The Step to Work/Family Economic Self-Sufficiency Collaborative model, funded in part by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, was developed to increase economic self-sufficiency among diverse low-income and disadvantaged populations who had little or no work experience or some employment barriers. Over a two-year period, Jewish Family and Children?s Services and Jewish Vocational Service, two existing San Francisco-based agencies with complementary specialties in providing social and psychological support services and job training and placement services, joined to develop and implement a comprehensive service delivery system. This system, which integrates community economic development, family support services, and employment services, assisted 100 individuals over its two-year project development period.

The goal of the Step to Work/Family Economic Self-Sufficiency (STW) model is to increase economic self-sufficiency among diverse low-income and disadvantaged populations by implementing a comprehensive service delivery system that integrates family support services and employment services. The project?s aim is to bridge the gap between employment services and social services, and to make it as easy as possible for participants to access the specific help they need to succeed.

The target population for this program includes public welfare recipients, low-income persons and immigrants who are in the ranks of the working poor, low-income individuals with little or no positive work experience, and people with one or more employment barriers. These barriers can include mental health issues, poor job history, lack of job readiness, language barriers, family problems, substance abuse, medical problems, and educational or intellectual challenges.

Social Services Specialist: Jewish Family and Children?s Services (JFCS)
Founded in 1850, JFCS of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma counties has a long and successful history of responding to community needs. Today JFCS serves 40,000 people each year in its five-county West San Francisco Bay service area. When JFCS embarked on the STW demonstration project, the agency already operated more than 40 programs that provide services such as case management; emergency food and shelter; individual and group counseling for children, adults, families, and the elderly; adult day health services; home care and care coordination for the elderly; refugee resettlement and citizenship training; outreach to those with disabilities and HIV/AIDS; adoption services; loans and grants; Utility Workshop, a hand-assembly workshop employing newly-arrived émigrés and people with disabilities; and a wide range of volunteer activities that reach out to the ill or isolated. JFCS? focus has always been on providing the helping hand that enables individuals and families to become self-sufficient. A great strength of all JFCS programs is the active involvement of 2,100 volunteers each year, 1,800 of them providing direct services to JFCS clients.

Employment Services Specialist: Jewish Vocational Service (JVS)
JVS brought to the Step to Work project 25 years of success in helping disadvantaged Bay Area residents find jobs, build careers, and achieve financial independence. JVS has long served some of San Francisco?s neediest residents, including welfare recipients, low-income workers, newly-arrived émigrés, youth and adults with disabilities, and homeless men and women. In addition to offering occupational training in several fields, JVS already had in place programs providing job search skills instruction, Vocational English as a Second Language (VESL), work "acculturation" training (including interpersonal skills, work behaviors, coping skills, etc.), employment counseling, and a self-help "Job Club" with access to computers, job listings, fax and phone. JVS also takes advantage of its pool of volunteers to provide one-to-one and small group services for its clients.

Each year JVS places more than 1,000 job-seekers into jobs through its relationships with over 7,000 employers. It posts several hundred job listings weekly, with over 2,000 current job openings listed at any one time ? one of the largest such clearinghouses in the Bay Area.

JVS also came to the Step to Work project with an existing range of services to help clients keep their jobs, acquire new skills, and advance in their careers. These include working with clients and employers to insure a smooth transition into the workplace and offering job coaching, retention support, peer support groups, mentoring opportunities, skills upgrading, and career development.

JFCS and JVS Together
JFCS and JVS have a long history of working collaboratively. For over 20 years, the two agencies have led San Francisco?s resettlement program for refugees from the former Soviet Union, integrating case management, social services, and employment assistance for approximately 30,000 newly-arrived émigrés. As a result of continuously assessing needs within the émigré community, JFCS and JVS developed the Refugee Elder Care Collaborative, funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, to fill gaps in services to frail elderly refugees and their families.

Vocational training, career development, and job placement for persons in JFCS? transitional housing and case management programs have been provided in collaboration with JVS. The agencies cross-refer clients from other programs on a regular basis as well, including individuals who are homeless, disabled, or dealing with substance abuse.

The Step to Work menu of services and opportunities is structured to focus on the goal of building family economic self-sufficiency and addressing the myriad issues that relate to the achievement of this goal. Participants are involved in creating the menu and in choosing components deemed useful to them.

Because the success of each participant is integrally linked to the stability and strength of the entire family, JFCS provides family advocacy in addition to individual services for STW participants. Family support services involve enhancing the families? abilities to support the job seeker in attaining his/her goals as well as orienting the entire family, including children and youth, toward the culture of work and achieving a career potential.

JVS provides assessment and employability planning to help participants identify transferable skills and interests, set short and long-term employment goals, and design a strategy to get there.

Through interagency meetings, cross-training, and frequent telephone contact among both project managers and line staff, a true collaborative model has been developed. This makes it as uncomplicated as possible for Step to Work clients to receive integrated case management that addresses both the psychosocial and concrete issues they face in securing and retaining employment to insure their self-sufficiency. Regular meetings of line staff and, less frequently, of supervisors, allow for discussion of any procedural difficulties that arise. They also provide a forum for focused discussion of specific cases that allow combined staff to brainstorm ideas for meeting the needs of individual program participants.

The collaborative agencies have utilized the following strategies to achieve project goals:

• Development and implementation of a collaborative model integrating case management, family support, and employment and training services, including the development of a comprehensive, integrated assessment and planning process.
• Implementation of systems for case conferencing, data collection, tracking, and program evaluation.
• Expansion of participant outreach, including linkages with public agencies.
• Analysis of job market potential and targeting of a major industry to tailor skill development to the pool of available jobs.
• Strengthening of collaborations with the private sector, including employers; with other non-profit service agencies and community resources, including development of a partnership with local community college(s); and with a pool of volunteers.
• Provision of long-term counseling and comprehensive supportive services, including assistance with child care, transportation, financial planning and money management, mental health and substance abuse treatment, and parenting support, for up to two years; provision of family advocacy and family orientation to culture of work.
• Provision of employment services, including: individualized assessment of employment readiness and identification of barriers to employment; goal setting; counseling; development of job search, work readiness, and employment skills; provision of such job search resources as phones, phone message centers, and computers; classroom training, including literacy, ESL, and occupational skills training; work experience through internships, volunteer positions, and transitional employment; job placement; and customized career development planning.
• Development of peer support network for program participants.
• Assistance with micro-enterprise development and loans and grants for business development and education/training.

To serve our target of 100 clients during the two year grant-funded project development phase, total staffing was 2.8 FTE, broken down as follows:

JFCS ? Total of 1.4 FTE staffing:

1.0 FTE caseworker/clinician
.2 FTE clinical supervisor
.2 FTE volunteer coordinator

JVS ? Total of 1.4 FTE staffing:

1 FTE employment specialist (.5 FTE bilingual for émigré population)
.2 FTE employment services coordinator
.2 FTE supervisor of employment programs

STW involves the expansion of existing and the creation of new employment-related opportunities and programs that insure family economic self-sufficiency through effective job counseling, job placement, job creation and business development activities. Intensive case management services are integrated into the employment plans of participants in each program. Customized plans can draw from the following menu of services in the sequence and combinations appropriate for each participant.

1. Comprehensive Assessment and Planning
The collaborating agencies have developed a comprehensive, integrated assessment process that reviews family history, previous substance abuse and treatment, barriers and supports such as child care, personal and family support systems, financial assessment, employment history, skills identification, work readiness, interest inventory, and educational background. This assessment is used to formulate an employability plan that includes long-term and short-term employment goals as well as plans for training, child care, transportation, financial planning and money management, mental health and substance abuse treatment, parent support, peer support, and mentoring opportunities.

2. Comprehensive Supportive Services
The comprehensive nature of the case management for STW participants is the key to the STW model. People who have been jobless for any period often suffer from low self-esteem. They and their families become used to the "cycle of poverty" and may become dependent on welfare. Since this is the norm for their lives, attempting to change it and adjust to the culture of work can be very threatening. They may have little or no work experience, mental health issues, and/or language barriers. Such psychological and practical barriers to preparing for, attaining, and retaining employment can seem insurmountable. The STW program helps individuals and families weather these difficulties.

The STW model involves program participants working with a case manager both at JVS and JFCS to define their barriers to self-sufficiency, create a plan to address these needs, and access the agreed-upon services. Areas addressed can include childcare and transportation needs, financial planning and money management, mental health and substance abuse issues, parenting support, family advocacy ? any issues that, left unaddressed, impede progress toward achieving and retaining self-sufficiency. STW case managers come to know their clients well, serving as their "champion" and making themselves easily accessible to help with any problems that may arise. Case managers take the initiative to keep in touch, offering encouragement and concrete practical support, including contacting other community agencies on their behalf and helping with paperwork so clients can obtain needed help from other community and government sources.

3. Training, Skill and Resource Development
Step to Work has built on the collaborative agencies? pre-existing employment training and placement activities and utilized their capacity for job shadowing, mentoring and transitional work experiences so that participants have the opportunity to learn directly about diverse employment opportunities and career options and benefit from supportive relationships with role models. For example, participants may be placed in internships or volunteer positions within other community organizations to gain work experience, observe different workplaces and jobs, and build professional relationships in the community that can be used for references and career networking.

JVS offers a number of other services to help participants prepare for work. Through intensive group workshops and individual counseling, JVS helps participants develop job search skills (interviewing and résumé writing), transferable skills (identifying previous work-related experience that can be applied to the current job market), and work readiness skills (such as good work habits, self-management, teamwork, communication with co-workers and supervisors, and ability to cope with conflict).

STW participants may also enroll in one of JVS? existing training programs, including Vocational English as a Second Language, Computer Assisted Design, Certified Nurse Assistant, Office Technology Training, and On-the-Job Training and Individual Referral, a JTPA program that allows JVS to enroll low-income clients in qualified training programs throughout the community. For additional training referrals, JVS and JFCS have relationships with many other training providers, including the Private Industry Council and San Francisco City College.

JFCS offers STW participants the opportunity to explore small business development by meeting with its Grants and Loans program staff to identify entrepreneurial interests and prospects, develop business plans, and gain the financing and technical assistance needed to start a small business. This pre-existing JFCS program, which assists approximately 20 émigrés each year in creating their own businesses, is targeted to micro-businesses and low-income individuals typically not well served by the banking community. JFCS? loan fund, providing financing up to $25,000 per business, is capitalized at $1 million.

4. Employment Development and Job Placement
STW approaches to providing employment include job creation through enterprise development, sectoral strategies partnering with employers, and traditional job development and placement services.

JFCS, through our Loans and Grants Department, has the capacity to create jobs through the start-up and management of enterprises, and also offers the possibility of employing target populations within our Help-At-Home (home care) and Utility Workshop (hand assembly, mail order fulfillment) programs.

Through the sectoral employment strategy, STW builds upon regional industry trends by identifying and targeting a major industry such as health care in order to access employment and training opportunities for program participants. JVS specialists seek to develop partnerships with firms in growth industries with entry-level jobs that offer wages to support self-sufficiency and have career advancement opportunities. Working with the employer, we determine what the training needs are for new hires and how the program can prepare participants to access and retain these jobs.

JVS has expanded its job development and placement capacity to help STW participants find career-ladder jobs in the Bay Area?s expanding job market. JVS works with over 7,000 employers to meet their hiring needs, and boasts one of the region?s largest and most up-to-date collections of job listings. In addition, JVS encourages clients to take responsibility for their own job search by providing the resources that many job seekers take for granted: access to computers, fax, phones, and a phone message center. Job seekers can attend JVS? many job search progress groups, résumé clinics, or career seminars.

Finally, JFCS offers expanded long-term supportive services as well as database tracking of participants and advancement assistance management for STW clients.

5. Retention, Career Advancement and Ongoing Support
Once participants are employed, STW provides follow-up coaching to help them adjust to and keep their new jobs, maintain confidence, and resolve problems. JVS retention counselors visit job sites and shadow clients on the job, working with employers on supervision skills and problem solving. This may involve mediating between employer and employee if necessary, or coaching employers on how to accommodate and support employees from disadvantaged backgrounds. JVS has launched a job coaching hotline with JVS employment counseling specialists on call utilizing beepers and cell phones. Participants can access help when emergencies such as car problems or babysitter cancellations threaten their ability to get to work on time, and thus their ability to succeed in and retain employment.

STW also encourages participants to look to each other as an important source of peer support. JVS has a Skills/Progress Group, in which individuals searching for jobs meet twice a week on a drop-in basis to share job leads, discuss their experiences being interviewed for jobs, and provide peer support. Developed specifically for the STW program, JFCS? weekly Job/Peer Support Group, facilitated by a licensed psychotherapeutic clinician, offers program participants peer support as they face the apprehension, psychological obstacles, and family complications involved in beginning and sustaining job training, seeking a job, and remaining employed.

The STW collaborative also taps the tremendous resources of our agencies? volunteers to assist STW in addressing the employment needs of low-income populations. Volunteers can help by:

• Volunteering as job coaches, mock interviewers and teachers/workshop leaders.
• Providing one-to-one and small group English language coaching.
• Serving as speakers and mentors for vocational workshops and specialized employment training.
• Providing volunteer opportunities for low-income persons, particularly youth and individuals transitioning from welfare who need to build an employment history.
• Mentoring STW participants and providing job shadowing opportunities to increase employment skill acquisition.

During the two-year program development period, the following outcomes were achieved:

• 109 individuals were recruited, assessed and provided with initial services.
• 77% (84 individuals) achieved employment goals of obtaining or retaining self-sufficiency, receiving education and training, obtaining or retaining a job, or receiving a promotion.
• 73% (80 individuals) were placed in jobs. The average wage was $11.97/hour.
• 24% (26 individuals) enrolled in training classes. At the conclusion of the two-year period, only one of these individuals had dropped out before completing training, and he had obtained a job.
• 18 individuals received job promotions.

Philliber Research Associates was contracted to evaluate Step to Work, especially the value added of its collaborative model as determined by the participants and the staff involved. In their report, they conclude that

The collaborative model had a profound impact on the staff?s ability to help participants realize their goals and on participants? ability to deal with problems and concerns influencing their ability to gain and maintain employment. Among staff, the collaborative model led to informal meetings and case conferences that addressed the myriad of issues facing shared participants with a number of barriers to employment. Staff found it was extremely useful to have a teammate with a different specialty to work with to develop the case plans. Among participants, many had worked closely with their JFCS and JVS caseworkers to receive the help they needed to deal with both psychosocial and concrete issues affecting their ability to seek, gain, and retain a job. Many participants continued to work with their caseworkers even after gaining employment.

The pre-existing history of collaborative work between JFCS and JVS has been a decided help in the implementation of STW. Both agencies had head starts on understanding what their sister agency had to offer clients and on developing a comfortable working relationship with professional colleagues. Both supervisorial and line staff worked very well with their colleagues at the sister agency.

Because of the robust economic conditions existing in the nation as a whole, and particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, it is currently relatively easy for people to find temporary entry-level jobs. For individuals with little job experience or long histories of joblessness, this affords them an excellent opportunity to obtain work experience and readjust to the working world.

This "seller?s" job market has also resulted in an increased hourly wage rate for participants in the project. However, increased wages, in turn, are feeding an increasingly expensive housing market that presents a difficult challenge to people struggling to achieve or retain self-sufficiency. One must earn well over the minimum wage to afford even the lowest level of San Francisco housing.

On the other hand, the City and County of San Francisco follows a very liberal implementation of welfare laws, making more benefits available to more individuals and families than in most cities and counties. For example, in San Francisco, even if parents no longer qualify for TANF, dependents are allowed to continue receiving it, making it somewhat easier for families in transition with children to pay basic living expenses.

An unanticipated challenge experienced by the STW Collaborative was that, at least initially, a number of participants were interested in one component or another, but not in the holistic project model. Several potential participants were not ready to admit their need for social services, but only wanted help in obtaining employment. In the present booming economy, it is not difficult to find an entry-level job; the difficulty is in retaining employment and in receiving promotions or finding employment that pays self-sufficiency wages for the San Francisco Bay Area with its extremely high cost of living.

As funding for STW made it possible for JFCS and JVS to provide "wrap-around" services, we were increasingly able to realize how important it is not only to refer people to sources of assistance, but to make it as easy as possible for them to access this help. Many clients have very limited time to avail themselves of the help they need.

The two agencies are not located in close physical proximity, and we realized that for people struggling to overcome a history of failure, the bus ride from one agency to the other sometimes seemed insurmountable. To address this, case managers began traveling to their sister agency and meeting jointly with individual participants at a single site. This saved participants from making a second appointment, determining how to reach a second physical location, and walking into a second unknown building to confide one?s difficulties to yet another stranger. It made it easy for clients to get to know and learn to trust professionals from both agencies, and to understand that there were advantages to them in utilizing both sources of support. The assessment process was greatly simplified for participants who are frequently already facing hurdles in their quest to become self-sufficient.

JFCS and JVS staff also made every effort to be pro-active in linking participants with additional services, which clearly benefited STW participants. In addition, staff learned that they had to be very proactive in their follow-up efforts, as some clients who were experiencing difficulties were not initially willing to confide this to caseworkers.

We also had a number of participants who quit the program when they found a job rather than using the job retention services of STW. In a number of cases, these individuals then ran into difficulties. Continued follow-up is very important, and it is a challenge for caseworkers to ask the right questions to determine when retention services or further counseling is needed.

The closer collaboration between the two participating agencies afforded by the project was very beneficial. Because JFCS caseworkers were closely monitoring clients, they were able to see and appreciate that JVS was truly finding people jobs. JVS staff came to realize what an important role a client?s psychological issues can play in sabotaging his or her successful entry into the job market. The usefulness of JFCS? support group for job seekers led by a clinician with a Masters in Social Work was particularly illuminating for JVS professionals with specialties in other areas.

JFCS supervisors and line staff learned that employment development takes special expertise, and that this expertise is available at JVS. JVS learned that many social and emotional factors can impede progress with job training, placement, and retention, and they learned that social workers at JFCS have special expertise to help clients with these issues. Staff at both agencies learned to think of the sister agency as a resource that is able to play a significant role in helping individuals we serve reach and retain self-sufficiency.

Staff also became aware of how very much time and patience and active work is required to achieve desired outcomes with clients who have not been self-sufficient for a long period of time. People with barriers to employment require longer and more intensive services than a number of staff members initially understood. In reviewing this program, several of its staff members wrote that perhaps they underestimated how large a part psychiatric disability plays in underemployment, and how many times clients and staff may have to try and initially fail before clients make the successful transition to obtaining and retaining employment, let alone receiving a promotion.

It is also important that this help remain available to individuals who may initially refuse it. Many potential Step to Work participants require extensive preparatory counseling and other work before they are ready to make use of the STW model of comprehensive services that includes employment counseling, training, and job placement. Not all clients are initially ready for all the services they need.

Based on interviews with program participants and staff, Philliber Research Associates, the outside evaluator of Step to Work, identified the following key factors as important to the development and successful implementation of this collaborative model:

• Staff?s willingness to equally share the work necessary to assist participants
• Staff?s and supervisors? willingness to travel to the other agency to attend development and implementation meetings related to the STW program
• Participants? use of services at both agencies
• Directors and supervisors from each agency actively supporting the work of STW, e.g., attending the staff meetings of the other agency
• Each agency?s ability to provide the necessary services needed to effectively assist the target population
• The ability to hire staff to work solely with the STW program.

Thus, the necessary elements for this project model to be successful elsewhere are agencies with specialties in employment development and in addressing the social, emotional, and family issues that can impede successful employment. Supervisorial staff must "buy in" to the collaborative model and support line staff in working with colleagues at the partner agency. With these factors in place, the case management model developed for STW offers an outstanding pattern for other agencies with complementary competencies and skills.

JFCS STW Participant Tracking Form (Adobe Acrobat required)
JVS STW Participant Tracking Form (Adobe Acrobat required)
STW Participant Combined Data Sheet (Adobe Acrobat required)