Off the Dole

It was nowhere near payday, and Lisa Halverson was down to $10 and a package of diapers. While she enjoyed working as a typist in Minneapolis, day-care expenses for her two preschoolers, at $160 a week, ate most of her $207 take-home pay. Halverson felt she had no choice but to go on welfare. “The hardest thing I ever had to do,” she says, “was to tell my boss I couldn’t afford to work anymore.”

Not so fast, Lisa. Instead of paying her to stay home, welfare officials encouraged her to keep her low-paying job and offered to pay all but $25 of her monthly day-care bill. That was in 1994, and today it’s clear that Minnesota’s investment in Halverson paid off. She got off the dole after a year, and now earns a $45,000 salary as a manager at a regional telephone company. She has never married, but Halverson, 29, says she would like to change that too.

Every state likes to trot out its welfare-to-work successes, but Minnesota has more than most. Last week a comprehensive evaluation of the state’s unique approach to welfare reform–an initiative that requires recipients to work but initially subsidizes them–showed impressive results. Since the state’s reform went into effect in 1994, employment among welfare recipients swelled 35%, and other measures of well-being–from marriage rates to school success–also improved.

The new study, conducted by Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a nonpartisan research center, was lauded across political lines, and could move more states to follow Minnesota’s lead. Today most states focus on reducing the welfare case load through short-time limits on benefits, offering little of the transitional help that Minnesota credits for its success.

–By Ron Stodghill II/Chicago