 President of the United States. I want to thank all of you for coming here today. Usually when I come to this room it's to speak to a visiting group, but today I think I'm here mostly to listen and I know that what I'm about to hear will change the way America looks at poverty and welfare. This month we're sending up to the Congress our welfare reform package. This package was shaped in many ways by you in this room including the five who are up here with me. You know when I think of the welfare system it reminds me of a story and I know some here have heard me tell this before and maybe everybody knows it but pretend that you haven't heard it because I like to tell the story. It's a story about the parent with the two children and two sons and one of them was a died-in-the-wilt pessimist and the other one was an incurable optimist and they thought they were both so unrealistic that they talked to a psychiatrist about it and he said he thought he could solve the problem. And they said well what? Well he said let's get the most magnificent set of toys any boy ever had and we'll put him in a room. We'll take the pessimist there and then we'll turn him loose and when he sees those toys and knows they're all for him he'll get over being a pessimist. And he said what he could do about the optimist. Well he said I have a friend who's got a racing stable and he said we can get quite a quantity of what they clean out of the stable and we'll put that in another room and when the optimist has seen his brother get those toys and then he gets that he'll get over being an optimist. Well they did it. Finally after a period they then went in and followed in and where the boy was with the toys and he was sitting there crying and they said what are you crying about? He said well I know somebody's going to come and take these away from me. And they went down to the room with the optimist and he was on that top of that pile of stuff and he was thrown it over his shoulder as fast as he could and they said what are you doing? He says there's got to be a pony in here somewhere. Well today we're going to hear from some of those who found the pony. As you know but maybe those from the press don't. In the past year we've been going around the country asking the experts about how the welfare system works and doesn't work. Now asking experts is not a new thing in the area of welfare reform. Time and again over the years the government has inquired of professors and welfare professionals why people are poor and why they stay poor. Forgive me for saying this but the result has been a welfare system that's very good at keeping people poor but when we began to look at welfare reform we changed the experts and we changed the questions. For the last year our experts have been people who know welfare first hand who've actually been on welfare particularly who've been gotten on and gotten off and we've talked to hundreds of these people. We've talked to hundreds more who've set up self-help groups in their communities self-help groups that really worked and that really helped neighborhood people become self-sufficient. These have been our experts and our questions have been how'd you do it? How did you get off welfare? How did you become self-sufficient? How did you set up a group to help yourselves and your neighbors? I've been told that this has been the first time in the history of the welfare system that government has asked not how people fail. That's how they gut in welfare and stay on but how they succeed and that is how they get off welfare. And I'm told it's the first time ever that government has gone as we have not to the people who can give you a theory about getting people off welfare but to the people who've done it themselves in practice or helped others do it. Success, not failure, practice, not theory and that's what shaped our welfare reform proposal and that's what we've come to hear about today. So now let me turn this meeting over to the experts. Mr. President, first this morning we're going to hear from Sister Monica Toman from East Liverpool, Ohio. Sister Monica is the second most senior member of this panel, Mr. President. And she spent 42 years teaching at elementary and secondary levels and then went into the self-help business to try to help senior citizens to get the services they need and has found since then that that's developed into a very healthy project. So Sister Monica. Thank you, Mr. President. The Ceramic City Senior Center is in East Liverpool, Ohio of the Tri-State area of Pennsylvania, West Virginia. We're about across the bridge from West Virginia and five minutes from Pennsylvania. We are really an unnamed Appalachia area. We have no business, large business or industry in the area. Forty, well I would say 30% of the people are unemployed. There are 15,000 residents in East Liverpool. 4,000 according to the 1980 census are senior citizens over the age of 60. And a study of e-data done in 1984 showed 46% of them below poverty level. Well these senior citizens needed help. They needed to feel dignified in their existence. So our senior center was established in 1979 with federal dollars to renovate and purchase this property. Now we provide services in that 3,200 square foot building to 1,700 seniors. These services help them stay in their own environment. And that is something that needs to be done. It also provides them with knowledge of their own talents and skills so that they can not only help themselves but that they will then help others. We have these soldiers and sailors on relief have come to our assistance. The general relief workers will spend their time with us and give us the help that we need. We have used the Title V senior aid program out of the Department of Labor and those four people spending 20 hours a week provide the leadership that is needed to help our 387 volunteers provide these services to the other people of the community. Of course when you receive government funds then there are a number of records that have to be kept. And so we have to have these people trained in the keeping of the records. We are proud of our 387 volunteers. They help us provide friendly visiting services, telephone reassurance services, health assessment services so that the seniors can have almost an entire physical and being prevented from having diseases that would debilitate them. We have socialization of course that keeps the seniors knowing each other, feeling comfortable with each other and also getting out of their homes so that they will then be able to help other people. We provide some chore services, laundry for about 30 shut-ins each week and our volunteers do that work. We have a kitchen that provides I'd say anywhere from 25 to 150 meals daily twice a week with the jobs bill food that was given out at one time. We established an emergency feeding site for the unemployed and at times we feed 300 of them and the senior volunteers help prepare and serve those meals. We received two vehicles from the 16B2 program using the UMTA funds and that provides transportation for about 420 seniors using the drivers and the volunteer escorts to take these seniors about 28,000 miles a year to nutrition, socialization, events, cultural places, medical appointments, and personal shopping. I feel then that our senior volunteers, many of them on the RSVP program, have not only become valuable assets to the community but they have made other people of their own peers feel important. Yet without the federal dollars giving us that base of operation there is no way that we could have done this making these people feel the need to continue living. We have established a co-op because we don't just want handouts but we want to help these people help themselves. This co-op then helps to extend their funds and provide nourishing food. We have joined with Sher Food Bank and are trying to establish a farm in which they will grow their own truck vegetables and then either sell them or can them or freeze them for the winter. We are involved in any number of projects one of which will be to develop a shared living facility. I think perhaps I've used my time. Thank you very much, Sister Monica. Next let me introduce to you Erlene White from Norfolk, Virginia and her husband Nelson who's in the audience says the two of them co-founded the organization called Parental Involvement Network or PIN and it came out of the problems they had with the busing situation in Norfolk so let's hear from her. Erlene? Thank you. Contrary to popular belief black parents are strong in favor of neighborhood schools in Norfolk were courts approved and end to busing of elementary school students for the purpose of racial balance. Parents were given the option of to bus or not to bus given this choice black parents chose not to bus by a whopping 86 percent majority. We had always known that the blacks who actually had to deal with busing did not like it. This clearly points out that agencies need to interact with grassroots people to solve problems relating to welfare and education. When we attempted to inform civil rights and religious leaders of the true feelings in the black community the first thing they wanted to know was was what were our professional credentials. They failed to realize that grassroots people do not need a whole lot of credentials to express their concerns or to develop some expertise in solving their problems. Since the media was only listening to black groups advocating busing my husband Nelson got the idea to organize the black parents who opposed busing thus the parental involvement network. We went door to door collecting signatures to present to the school board. We felt that 1200 signatures was enough to convince both the school board and civil rights groups that there was substantial black support for an end to busing. We did this with a cadre of 15 parents and in September 86 8000 black students returned to neighborhood schools where their parents have a greater opportunity to interact with the schools. We constantly help poor parents to understand how the school system work and to get the best out of it for their children. Education and welfare dependents are clearly related and dealing with welfare parents. We found that more daycare was needed that even if they got a job the funds they received are stopped before they can get on their feet. Some change is needed in this area of transfer from welfare to becoming a working class parent. Thank you Erlene. We now move on to Tony Enriquez from Oakland California who is in charge of one of the longest running self-help efforts in the United States. The Spanish speaking unity council which started in 1964. Tony. Thank you. The Spanish speaking unity council in Oakland California was started as a grassroots organization in 1964 but we have grown to a community development corporation with assets of over 15 million dollars. We operate a continuum care of services to our community from infant child care services to elderly services. We provide services in employment and training both youth and young adults housing programs for families and elders. Emergency housing and family needs small business technical assistance and community economic development assistance and project development. More specific to today's panel discussion we operated a supported work program for over 10 years working with long-term AFTC recipients welfare mothers. This supported work program provided avenues of opportunity to long-term welfare mothers to come back into the job stream. Through a welfare grant diversion process we were able to provide job opportunities in a supportive work environment. In the operation of our own small businesses we have provided a vehicle to bring back self-reliance and capacity building into the lives of many welfare mothers. In our organizational philosophy of integrating community economic development into the delivery of social services we have been able to build community and individual capacity to alleviate poverty in our community. Thank you. And finally it's closest to home Kimmy Gray from Kenilworth Parkside Resident Management Association. Kimmy I know that you had five children on welfare and that you've gotten yourself and them off welfare and sent them all to college. I think that's an accomplishment in itself worth it. But you've gone far beyond that so tell us about it. All right Mr. President let me first describe the Kenilworth Parkside community. They are 464 public housing units. We're at the end of nowhere some folks may refer to it because we are ward seven and they call the part of the state that's been forgotten. Prior to 1982 only two children with an out community had gone to college. There was no heat not ward on our public housing property. Trash pickup was perturbed and because of that we began to meet ourselves and organize the residents of our community and throughout efforts we created a program that's named the college here we come Mr. President which I know you're familiar with because you awarded us an outstanding standing award for sending over 582 of our children away to colleges. When those children went away to college they returned very dissatisfied with our conditions and because of that those students and the parents of those students began to develop their own master plan because we had realized we had had persons to plan for us and had not given us opportunity to plan for ourselves and therefore their plans were not successful because we had nowhere to participate in really but to take orders. Throughout master plan we created resident management and through our resident management concept we reduced our welfare recidivism and 82 was 85 percent it's now been reduced to 22 percent we reduced our crime reduced our teenage pregnancy by 50 percent. We created small businesses before you see the philosophy of our community the only way that we could even save our community was beginning to save our families and how we save our families by returning respect and responsibility and pride back to the fathers of our community by employing them first before we employed the youth. We created small business that are now employed those former welfare recipients and they are owned by some of the residents of our community for we knew that the only way we could help ourselves by saving ourselves. That no one had the obligation to us to do anything for us we had to do it ourselves. I feel proud to see you today because for the first time I know I personally had a direct input on forming this policy and to my knowledge this has never been done before where the executive branch of the government has come down to the community to talk to a former public welfare recipient to find out how we feel about things and find out how we felt about being dealt with when it comes to welfare reform and work with the Kilmworth Parkside community we have did a need assessment through our college students and found that our residents want jobs. We're proud of the rippling effect that our community program has had around not only the city of Washington DC but throughout the United States to say that we want employment we do not want welfare we want dependency and we thank you Mr. President for providing us the opportunity. Thank you Kimmy and thanks to all of our panel members Mr. President you've heard these success stories so why don't we talk a little bit about how we can build on them. Well believe me and I know that there are many more like these and there used to a time here for a lot of questions that people have and I hope that you will have time to find out more and how these work for example sister what your experience was in working with the state cooperation and so forth. Someone sent me a little item that must have appeared in print someplace it was in print it was just cut out and I don't know where it appeared or anything but it did give us pause to think just a little short thing and it said in an earlier day in America people lived well they had plenty to eat they were independent they were free and then the white man came. Thomas Jefferson once wrote he knows most who knows how little he knows in the area of welfare I think it's clear today that it's time for those of us in Washington to face up to how little we know. You good people have just shown the truth of what columnist William Raspberry wrote recently that good ideas come not from Washington where the headlines are but out in the country where the action is. That in effect is what our welfare reform proposal is all about creating a welfare system that invests in your solutions and in the solutions of thousands of others like you around America. Our welfare study really isn't that thin. Up from dependency which will be released today names nearly 400 examples of self-help groups across the land. Our reform is intended to start a process that taps this spirit and mobilizes this initiative and here's what we propose to do. We will ask Congress to approve legislation to allow the states to experiment with the kind of anti-poverty ideas that you've told us about here today. Right now federal laws and regulations limit what the states can do. I was a governor of a state and I know how frustrating it could be and that's why so many of your good ideas can't be tried within the bounds of our current welfare system. Our proposal retains the current federal financing role and the federal government will continue to enforce civil rights laws and do process protections. All we will ask from the Congress will be that it waive the many other rules and regulations that prevents state experiments from helping people become independent. In many states with the limited flexibility we've given in the last six years this experimentation has begun. Some like Utah and New Jersey have made great strides. As you know I've invited all the governors to the White House later this month to present our welfare proposal and to listen to their thoughts about welfare reform. But our reform effort does not end with the states and the governors. It only begins with them. One of the real keys is at the community and neighborhood level. People like yourselves. We want community leaders to draw up reform plans for their own cities and neighborhoods and then to work with state officials to put those plans into practice. We want not 50 experiments but hundreds and thousands. In short we want to liberate the creative genius and entrepreneurial energy that we've seen here today and that exists all across America. As one scholar John McKnight put it, I know from years in the neighborhoods that we can rely on community creativity. America is being reinvented little by little in the little places. They're just a few simple principles that all experiments should follow. These are principles that all of us have learned and you have begun to demonstrate. We've learned for example that work is the only genuine path to self-respect and independence. And we learned that any welfare system should offer the incentives and tools to escape welfare not the incentives to remain dependent on welfare. With these and other lessons in mind our proposal will ask the Congress to allow those of us in Washington to work with the states in screening reform ideas. We will offer communities and states wide latitude in developing their proposals but we will also ensure that any initiative supports families and promotes self-reliance. It's time for the federal government to admit to what it doesn't know and start listening to creative governors like Tom Kane and Booth Gardner, Jim Martin. It's time for the government to start listening to community self-help groups like yours and the others that Chuck and his group here have identified. It's time, as Charles Murray has written, to start listening to those we wish to help, not armed with a clipboard and a set of multiple choice questionnaire items but with curiosity and patience. Well that's what we've begun to do this past year and that's what our reform package will help all of America to do in the years ahead. You know I had an experience as governor because we came up with a welfare reform plan and it could only be permitted under regulations as an experiment and we dealt with and we negotiated with the people in Washington and we were getting nowhere and finally I ordered our people, one of whom was Chuck Hobbs right here and who is responsible for some of that plan. I ordered our people that we would not discuss anything further with Washington unless the president was present and he came to California. We went down and met with him and I scribbled a few notes on the plane on the back of a gin rummy pad and when we got in the room with the people we'd been dickering with all these years and getting their months and getting no place I submitted what it was we wanted to do. It was a work fair plan and what we had accomplished so far and getting ready for it and it was wonderful. The president just heard me out and only took a few minutes and he just turned to his group and said I want this done. You'd be surprised it happened but they'd only let us experiment so we got to do 35 out of the 58 counties in California and they very carefully omitted the two largest Los Angeles and San Francisco but we started our experiment and there was one benefit that we had not been able to anticipate and that was that we had gone to every community at every level and we had said are there things in your community your county your district whatever that you would be doing if you had the manpower and the money we didn't want boondoggles and they sent back their list of things yes that they would do we screened them to make sure they were useful tasks so we took those approved those useful tasks and then we told them there is the manpower and the money and they will soon be reporting to you for work and then we notified the able-bodied welfare that those areas they were to report for this work but at the same time we assigned some of our own bureaucracy at the state level from our labor department to be job agents they were each given a list of names and they would arrive heard and watch those people at what they were doing and I said it's your job to try and make their work their temporary not the job temporary but to move them from that to the private sector as fast as possible and in the midst of the 1973-74 recession with a great increase in unemployment through that program we put 76,000 welfare recipients into private sector jobs and permanently moved so this is I don't want to get caught like I won't name the president but I won't don't want to get caught like him and have me have to be able to turn and say I've said it in advance of your you're coming with recommendations and that's what Chuck has been here and all about one last little thing I want to tell you I have a letter on my desk that I have to answer it just arrived it's from a young man who had a surf a water surfing accident water ski no water skiing accident he is a quadriplegic he is totally dependent on the government programs but attached to his letter is a business card with his name on it he has an idea for an independent business a small business that he is organizing to start and the small business will be counseling and advising other disabled people to be able to free themselves from dependency and to become independent and that what he needs and what I'm certainly going to try to work out for him is some kind of a bridge from his present dependency to the success there so that he can get by that bridge and I think here of all things of a is a success story and an indication of what you've heard up here today and that is what I've said myself so often the overwhelming majority of the people on welfare want nothing more than to be independent of it and back out with the rest of us even so the questions would have kind of redundant because I think these four individuals made it pretty plain as to what they were doing and I think as you all exchange information about what others have found can be done we'll find the answer to this and it'll be an answer in the American way which we have neglected for too many years thank you all god bless you all