Minnicucci Associates (1995, pp 31-32).

form of public assistance, the neighborhood divided by freeways, and very few local jobs. In early 1992 Bolton and some colleagues gathered commitments in the form of official resolutions from the Oakland City Council, the Oakland Board of Education, and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors to participate in a joint venture to design, estab- lish, and test an alternative, family-centered, neighborhood-based sys- tem of human services in the Prescott neighborhood. The mayor of Oakland was also on record in support of the project.

A year passed in meetings with community groups and other collab- oratives (Oakland is home to a great many) and in exploring potential organizational commitments by various county agencies. These agen- cies were proving more skittish than their nominal superiors on the elected boards might have anticipated. Bolton and his associates also drafted a neighborhood self-governance plan, which would have cre- ated a joint powers authority under California law, with the contracting jurisdictions being Alameda County, the city of Oakland, the Oakland Housing Authority, and the Oakland Unified School District. In June 1993 an organizer was hired. CISFAN arranged a series of site visits for agency staff to Del Paso Heights and to two apparently model school- linked services programs in Southern California. A decision was then made to try to create a neighborhood-based family services center on the campus of Prescott Elementary School. Despite lukewarm assur- ances of cooperation, the school principal proved reluctant in the end to provide space either in the school or on the grounds.

CISFAN had some small successes organizing the residents of a nearby public housing project and helping the Prescott school and its parents to obtain a state Healthy Start grant. However, it failed to inter- est its foundation funders in supporting a move to establish itself as a federally recognized community development corporation, because one was already operating nearby.

In July 1995 Bolton wrote a letter to the center steering committee that declared the Prescott project "not successful" and in effect at an end. He diagnosed as the main reasons for failure that Alameda County did not fulfill its promises of three years earlier; that "aggressive lead- ership" from elected officials was not forthcoming; that the project orga- nizers did not manage to give neighborhood residents "a big stake in the revitalization effort," such as jobs; that "we had no visible base in the neighborhood" nor enough connection "to any indigenous organi- zation with a strong neighborhood base"; and that the organizers were

"easily ignored or conned" by local actors playing sophisticated politi- cal games. "Oakland is a difficult place," he wrote.

Even though the CISFAN operation closed down in Prescott, as of June 1997 the Healthy Start activity had taken shape and had become a good focus for subsequent community development. A family life resource center is now located in the community, though not on the school grounds, and it is reinforcing the successful work of a federal Healthy Start project in the same community that the Alameda County Public Health Department had started in 1991. Observers think there may have been some slight carryover from the CISFAN efforts to those of the state Healthy Start, but probably not much.

Welfare to Work

Many welfare-to-work programs involve collaborative relationships among the local social services agency, adult schools, community col- leges, state employment agencies, community-based training organiza- tions, and substance abuse programs. An ideally functioning system to serve welfare-to-work clients would integrate services for a client at a single point in time and also over the course of the client's participation in the service delivery system.

The technology of moving welfare recipients into the labor force and then into jobs is moderately complicated. Recipients are quite heteroge- neous. In the early 1990s, during the era of the federal-state JOBS pro- grams, some 40 percent were short-term program users, down on their luck but reasonably able and willing to find and hold employment. Almost another 25 percent were relatively long-term users who faced physical or social or psychological barriers to work that could be con- sidered insuperable.51 Without immense luck, most of these would never be job-ready. The remaining recipients would have constituted the obvious target group in any reasonable system of triage. Almost but not quite job-ready, they would have presented various challenges to the JOBS program managers and line workers.

Program theorists were divided between two models. One, labor force attachment, held that the most important route to success for the almost-but-not-quite job-ready population was through teaching atti-

51. Gueron (19%). Gueron said "probably less than 25%" w h o "cannot work, or w h o could work only with special support" (p. 555).

tudes, behaviors, and skills that would encourage rapid entry into the labor force. The h u m a n capital model held that the best route was through the longer term process of attaining a bundle of marketable skills.

In 1991 and 1992 I worked on a study of how to improve agency productivity in the JOBS program for the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation of New York City. I visited sites in California, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Michigan. The most interesting of these was in Riverside County, California. For this book, I revisited the two sites in Oregon and added a third. I also spent a week in Denver in 1994, learning about the Denver Family Opportunity (DFO) welfare-to- work program.

Riverside County (Medium)

The Riverside County, California, program was a relatively pure expression of the labor force-attachment model.52 It was also a highly successful program in terms of getting clients into jobs and off the wel- fare rolls.53 The prevailing slogan, directed at case managers as well as clients, was "any job is a good job," because a job would provide imme- diate income, socialization in the world of work, self-knowledge about one's skills and career preferences, and potential contacts to search for the next job. Moreover, it aimed to boost the self-esteem of JOBS partic- ipants (called Greater Avenues for Independence, or GAIN in Cali- fornia) and sent the strong message that the participants could—and should—expect a lot from themselves, not just in the way of job search but in terms of a broader human experience. The county welfare depart- ment director was the indefatigable, and some would say visionary, promoter of the program, which proved to be strikingly successful. Another important element in the success of the program was the trans- formation of the GAIN organization into a high-involvement organiza- tion (see chapter 4).

Riverside GAIN developed virtually no working relationship with the state's employment development department, which GAIN man- agers took to be wholly uninterested in serving welfare clients. It relied to some degree on Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) organizations for