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The other day I came to one of the 32 neighborhood food pantries supplied in part by the Hunger Network of Greater Cleveland. But I was looking for information, not food.
Here it is, mid-1999, with a high stock market, low unemployment, and good-looking national economic indicators. Low-wage employers are going crazy trying to hire and keep workers. Higher-skilled workers have their pick of good jobs.
"Why," I wanted to know, "are people poor?"
I was expecting to hear something about trickle-down, something about a loss of manufacturing jobs, and something about how you can lie with statistics. I was sure someone was going to tell me that those economic indicators are inapplicable, invalid, or wrong.
Not really, said Janet Thomas, who is Program Director at the Brookside Center on Pearl Road near Archwood Avenue. (That eponymous brook is a bit hard to find if you don't know the neighborhood really well.) While food distribution is way down from past years, indicating that many past clients have found their way up the income ladder, the real story is that places like Brookside continue to work with people whose problems go beyond not having a job.
Centers like Brookside are charged with assisting people living in a certain geographic area; when someone who can't prove residence within the service area (in this case Archwood-Denison, Old Brooklyn, and the city of Brooklyn) comes for help, they are referred to their home area's center. People who are homeless are also referred to agencies who are better equipped to help.
For this reason, we can't say that Brookside serves the people who have reached rock bottom. Those are homeless, incarcerated, or otherwise so dysfunctional that they can't even get themselves to the center. Brookside clients are struggling, but many receive SSI (Supplemental Security Income, part of the federal Social Security system) or TANF (Ohio's "Temporary Assistance for Needy Families", the limited-term program that used to be called AFDC) benefits, or perhaps work at a low-paid job, earning too much to qualify for those benefits. A day at Brookside isn't quite the same as handing out sandwiches and coffee at night on Public Square. Still, it offers some perspective.
Janet Thomas laid it out plainly:
The largest group of people we serve are on SSI, and many of those disabilities are mental. And they're not going to get better, or it will take them a long time. And there are still many single mothers or parents trying to raise their children with TANF. They're out of their marriages because there was abuse or domestic violence. There's a lot of reasons. People's lives are complicated. There are going to be people who struggle in crisis and need our help.
The food-distribution aspect of the Brookside Center has become less prominent since it moved to a big storefront office on Pearl Road. The move to the bigger building was required to host programs to build independence because, in the words of Janet Thomas, "we've got to be about more than a bag of food."
For the last five or six years, there have been fewer of those bags of food. The number of families who signed up to receive food has decreased from a high in the 700-800 range to a little under 500 now. "Those who could," said Janet Thomas, "got better with the economy.... The last Wednesday of the month we used to get 100 families a day. [Volunteers now] think they got a lot now if they have 35 families in one day." Still, the bags are a priority: "I'm glad for those people who don't need it anymore but we need to be there for those who still do!"
While they weren't loaded down with numbers and percentages, Janet Thomas's professional staff (two outreach workers and a special events coordinator) told me that a large number of clients are people who are having trouble with jobs or housing because of mental illness. Sometimes, not often, it's obvious that a client is off his or her medication--"acting out" in the form of cursing, intense irritability, hyperactivity, or just expressing intense anger for no obvious reason. More frequently, they find people who are stable but need ongoing medical and counseling care to function at all, and for whom regular self-supporting work is unlikely to happen in the near future. Fortunately for these clients, they are eligible for federal SSI benefits--and SSI has no time limits because it is intended to compensate for permanent disabilities.
Another major category of Brookside clients is what they call displaced homemakers. These are almost always women who have lost their family income due to divorce, escaping abuse, or a mate's drug abuse. These women frequently need counseling, help with child care, and job training. Mostly they are capable of earning a living but are tight on resources in the short term. Prospects for independence for these clients are a bit better.
When discussing the center's GED program, one staffer noted the difficulty of young unmarried mothers getting prepared for self-supporting work. It's a common image but largely true: girls who become pregnant while in high school do have a particularly tough struggle to become able to support a new family. One of the ongoing challenges of administering the GED program is encouraging students to keep attending classes and to continue making progress even with conflicting family or work commitments.
Recent welfare reform rule changes make this a bit tougher. Jackie, who runs the GED program, said, "Our students in GED are being told they have to work a total of thirty hours a week. Twenty hours of that can be a paid or volunteer position and ten of that can be GED.... I've had a lot of students that were here for two or three months, but then they said, 'Well I'm not getting any income, my child needs this and that,' they drop out. They don't get their GED because income becomes a priority. They're working, but for minimum wage. It's sad... but [current income] becomes a priority."
For some students it becomes more difficult with a learning disability that hadn't been identified while in school--something that might have led to their dropping out in the first place. Now pre-tests are done for new GED students, and those currently reading below about fifth-grade level are considered for extra targeted help.
Cathy said, "I would say that's one of the biggest predictors of future poverty. Having your first baby before you're out of high school."
The center also offers ESL (English as a Second Language) classes that are primarily used by students whose first language is Spanish. I'm not sure I've ever encountered a young person here who speaks only Spanish, but the bilingual outreach worker assured me that many newcomers from Puerto Rico did not learn English on the island and have to learn it here before becoming employable. Even light-assembly or day labor jobs require some proficiency in reading and understanding spoken English.
Hardly anyone these days comes to the Brookside Center for help just because jobs are difficult to find and keep. While the mid-80s were particularly tough for lesser-skilled working people, unemployment figures in Cleveland now are about as good as they've ever been.
At this point I should note that the statistical definition of "unemployment" changed around 1984, in a way that made the numbers look more optimistic: active-duty military members started to be counted as employed instead of not figured in at all. While the result might be a more accurate measure, it also caused trends to be obscured a little. Even so, almost everyone agrees that most Cleveland workers do not face a massive threat of immediate unemployment at the moment.
I had this nightmare before doing the interview: "People are going to read this and think I've gotten soft." So I thought a minute about my right-wing buddy Todd from college, and asked the questions he would ask. (I hope you're reading this, Todd!)
I asked Janet Thomas directly: Are there people who take advantage of Brookside's services because they're there? Are you creating dependency? She said, "Absolutely not. We know this because the people who use our services do not use all of our services. People can get three days of groceries every month but hardly ever do it twelve times a year, more like six times when they're struggling.... It's hard to ask for help. If they were trying to take advantage of the free food they would be coming twelve times a year, and they're not."
Other services, beyond food distribution, require at least as much effort from the client as from the center volunteers and staff. They don't appear to be tempting targets for freeloaders.
Okay, but didn't the unemployed and uneducated dig their own holes? Most people finish high school, get some kind of job training, and are able to support themselves... why are Brookside clients different?
This got a great reaction from everyone in the room. Janet Thomas put on her best preaching voice and said of those comfortably situated in the middle class, "That's not virtue. That's a condition."
Life is complicated. People get sick. Spouses bail out. Jobs move away. Birth control fails. Cheap apartments turn into parking lots. People with skills, resources, and some luck can adapt on their own. Others need support and services, either temporarily or permanently.
Since I don't like to advertise stuff here, I'll just say that if you like what Brookside is doing and want to help, you'll find them under "Brookside Center" in your Cleveland phone book. Don't even tell them I sent you.
(This article appeared late at night on 24 July 1999.)
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