life management classes help families in a wide variety of areas. In order to remain in the homeless shelter past the first 30 days, family members must take part in the programming opportunities. If they do not, they have to leave and find other lodging for themselves and their families. The logic behind this is that Family Gateway is an organization that seeks to help people on multiple levels, and that there are numerous families in the Dallas area that could benefit from their services. They want to help people in as many different ways as possible, and so when they find people who are resistant to the programming, they sit down with them and show them the potential benefits of taking part in the program. In cases like this, these discussions remain positive, and they result in families deciding to take part in the program. In the 2015 calendar year, they only had to ask three families to leave because of a refusal to take part in programming (R. Greenlee, personal communication, July 13, 2016).
Evaluating Adult Education at Family Gateway
Not every adult who enters residence at Family Gateway needs to take the same courses. A family where the father is overcoming an alcohol addiction and the mother needs help with nutritional planning and basic child care will need a different suite of services than the family where the father has been long gone for a number of years and the mother did finish high school but never had the time or opportunity to take part in any college coursework because she had a child on her nineteenth birthday, and her mother required her to work full time in order to stay at home with her – but then her mother had a boyfriend move in who didn’t like the baby being loud, and so the young mother ended up out and on her own, with scant resources.
So an important initial step in this sort of social service planning is “a comprehensive assessment of the family’s needs in order to develop an appropriate service plan” (Hutson 2004, p. 3). In the case of Family Gateway, this includes an initial interview with the entire family as well as the individual adult(s) involved, and, when appropriate, the children separately as well. The purpose of this is to identify the strengths and growth areas for each family, to ensure that the services that Family Gateway provides are ones that the family actually needs.
One reason for the comprehensive assessment that is particularly important for the Family Gateway team is their desire to create a client approach for the families that they serve (R. Greenlee, personal communication, July 13, 2016). The rationale for this is that, in other service organizations, when an individual or family comes in for help, they often have to wait in long lines and then receive a check, a box of food, a bag of clothes, often from someone with a bit of a surly attitude. The waiting room is not all that clean or pleasant, and the overall experience (while helpful for the immediate needs of the recipient) is not one that will promote change and positivity. Instead, Family Gateway chooses the client model for their approach with the people that they serve. This includes making appointments for screenings (and not making people wait more than a few minutes for those appointments) and treating the residents as though the relationship is a professional one. This may sound semantic in nature, but research has shown that changing the terms of the relationship can elevate the standing of the people that Family Gateway serves and make them feel a greater sense of ownership in the program and in their own development (McLaughlin 2009).
How does this work philosophically? First of all, the necessity of applying for social services almost always involves experiences that degrade the applicant’s personal sense of self-worth. If you go into a kindergarten classroom and ask all of the kids what they want to do when they grow up, no one will say that they want to be unemployed or that they want to live off public assistance. Instead, they will say that they want to be things like a teacher, an astronaut, an artist, or a veterinarian – career paths that interest them. When you move from being that optimistic kindergartener to an adult with nowhere to live except a homeless shelter, that regression involves a series of blows to your self-esteem that can be difficult to overcome. So when you go into a social services agency, whether it is public or private, and you apply for assistance, the way that this process takes place can influence your potential for future progress in a very real way.
If you walk in and someone just hands you a clipboard, and you look around the lobby and see dozens of other people just sitting and waiting for services, and the whole mood of the room is dour, and you realize that you are going to have to sit there for a long time, that affects your self-esteem as well. Even when you know that assistance is coming, the demeanor of the clerks who help you and the fact that you have to wait so long for it can be draining. At Family Gateway, families can show up and receive assistance right away, but they move as quickly as possible to a professional footing, scheduling screening appointments and coming to the families and meeting with them. Treating the residents as clients gives the residents a sense of ownership, that they are at the shelter to receive services that will benefit them. However, the difference between a client and a beneficiary is that a beneficiary simply receives services, but there is no implicit expectation that the client is supposed to do anything with the services he receives that will benefit himself over the long term. When you are a client, you go to an interview preparation course, because you are going to take the information from that course so that you can perform well in the job interview and make a new life for yourself and your family. When you are a recipient, you go to the interview class and sit through it because if you do not go to the class, you will have to move out (R. Greenlee, personal communication, July 13, 2016). At Family Gateway, the leadership have decided that this distinction is important to maintain and that it makes a difference in the impression that their client-recipients have about the services – and about themselves.
When it comes to evaluating the outcomes of social services, Family Gateway has to provide a great deal of reporting to the funders who give them their grants each year, as part of the contractual agreement that goes with taking the money (and having the grants renewed, when applicable). This means that Family Gateway has to report on the number of families in which the adult(s) find jobs and are able to move into the long-term supportive housing that the program also provides. They report on how quickly new client-recipients are able to find employment, as well as on the number of courses that the client-recipients take part in beyond the required level. They also report on the families’ progress after they move into the supportive housing (the two apartment complexes), in terms of finding and retaining jobs as well as participation in community college courses, which Family Gateway does not fund directly but connects client-recipients to in conjunction with the Dallas County Community College District, which uses federal grants that they receive in order to provide free and reduced cost tuition and fees to those who qualify (R. Greenlee, personal communication, July 13, 2016).
Conclusion
Research has shown that simply relying on short-term forms of assistance does not help the long-term problems associated with generational poverty (Geen, Fender, Leos-Urbel & Markowitz 2001). Instead, a blending of short-term and long-term assistance programs has been seen as a more permanent way to help families leave the poverty cycle behind and move forward toward productive living (Ragan 2003). Blending short-term and long-term solutions does require a greater investment, not just in terms of dollars and time, but also in facilities. When it comes to public entities, there is often a lack of political will to put these sorts of infrastructures in place and to maintain them, but when private organizations such as Family Gateway are willing to invest in this sort of work, government entities will often fund them through grants, provided that the reporting is adequate. Adult education initiatives such as the ones that Family Gateway has instituted to help its client families are designed to help families leave the cycle of generational poverty behind. They are not effective with all families, but with an ongoing pattern of assessment and adjustment, the leadership at Family Gateway fine-tunes their processes and helps families leave the desperation of ongoing poverty behind, one family at a time.
References
Family Gateway (2016). Services. http://familygateway.org/programs/services/
Geen, R., Fender, L., Leos-Urbel, J., & Markowitz, T. (2001). Welfare reform’s effect on
child welfare caseloads. Washington, DC: Urban Institute. http://www.urban.rog/UploadedPDF/310095discussion01-04.pdf.
Greenlee, R. (2016, July 13). Personal interview.
Hutson, R. (2004). Providing comprehensive, integrated social services to vulnerable
children and families: Are there legal barriers at the federal level to moving forward? Center for Law and Social Policy. Paper written for the Cross-Systems Innovation Project of the National Governors Association, the Hudson Institute, and the Center for Law and Social Policy. http://www.clasp.org/resources-and-publications/files/0170.pdf
McLaughlin, H. (2009). What’s in a name: ‘Client’, ‘Patient’, ‘Customer’, ‘Consumer’,
‘Expert by Experience’, ‘Service User’ – what’s next? British Journal of Social Work 39 (6): 1101-1117.
Ragan, M. (2003). Building better human service systems: Integrating services for
income support and related programs. Albany, NY: The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.
