Florida’s regional workforce boards help connect employers with workers. In addition to providing career training, the boards are also charged with helping transition people from getting federal public assistance to becoming self-sufficient. But this year’s state budget cut the welfare transition program. And that’s making it harder for the boards to serve people with the lowest incomes.
Yolanda Brooks lives in Miami. She says, after she was laid off in February from her job at the nonprofit Youth Services International, it got really hard to support her children and pay the bills.
“I’ve even found myself being without any electric, power, for almost a week,” she says.
And she says that was with her federal TANF money—that’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. To get help with her job search, Brooks went to a career training center run by the South Florida Workforce Investment Board.
“I mean, I even have a specific person, David Gilbert. I mean, without him, I know for sure, I would have been homeless. Homeless and stressed out with two kids living in a shelter,” she says.
For tens of thousands of people every month, Florida’s 24 regional workforce boards help with training, finding job leads and placing them in career shadowing so they can learn skills.
Most funding for career centers comes from the federal government. But for families earning up to 185 percent of the federal poverty level before taxes, the centers use Welfare Transition dollars from the state to provide additional support, including childcare.
Brooks says, “For a lot of people that I know that are on TANF, that is a big, big problem—daycare. And without daycare, they can’t get a job.”
This year, the Legislature cut the workforce boards’ Welfare Transition budget by $15 million—that’s 25 percent less than what it was last year.
“That was helping to pay for people to get to and from work,” says Jim McShane, CEO of WORKFORCE plus. That’s the workforce board for Leon, Gadsden and Wakulla counties. Directors there recently looked at whether they could continue providing gas cards and bus passes for Welfare Transition clients. They chose to wait and see whether funding is restored during the upcoming legislative session before they decide.
McShane says, when boards stop providing Welfare Transition services, the number of clients participating in the program could drop below federally required minimums, and that could lead to even more funding lost.
“One of the things that we don’t think the Legislature has considered is the fact that these dollars will probably affect the federal dollars next year and reduce the state’s funding in the whole federal welfare side by $45 million,” he says.
McShane says workforce boards could not take that cut after a decade of flat or decreasing federal budgets without further reducing services.
“The whole idea of Welfare to Work, back in the year 2001 when it started, was to get people off of sitting at home and getting a check, and getting them into work,” he says.
Reducing unemployment is an often repeated top priority for Florida Gov. Rick Scott. But some regional workforce board directors say they have no choice but to cut Welfare Transition services intended to help people get jobs.
Workforce Central Florida Program Director Joyce Hinton says she’s laid off 15 case workers since July. She says, “Their job primarily was mapping out an employment plan, processing people who maybe wanted to go to post-secondary education, or helping those job seekers who were ready to reenter into the workforce—so, helping them look for work, doing their resumes.”
Hinton says the state has given career centers an automated, streamlined check-in process to replace the laid-off employees. That means Welfare Transition clients enter information into a computer instead of talking to a case worker.
In Miami, Yolanda Brooks says her support services have been a life saver. Without a car, bus passes from her workforce board are how she gets to job interviews. And she says the nonprofit where she’s been career shadowing just told her they’d hire her full time if they get a federal grant next month.