The Surprise Blessings of Reform

By Nancy Gibbs/Greenville

The experts who built the welfare system didn't intend to create a toxic culture of dependency. And it turns out the reformers offering antidotes didn't anticipate some of their own side effects either.

Certainly Lisa Van Riper didn't. Three years ago, her friend David Beasley, then the Republican Governor of South Carolina, gave the Greenville civic activist $200,000 of private money left over from his inaugural and asked her to help make the state's new work requirements for welfare recipients stick. Van Riper's mission: to persuade every church, synagogue and private civic group in the state to adopt one welfare family and guide it toward independence.

Today her private, nonpartisan foundation, Putting Families First, has become a national model. Nearly 900 groups statewide--from fundamentalist churches to liberal organizations--have signed on to help hundreds of families. The state department of social services recruits clients, 90% of them single mothers; the church or association puts together a team to help with everything from resumes to fixing a broken toilet to lining up free dental care. No one knew how the chemistry would work--or that the public-private partnership would help yield something valuable, even beyond a 65% drop in state welfare rolls.

Greenville is the kind of place where the wild kids cruising down North Main lean out their windows and shout, "Jesus loves you!" But the church folk in town knew members didn't always practice what was preached. They might have a food bank, might donate Christmas toys and Thanksgiving baskets, but long-term, hands-on care was left to government experts, the professional social workers. "We were like 911," says Wilhelmena Tucker, a volunteer from Foster Grove Baptist Church. "We would help in an emergency, but when the emergency was over, there was no follow-up."

What makes Van Riper's program special, say volunteers, is that it is personal and direct. "The government assistance shows up in the mailbox," says Jay Cox, a Presbyterian mentor. "We show up at the front door." And when they do, some are learning as much as they are teaching. Like how easy it is to lose a job because the car broke down and there is no public bus, or because a kid was sent home sick from school and the mother needed to be home too. "So now we're developing, just out of compassion and knowledge, a whole group of people that are becoming voices for day care, for medical insurance, for transportation needs," says Van Riper.

The volunteers are also watching other preconceptions crumble. As white churches work with black families and black churches adopt whites, suspicions float away. "I've been in government for 25 years," says Leon Love, deputy director of community services for the state, "and no program I've seen has done as much for race relations as this one has. We didn't go into this with that goal--but these relationships develop based on people, not color. People get to know people, and then it's hard to hate a friend."

The stories are by no means always happy, and sometimes the relationship falls apart. One volunteer had to change her phone number after an unstable client turned threatening. Some mothers decide they don't want the help: they don't want to work after all. A team from a Greenville Presbyterian church was helping a young mother of two whose husband was in prison. They found her some clothes, helped her land a job, baby-sat the children. The day she finally got her driver's license, they even had a car for her, donated by a church member. She was murdered the next day in a robbery in the housing project they were trying to help her escape.

"One problem," says Curtis Johnson, pastor of Valley Brook Baptist Church, a black church of 500 members, "is that their world is unfamiliar to us, and they know it. If I have someone who is coming out of prison and needs a job, I don't match him with some big supervisor. I match him with someone who came out of jail too and found Christ, someone he can relate to and feel comfortable with," he says. "We may have good intentions, but we can't touch them at the level of their hurt. We've never walked in their shoes. And so, without meaning to, we can seem all self-righteous and pushy."

But the rewards, when they come, are great. Maggie Copeland, a mother of six from the 5,400-member First Baptist Church of North Spartanburg, has been working with B.J., a 15-year-old girl who lives in a nearby trailer park with her 2 1/2-year-old daughter and her mother. B.J. used to go to another church sometimes, until the van that came to pick her up stopped coming because the drivers feared the neighborhood. After her baby was born, however, she knew what she wanted. "My mom was brought up in the church," B.J. says, "but I wasn't. And I know I'd have done so much better if I had been. You're just smarter. The church kids, they do so much better in school. They're real friendly and all. I knew I wanted my little girl in the church."

B.J. and her daughter are eligible for Medicaid and WIC, which provides coupons for milk, cheese and food for the baby. But B.J.'s welfare check was cut when she dropped out of school last winter. She makes a little extra money baby-sitting other children on weekends. Last week Copeland sat in B.J.'s living room helping her choose an interview outfit for an after-school job at a dry cleaner's. Next week, when the school bus comes for her at 6:30 a.m., her mentors will make sure she is on it. "She is determined to make something of herself," says Deidre Hennecy. "I can't wait to see how far she might go."