Ready, Willing & Able | The Doe Fund

The assemblage of high-end hors d'oeuvres is commonplace in a city with sophisticated culinary tastes, but two facts make the bustling scene noteworthy: the kitchen is in the middle of the South Bronx, and Miss Williams and most of her fellow workers are on welfare. They are members of a new four-month training program intended to give them enough skills and experience to qualify for entry-level jobs in restaurant and hotel kitchens.

The class is among dozens of new, innovative efforts in New York City and around the country by private groups -- most but not all of them nonprofit -- to move people from welfare to work.

In many ways, these small-scale programs represent a sharp counterpoint to New York City's mammoth workfare program, in which more than 32,000 welfare recipients sweep streets and answer phones in city agencies in return for public assistance. Proponents say the private approaches offer more promise because they teach people specific skills and provide many routes out of welfare -- instead of just handing recipients a broom or ordering them to file papers, as New York's program typically does.

In a series of articles published in April about workfare, The New York Times found little evidence that the program had provided many participants in New York City with marketable skills or that it had helped significant numbers of people leave welfare for full-time jobs. Many of the new programs have shown intriguing results, however, often because they identify growing sectors of the local economy and then provide short-term training for jobs in those industries.

A nonprofit group, working with a major brokerage house, has moved 52 mothers on welfare into jobs as administrative assistants and service representatives over the last three years. Another nonprofit group, linked with a hotel chain, has helped 24 single adults on welfare get full-time hotel jobs in the last year. Even proponents of these programs acknowledge that these numbers are small, but they do suggest that combining specific, short-term training with work experience can lead people to full-time jobs.

Independent experts who study welfare around the country say small-scale models sometimes cannot be adapted to the large-scale needs of cities and states, which have to move hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients into the labor force under the overhaul of welfare approved by Congress in 1996. But proponents say some of the new welfare-to-work programs could readily be expanded to help more people.

A much admired small, private program in Chicago called Project Match has been reconfigured for use on a broader scale in a conventional welfare center there as well as in Iowa, Ohio, Tennessee and Maryland.

Since research shows that workfare has not moved many people into full-time jobs in cities and towns around the country over the last 20 years, many experts say local and state governments have incentive to try some newer approaches. That may apply particularly in places with high unemployment, like New York, where the basic strategy used in most states -- simply sending out welfare recipients to search for jobs -- has had only mixed success.

"There are a lot of different things that can work, and the most important thing that a city or state can do is not to impose a narrow idea of what welfare reform can be," said Julie Strawn, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a Washington-based research and advocacy group.

Even New York City, with by far the nation's largest workfare program, has shown interest in combining work with training. About 12 percent of workfare participants also take classes for a high school equivalency degree or in basic English. In rare cases, welfare recipients are given workfare credit for participating in an experimental program.

Miss Williams for example, is technically in workfare, even though she spends her days learning how to cook. A cheerful 45-year-old mother of five who has been on public assistance longer than she cares to say, Miss Williams knows first-hand the limitations of conventional workfare.

"I was working in the Bronx criminal courts, cleaning up toilets," she said. "It was awful. There was no future in it."

Since March, she has come every weekday to the industrial kitchen on the ground floor of a former hospital that was renovated by a nonprofit group, the Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation, on East 168th Street in the Morrisania section of the Bronx.

The 10-story building has 132 apartments and vast space to accommodate a health clinic, the kitchen complex and a day-care training center, among other things.

Miss Williams, one of nine students in the culinary program's first class, has learned basic cooking skills, food handling and sanitation as well as job-search techniques in the all-day program. "I'm learning so much here and I love it," she said. When Miss Williams and her classmates complete the course next month, they should be ready to work as prep-cooks in professional kitchens. An essential part of their training has been preparing hors d'oeuvres and other foods for the organization's new food service, which has catered events for the Legal Aid Society, the Ms. Foundation and other nonprofit organizations.

"Getting people off of welfare and creating jobs go hand in hand," said Nancy Biberman, president of the Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation. "You've got to do both."

The new welfare-to-work programs share some important characteristics. Most emphasize flexibility, offering participants an array of paths to work. Many train people for specific jobs by linking with corporations. And many are strikingly entrepreneurial.

The nonprofit sponsors still depend heavily on government financing. They supplement these revenues with money from their own businesses and with fees that corporations sometimes pay while welfare participants are in training.

Besides the catering service, the women's development corporation trains welfare mothers to become licensed home day-care providers. The corporation also teamed up with a for-profit company, America Works, to teach welfare recipients job-readiness skills and interviewing techniques before sending them out to find a job. America Works gets paid only when someone is hired.

"There are a lot of options for people here," Ms. Biberman said. "This is not a one-size-fits-all approach."

The same could be said for another nonprofit group that got its start in building housing for the poor, the Common Ground Community. The group rebuilt the Times Square Hotel, a 652-room S.R.O. on West 43d Street and Eighth Avenue, four years ago, filling it