Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [76]
The success of welfare reform was due to more than better policies. There was also a conscious effort to expand the job market for people coming off welfare by organizing a large number of employers to recruit and hire their new employees from the welfare ranks. The partnership was established by my friend Eli Segal, who had earlier set up the AmeriCorps program. The Welfare to Work Partnership began in 1997 with several hundred businesses committed to hiring people off the welfare rolls. Thanks to Eli and the evangelical zeal of the partnership’s charismatic president and CEO, Rodney Carroll, an African-American businessman who took a leave from his job at UPS, its membership increased to more than twenty thousand firms of all sizes. By the end of 2000, they had hired more than one million people from the public assistance rolls, UPS alone accounting for almost 66,000 of them. Even those numbers underestimate the impact of the partnership’s effort. The publicity the partnership received and the good results the firms achieved doubtless encouraged other businesses to follow suit.
One of the employers, infoUSA of Omaha, Nebraska, a mass-mailing operation, has made a concerted effort to hire people who were on welfare, as well as people who are disabled or who have to support themselves after getting out of unsafe domestic situations. Since 2001, it has hired more than one thousand of them, many of whom have become long-term employees. InfoUSA works with the Iowa School for the Deaf to train hearing-impaired employees and helps get transportation assistance for those without cars. Transportation is free for the first thirty days, then costs $20 a month. The company also works with lending institutions to help employees buy their own cars, and with the state of Nebraska to make sure they get the child-care assistance for which they are qualified. InfoUSA provides counseling and advice on how to get protective orders for employees who are victims of abuse. A couple of years ago I had the chance to visit with infoUSA’s employees, and they seemed happy and self-confident, clearly enjoying their work. The Welfare to Work Partnership organized and expanded the job market for people who desperately wanted to escape welfare and build independent lives.
As president, I worked to bring distressed communities as well as welfare recipients into the economic mainstream with incentives like the Empowerment Zone and New Markets tax credits, and the establishment of community development banks, and microenterprise lending programs. After I left office, my foundation continued this work through the Urban Enterprise Initiative outlined in chapter 8, helping low-income workers qualify for the earned income tax credit and trying to move them away from dealing with excessively expensive lending and check-cashing operations and into becoming part of the financial mainstream.
While government incentives and foundation efforts in these areas are helpful, the truth is there is money to be made by investing in underserved communities and groups. Since leaving pro basketball, Magic Johnson has done very well investing in minority communities, including Harlem. So has Ron Burkle, founder of Yucaipa investment fund, which has earned strong returns for its labor union and public pension funds investors by targeting underserved communities and troubled companies with worker-friendly policies. When I left office, the opportunity to work with Yucaipa was the only private sector offer I accepted, because I wanted to continue working to bring economic opportunities to low-income communities, and I thought Yucaipa could prove they’re good investments. In the last five years, Yucaipa brought Piccadilly