In July 1996, “welfare” was declared dead in North Carolina, and “Work First” was born. The mandate followed national welfare reform: economic assistance was not an entitlement for needy families as it had been for more than 30 years. Counties would spend public-assistance money to help families go to work.

To achieve these goals, North Carolina requires each county to develop a plan for moving families into work. Counties get limited flexibility in how they implement their plans and spend their public assistance money, though each county must provide basic services such as child care. And money must be spent on families whose income is 200 percent of the poverty level or less and who have children under the age of 18. With this autonomy comes responsibility for meeting goals such as having 50 percent of clients working at least part-time.

The new laws also placed time limits on public assistance for the first time. In North Carolina, any adult who has been on assistance for 24 consecutive months must leave Work First and may not receive assistance again for three years. And the federal public-assistance law places a 60-month lifetime limit on each adult’s receipt of benefits. In some cases the state may grant hardship extensions of both limits.

More than five years later, the number of North Carolinians cashing monthly assistance checks has certainly dropped — from more than 120,000 in January 1995 to about 51,500 in December 2001. But it’s still too early to tell whether Work First is really a success, says Dean Duncan, clinical associate professor of social work. The true test, he says, will be how well families fare after they leave the program.

Other Carolina researchers are equally reluctant to proclaim Work First’s success or failure. Instead, says Phil Cooke, professor of social work, they are telling a story about how welfare reform has played out in North Carolina. These researchers and some social workers agree that Work First has spurred counties to find new ways of helping clients become self-sufficient. But scarce resources make it harder to help some of the toughest cases — those who, for instance, have only a sixth-grade education or have never held a job.

County control

Cooke and Deil Wright, professor of political science, lead a team of Carolina doctoral students as well as researchers from 11 other UNC-system institutions conducting case studies of 25 North Carolina counties. The “Tracking County Responses to Welfare Reform” study also includes surveys of more than 400 county commissioners, county managers, social service directors, and social service board chairs from all 100 counties. Cooke believes that the experiences of these “policy implementers” can be instructive for national policymakers because North Carolina’s county-centered system is unique.

In the case studies, many respondents said that Work First has shifted the nature of county caseworkers’ jobs from simply determining eligibility for cash benefits to helping clients solve problems and find jobs. Robert Gilmore, Work First supervisor for Orange County, echoes that opinion. “The counties were given a chance to be as creative as possible in providing resources to help clients move forward,” Gilmore says. “Work First has caused us to rethink the way we do business.”

Some new ways of doing business: Durham County’s Department of Social Services (DSS) contracts with the city’s chamber of commerce, supporting a full-time “job developer” position. This person organized several job fairs at Durham’s DSS offices in 2000, leading to jobs for more than 100 Work First recipients. This partnership between the Durham DSS and chamber of commerce has been a model for the state, according to the Durham case-study author Rebecca Winders of North Carolina Central University.

Lack of transportation to and from work is a constant problem, especially for clients who live in rural areas. Gilmore notes that some of his clients are in their thirties or forties and have never driven a car. This year Orange County spent part of its discretionary money on adult driving classes, and about 32 women have received their licenses so far. In Caldwell County, the DSS bought a “Job Search Van” and hired a driver to take clients to and from work.

To increase services, many counties have worked more closely with non-profit organizations, businesses, and other community members. “There’s no question that welfare reform has resulted in communities participating much more in welfare issues than before,” Cooke says.

Gilmore and Winnie Morgan, Work First faith-involvement coordinator for Orange County, agree that community cooperation has been crucial. “We didn’t have the resources in place when Work First was first implemented,” Morgan says, “but now we do.” Community organizations in the county have worked with DSS to provide such services as a car-donation program, G.E.D. classes, and clothing closets.

Dean Duncan tells the story of welfare reform using numbers. He and colleagues are tracking everyone who has received public assistance in North Carolina since 1995, using statistics from North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services, Division of Social Services. Data include the number of families entering the program, how long they stay on assistance, and whether or not they return to assistance rolls after leaving. The researchers also track how Work First participants fare at getting jobs.

Duncan is careful with his statistics. He uses and posts to the project web site only numbers that have been reconciled for the whole month. These final counts can differ by as much as 2,000 from the first-of-the-month numbers that sometimes end up in local newspapers, he says.

Though statistics aren’t everything, they can form a partial picture. Duncan updates the web site monthly, and caseworkers can use it to generate reports and track trends in each county. Tim Rhodes, program administrator at the Buncombe County Department of Social Services, says he’s using the web site to evaluate a pilot project in his county. “We wouldn’t have access to this data any other way,” Rhodes says.

The statistics do show some positive trends. Contrary to the popular image of “welfare moms,” most families in North Carolina do not stay on public assistance for long periods of time. The average length of stay is six to eight months. And, the longer a family stays off Work First, the more likely it is that the family will remain independent. “If you can stay off for more than three months, there’s a very good chance that you’re not going to come back onto the program at all,” Duncan says.

The statewide caseload continually dropped from 1995 to December 2000. From December 2000 to December 2001, it showed a slight increase — 639 people. Duncan says that this increase reflects a drop in the number of people leaving the caseload. “My guess is, because of the economy, they’re just not finding the jobs out there. But that is just a guess.”

The number of new clients coming onto assistance has not increased but has remained steady, Duncan says. Some families avoid full-time monthly assistance by using a Work First program that provides lump-sum emergency payments. Currently, about a thousand cases each month receive these payments, known as benefit diversion.

“The average monthly assistance check is relatively low, around two hundred sixty or two hundred eighty dollars a month for a family,” Duncan says. But a car repair such as a timing belt or brake job can run $400 or more. A lump payment of $600 to $1,000 can take care of such an urgent need and allow the head of a family to continue to work. This approach contrasts with the old federal program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which gave clients full benefits or nothing.

Running out of time

At the end of 2001, Duncan’s numbers warned of an unprecedented event — 213 people were scheduled to have their monthly checks stop for good. These are the first group of people in North Carolina to exhaust their benefits under the 60-month federal lifetime limit. Duncan says that many of these clients may qualify for disability payments or supplemental security income. And 37 of them have received hardship extensions and are still receiving Work First assistance. Duncan’s team will be able to keep tracking most of these clients because they’ll still receive Medicaid and food stamps. But it’s not clear how most of these families will make ends meet.

Families who have left Work First on their own or through the 24-month limit provide a clue. In a given year, about 70 percent of those people will earn money from work sometime in the next year. “We don’t know what happens to those who don’t have earnings,” Duncan says. “We suspect that a certain proportion are working in the underground economy — doing things like babysitting or repairing cars or running errands for somebody.”

Studies from other states show that people still struggle after leaving public assistance. In 1999 the National Conference of State Legislatures published a summary of studies of former welfare recipients in 19 states. Most families said they were better off than when they were on welfare but were struggling to get by. Lack of child care and transportation continue to be obstacles to working. About half of the former recipients have a job or earn some money from work, most earning between $5.50 and $8 an hour.

Andrew Dobelstein, professor of social work, found similar patterns in a survey of 58 former Work First clients in Chatham County, a study he led through his nonprofit organization, the Conference on Poverty. Seventy-six percent of the Chatham respondents were working at least part time. The average wage was $8 an hour.

Some findings were unique to the Chatham study. Rather than using formal day care, 80 percent of respondents used neighbors or relatives who could accommodate their evening and weekend work schedules. “That may not be the best child care, but that’s child care for them,” Dobelstein says. “We don’t have good information at all about the day care that is being provided in this informal network.”

Dobelstein also finds it striking that many of the families in his study did not use the benefits still available to them after leaving Work First. Just 48 percent of the respondents took advantage of the earned income tax credit, while only 10 percent used mental health or social services. “People in this low-income group don’t tend to use the formal services very much,” Dobelstein says. “It’s a universal problem that social welfare agencies are facing. Services do not substitute for food on the table. One reason, perhaps, why people in the Chatham County study did not use services could be that, compared with increased income from working, the services had little appeal to these people.”

No one claims that Work First is perfect. In the case study of Buncombe County, one social services worker said that while Work First helps more people find jobs, many of those jobs will not move people out of poverty. “A person with a ninth-grade education can get a job, but they cannot become self-sufficient,” the worker said. Another added that more money is needed to help people overcome obstacles that won’t go away overnight such as mental illness or substance-abuse problems.

But right now resources are limited for the basics such as day care. For instance, in Orange County there were about 300 people on a waiting list for child-care subsidies in early 2002, according to Gilmore.

“Welfare reform was and is an experiment,” Cooke says. For many, the welfare-reform experiment has only just begun.