State shifting welfare focus, millions in funds to two Memphis nonprofits – The Tennessee Tribune

After he graduated from Frayser High School in 2002, Corey Barber decided to change the direction of his life. He enlisted in the Marines.

“I figured I’m dodging bullets in Frayser, I might as well get paid to do it in a place where I can do some good,” Barber said.

Many months later, Barber was dodging bullets in Iraq. One hit him in the back of his head. He suffered a traumatic brain injury. He still suffers from PTSD.

When he came home, he listened to music all day to try to sooth the ringing in his ears. Six years ago, he started a music production company, Impeccable Taste Productions.

“It was just me bootstrapping it,” said Barber, a married father of three. “I was not flourishing. We were struggling.”

A year ago, Barber decided to change the direction of his family’s life. He enrolled in GROWWTH, a new Memphis-based program that is a key part of Tennessee’s effort to reform welfare reform.

Participants must be eligible for some form of public assistance and be a parent or guardian of at least one child under age 18.

GROWWTH is one of seven pilot programs established across the state “to test innovative ways to support Tennessee families with low incomes to increase economic mobility and well-being.”

It features an 11-week workforce readiness program that includes job training and a microbusiness bootcamp. Those who enroll in GROWWTH Academy can earn “milestone payments” and college credit along the way.

Barber received $3,100 in payments for completing the academy and a financial wellness session and earning a credential in bookkeeping. He also completed the microbusiness bootcamp and several other requirements to qualify for a forgivable small business loan of up to $50,000 from River City Capital.

“It’s given me the skills and the confidence and the capital I needed to try to turn my idea and my passion into a stable business,” said Barber, 40. “I’m tired of just getting by. I want to get ahead.”

GROWWTH and the six other pilot programs are products of the 2021 Tennessee TANF Opportunity Act. TANF stands for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Tennessee’s version is called Families First. It was a product of the Clinton administration’s effort to “end welfare as we know it.”

State officials believe that one or more of the Tennessee Opportunity Pilot Programs will become a model for TANF reform here and across the country.

“We want to use TANF as a tool to transform the Tennessee safety net,” said Clarence Carter, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Human Services. “TANF is broken. The way it works is goofy. I’m sure that wasn’t the intent. We want to figure out what works.”

Safety net advocates are concerned that the state’s efforts to “figure out what works” will divert more TANF funds, which also provides direct cash assistance to low-income families with children.

Tennessee spends about 40 percent of its annual TANF funding on basic cash assistance — higher than the national average of 22 percent. But the number of Tennessee families with children receiving TANF cash assistance has plummeted from more than 100,000 to under 10,000 since the mid-1990s.

“It seems like the state is looking for more ways to reduce direct cash assistance to poor families,” said Jane Dimnwaobi of the Tennessee Justice Center. “But study after study shows that direct cash assistance is the most effective way to help lift families out of deep poverty.”

Loopholes in the 1996 TANF law allowed states to accumulate billions of dollars in unspent TANF funds. Tennessee was holding $800 million in unspent TANF funds, the largest surplus in the country.

In 2019, the Beacon Center, a Nashville-based free-market think tank, noted the massive surplus of unspent TANF funds in a report called “Poverty to Prosperity: Reforming Tennessee’s Public Assistance Programs.”

The report was widely circulated among state officials. It recommended that the state use the surplus funds to create “innovative transition services that reward working parents for each move up the economic ladder toward stability and prosperity like transportation and childcare supplements for families who are working.”

Two years later, legislators approved the Tennessee TANF Opportunity Act. Among other things, it directed the state to use surplus TANF funds to establish pilot programs to test and prove different “theories of change” — strategies to “help families to become stable and move beyond the need for safety net benefits in the long-term.”

Seven pilot programs each have been given $25 million and four years to make their case.

The Beacon Center report also pointed out that Shelby County “represents the largest caseload” for public assistance programs in the state.

“Tennessee should invest in pilot projects focused on poverty in Shelby County and opportunities to provide more supportive wraparound services for working age adults that need childcare, transportation, education, and employment training services,” the report recommended. “Successfully partnering with families in Shelby County to tip the scale in their favor to move from poverty to prosperity would have the single greatest economic impact for the state’s systems of support.”

Two of the seven pilot programs are in Memphis.

-GROWWTH (with an extra W) stands for Growing Relational and Occupational Wealth in West Tennessee Households. It’s testing the impact of offering payments to participants who achieve certain program or employment milestones. The program will serve all 21 West Tennessee counties.

-AFIRM (minus an ‘F’), which stands for A Father’s Involvement Really Matters. It’s testing the impact of parenting and co-parenting education, and “the effects of healthy marriage and relationship education on labor market outcomes and economic well-being.”

The program, run by Families Matters Inc., serves fathers in Shelby County with low incomes who have a newly established or pending child-support case.

It includes job training and placement, an 8-week parenting and fatherhood workshop, co-parenting agreements, and referrals to legal support services for child support matters, expungements, driver’s license reinstatements, and traffic ticket payments.

Both programs began enrolling participants in early 2023. As of Sept. 1, GROWWTH had enrolled 1,121 participants. Its goal is to serve 2,500 over three years. AFIRM had enrolled about 1,100 with a goal of 1,700.

AFIRM is enrolling only men.

“We’re trying to help fathers understand that they are part of the solution and help them change their perception of fatherhood,” said Carol Jackson, executive director of Families Matter, AFIRM’s fiscal agent.

Nearly all of the participants in the other six pilots are women.

“We’ve had some challenges we’re still working through,” said Stephanie Jenell Godwin-Chu, project director for GROWWTH, which is led by the Center for Regional Economic Enrichment at the University of Memphis. “We’re learning that eligibility does not equal sustainability. We need more interventions than we thought for those who are struggling,” particularly those with Medicaid eligibility and formerly incarcerated.

This past summer, Keisha Vinson, a GROWWTH Academy graduate, decided to change the direction of her life. She attended a jobs fair hosted by GROWWTH.

“I’m hoping I can walk out with something that will change my life,” said Vinson, 29, a single mother and graduate of Southwest Prep Academy, a charter school in South Memphis. “I’m trying to put myself in a better position.”

A few weeks later, Vinson found herself in a new position working as a school bus driver for First Student, the private company that provides bus service for Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

GROWWTH helped Vinson enroll in a local truck driving school. The organization covered her tuition while she earned a Commercial Driver’s License. She also earned several thousand dollars in milestone payments.

“I just always wanted to be a truck driver,” said Vinson. “I like to drive.

A school bus isn’t an 18-wheeler, but it’s a good start.”

As a GROWWTH graduate, Vinson’s employment will become part of a new state and federal system of tracking and measuring TANF’s effectiveness.

“We’ve been measuring the wrong things with TANF,” Carter said. “We measure inputs and outputs, how many applications we process, how many individuals and families we serve, how much money we spend, and so on. But those measures tell us very little about impact of those things on people’s lives.”

Carter’s department has contracted with MEF Associates of Virginia, the Urban Institute in Washington, and Vanderbilt University to measure and evaluate “the implementation, effectiveness, and cost” of the seven nonprofit pilot programs.

A new federal law requires states to “measure employment outcomes” by measuring each participant’s work and earnings two and four quarters after leaving TANF.

Tennessee is taking an additional step by turning its pilot programs into a sort of clinical trial for welfare reform.

The first 700 or so participants who enrolled in each pilot were randomly sorted into two groups to measure each program’s long-term impact.

The two “study groups” in AFIRM (and three other pilots) merely received a different combination of services.

But in GROWWTH (and two other pilots), one randomly selected study group received full services immediately, the other was told they’d have to wait a year. That approach created some problems.

“Everyone applies to the same program, but then half of them get the goods and half of them don’t,” Godwin-Chu said. “Those who didn’t were understandably angry or disappointed. These are people who have been let down so much. You hope they will come back, but most fall off completely.”

GROWWTH ended its randomizing in June after becoming the first pilot to reach its enrollment study goal of 700. All newly enrolled participants will be eligible for full GROWWTH services.

Carter says the study groups are necessary. Randomized control trials are “the gold standard in scientific evaluation,” Carter said. “And it was the stated desire of the governor and legislature to learn what works and is most effective.”

Safety net advocates say public officials already know what works: basic cash assistance.

“Robust research dating back to the 1960s show that basic cash assistance and near-cash assistance (such as the earned income tax credit, housing vouchers, or food stamps) provide a broad array of benefits immediately and well into adulthood for participating children,” the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy reported in 2023.

Those benefits include:

• Improved performance at school.
• Increased rates of college enrollment.
• Improved infant health, such as reduced premature births.
• Improved behavior among children.
• Reduced likelihood of homelessness.
• Increased earnings after reaching adulthood.

“For families who are victims of domestic violence, TANF can make the difference in achieving the financial independence needed to leave an unsafe situation,” KyPolicy reported.

KyPolicy issued its report in response to the first year of Kentucky’s overhaul of its TANF program.

While Tennessee is shifting hundreds of millions of TANF dollars into seven nonprofit pilot programs, Kentucky officials have doubled down on TANF’s basic cash assistance.

• Doubled the monthly cash benefit — for example, from $186 to $372 for individuals, and from $328 to $656 for a family of four.
• Doubled the one-time alternative cash benefit from a maximum of $1,300 to a maximum of $2,600.
• Doubled car repair assistance from $1,500 to $3,000 per household over a 12-month period.
• Increased transportation assistance from a maximum of $200 per month to $300 per month.
• Doubled assistance with required fees needed for a job (such as training, registration fees, testing, applications, etc.) from a maximum of $200 per fee to $400 per fee.
• Tripled relocation assistance to help participants who have to move for work from $500 to $1,500.
• Increased assistance for other work-related expenses such as uniforms, interview outfits or tools from $400 to $600 per 12-month-period.
• Raised the asset test for TANF eligibility from $2,000 to $10,000 per household, “especially crucial for older caregivers who may be raising children off of retirement savings.”
• Ended the two-parent penalty, which “allows more two-parent families to receive KTAP.”

Earlier this year, Chapin Hall, an independent policy research center at the University of Chicago, evaluated TANF overhauls in Kentucky, Indiana, and Wisconsin. All three states increased basic TANF benefits for families with children.

“An estimated 29,112 fewer children would have entered foster care nationally (from 2004 to 2016) if states had made it easier for families to receive TANF cash assistance,” Chapin Hall reported.

The nonpartisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington agrees.

“What we know now unequivocally is that cash works, and that families know best what helps them the most,” said Aditi Shrivastava, the Center’s deputy director for income security. “But some states still are making policy choices not to provide cash.”

The 2021 Tennessee TANF Opportunity Act increased the state’s maximum monthly TANF assistance from $277 to $387 a month. That’s a 40 percent increase but still more than a third lower than the national average.

“Tennessee’s monthly benefits are better but still not nearly enough to lift a family out of poverty,” TJC’s Dimnwaobi said. “It’s unclear what impact the pilot programs will have on direct cash assistance. So far, not much.”

Since February 2023, GROWWTH has spent about $5 million. About a tenth of that has gone directly to participants, in the form of $436,000 in milestone payments.

The program also has spent nearly $900,000 in “support services.” Those include enrollment fees, application fees and tuition for job or skills training, and childcare and transportation assistance while employed.

Those spending ratios hold for all seven pilots, which served 6,577 individuals and 1,723 households in 2023.

The pilots spent $24 million overall, but only $254,000 on milestone payments to 465 households. Only 198 households met employment goals.

Still, GROWWTH is growing.

The original 4-person staff has expanded to 26. The program has moved from an office into a suite in the FedEx Institute of Technology on campus. They’ve also opened a community office in the old YMCA building on Walker.

GROWWTH’s community partners include YMCA of Memphis & The Mid-South, Economic Opportunities, Workforce Innovations (Northwest and Southwest Tennessee), and Community LIFT.

“We’re getting great cooperation from everyone,” said Tracy Robinson, executive director of the UofM’s Center for Regional Economic Enrichment. “We’re learning as we grow but we believe this program will provide the direct, targeted support so many households need.”

Jessica Pratt, a 37-year-old single mother of a second grader in Memphis, heads one of those households.

Pratt, who fled a bad marriage several years ago, moved to Memphis from Missouri. “I had to outrun my past,” she said.

She tried to start her own daycare, but Covid and a lack of capital and business acumen shut her down. “Being low-income is like a curse,” she said. “No one has any capital to give you.”

She enrolled in GROWWTH Academy a year ago. The $1,900 she earned in milestone payments helped her pay bills while she completed her bachelor’s degree in education at the University of Memphis.

She graduated in December. About half of GROWWTH’s participants have more than a high school education.

Last spring, Pratt completed GROWWTH’s microbusiness bootcamp and qualified for a forgivable small business loan from River City Capital.

The loan is disbursed in three conditional payments. Participants must maintain a budget, provide documentation of spending, and remain in good standing with the program.

Pratt is using the training and the funds to bolster Do You Design, a side business she started to help make ends meet.

This fall, she enrolled in graduate school. She plans to earn a master’s degree in instruction and curriculum design.

“I’m using the loan to grow my side business. Then I’m going to use the profits to fund a daycare and my master’s degree to run it,” Pratt said. “That’s the plan.”