Neighborhood MATCH Program

It wasn't the scolding, grounding, or hospital bills that most terrified 18-year-old Petra Trevino when she phoned her mother from the side of the road last year with news of a smashed, totaled car. She wasn't crying over missed dates or canceled road trips. She was staring welfare straight in the eye, and she was devastated.

"After the wreck, I didn't have any transportation to work, so I had to put in two weeks' notice, but I was dependent on a ride to work and finally just had to quit," Trevino says of the crash repercussions. "I was a single mom, I was unemployed, and I couldn't really do anything about it because I didn't have a vehicle."

Petra's story is a common one. Pregnant at 16, she dropped out of high school and ultimately moved in with her mother when her young marriage began shredding at the seams. An assistant manager at a Houston-area fast food restaurant, Petra could save very little extra money each month. Without transportation, she was also without options.

Several months after applying for federal assistance, the teenage mother caught wind of a welfare-to-work program that sounded plausible, credible, even attractive. The program, called MATCH (Mills Access to Training and Career Help), was just in its infancy in the Houston area, but had already generated a great deal of publicity and buzz through targeted billboards, radio spots, and 14,000 informational postcards sent to local residents on welfare.

"I first heard about the MATCH program through a friend," Petra says. "She encouraged me to come out to a job fair and find out what it was all about. I took advantage of the free transportation for a while, but now I've got an assistant manager position and my own car. And I'm off welfare, thank God."

A Wow! project in overdrive, the MATCH program was born last year in the Hunters Point area of San Francisco, where the Mills Corp. -- a real estate development company -- is building a shopping mall alongside the new and much-debated 49ers football stadium. The problem of hiring dependable, dedicated full and part-time employees in that lower-class region of the city has concerned Mills since the project's proposal. But when Jim Dausch, senior executive vice president of development for Mills, began talking with the San Francisco chamber of commerce and local non-profit foundations about opening the mall's retail and service jobs to disadvantaged residents of Hunters Point, Vice President Gore's office took notice. In August 1998, Dausch met with the Presidential Community Empowerment Board and quickly decided the welfare-to-work project could not wait for Ed DeBartolo and his 49ers. Conveniently, the Katy Mills mall outside Houston was just 14 months from completion and a prime testing ground.

"We needed to see whether we could marshal both federal resources and programs and local resources and programs with our own efforts to do a better job hiring people, particularly disadvantaged people and those coming off welfare, into jobs with a career path and benefits," Dausch says about the decision to launch a program in Texas. "The Mills malls have, on average, 3,500 full and part-time job openings when they start...but Katy Mills is roughly 25 miles from downtown Houston. Most of the people who need entry-level jobs are in urban areas or far rural locales. The challenge for us was to recruit people where they live, but then get them -- on a regular, convenient basis -- out to jobs in the suburbs."

An overwhelming percentage of the 800 people who attended Mills' 10 local job fairs this summer and fall were single mothers without any means of private transportation. Many of them had little or no work experience, and understandable qualms about leaving their children and entering the work force -- perhaps for the first time.

"The first week of training is about self-esteem," says local organizer Sue Lovell, who was hired by Mills to establish the transportation, childcare, and training programs associated with MATCH. "When you interview, look someone in the eye. Don't be afraid to do so. You are worth something. You can do this."

Lovell began working on MATCH last February, and in roughly six months she and her colleagues managed to establish partnerships with local and national government agencies such as the Houston-Galveston Area Council -- the local purveyor of workforce funds. The senior transportation planner there helped Mills organize a free transportation system for MATCH participants who live prohibitively far from Katy Mills. Relationships with the Urban League and United Way helped get the word out to potential candidates. And the Texas Workforce Development Board helped them tap into federal and state funds specifically set aside for childcare. Even with the appropriate funds in place, Lovell said she found herself nudging tradition and rigidity. For example, most child-care facilities' normal operating hours simply don't gel with the schedule of a mall employee who is counting the cash drawer until 11 p.m.