Ohio Works First
Ohio Works First is the financial assistance portion of the state’s Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, which provides cash benefits to needy families for up to 36 months.
Who is eligible?
Families with children that meet a “gross monthly income test” may be eligible. Gross monthly income includes unearned income – for example, Social Security benefits – and earned income before taxes. Since July 1, 2014, the gross monthly income limit for a family of three has been $825. This typically increases annually. If a family member works and pays for child care, the cost of child care may be deducted.
Resources such as a car or home ownership are not considered in determining eligibility.
In addition:
• Minor children living with guardians other than their parents may be eligible for “child-only” assistance, with no time limit.
• Women who are at least six months pregnant may be eligible for individual assistance.
• Unmarried minor parents and pregnant minors must be in approved, adult-supervised living arrangements or live with a parent, legal guardian, relative or legal custodian.
• Most adults and minor heads of household must participate in work activities. Allowable work activities include such things as on-the-job training, community service and education directly related to employment.
• In order to receive benefits, adults and minor heads of household must sign a self-sufficiency contract.
• Failure to sign the self-sufficiency contract without good cause can result in denial or termination of benefits, which would affect the entire family. The contract explains the participant’s rights and responsibilities and what the county department of job and family services will do to help the participant become self-sufficient.
Who is not eligible?
Assistance groups are not eligible if they include an individual who:
• Does not sign the self-sufficiency contract
• Does not comply with the terms of the contract
• Has income that exceeds the amount for the assistance group size
• Has received benefits fraudulently
Other individuals who are not eligible include:
• Fugitive felons
• Probation/parole violators
• Individuals convicted for fraudulently misstating where they live in order to receive benefits.
How much are payments?
Ohio Works First monthly assistance for a family of three is currently $473. Benefits are issued through either the Ohio Pathway card, which is a pre-paid debit MasterCard, or deposited directly into a checking or savings account. The Ohio Pathway card can be used at MasterCard member banks, ATMs and any retailers that accept MasterCard.
How to apply
Applications for Ohio Works First assistance may be made online at http://ODJFSBenefits.Ohio.gov or by filling out the “Request for Cash, Food and Medical Assistance” (JFS 7200) form and submitting it to the appropriate county agency.
Source: Ohio Department of Job and Family Services
TANF work participation rate
States must engage a target share of families receiving assistance in a specific list of countable work activities for at least 30 hours a week (20 hours a week for single parents with one or more children under 6), or face financial penalties. The target rate is 50 percent but is adjusted for states based on certain criteria.
Ninety percent of two-parent families must be engaged in countable work activities for 35 combined hours a week between the two parents (55 combined hours if they receive child care subsidies).
Teen parents under 20 may participate if they maintain attendance at a secondary school or the equivalent or participate in education directly related to employment for at least 20 hours per week during the month.
Countable activities
The federal law lists 12 categories of countable activities. Nine of these are called “core” activities, which can be counted for all hours of participation:
• Unsubsidized employment
• Subsidized private sector employment
• Subsidized public sector employment
• Work experience
• On-the-job training
• Job search and job readiness assistance
• Community service programs
• Vocational educational training, for up to twelve months; and
• Providing child care services to an individual who is participating in a community service program.
Three activities can only be counted when combined with at least 20 hours per week (averaged across a month) of a core activity, and are referred to as “non-core” activities:
• Job skills training directly related to employment
• Education directly related to employment; and
• Satisfactory attendance at secondary school or in a course of study leading to a high school equivalency certificate
Sources: Code of Federal Regulations, Center for Law and Social Policy
What the law did
Before the 1996 reform, states in most instances were required to provide cash assistance to anyone eligible without mandatory time limits or work requirements. The federal government turned funding over to states in the form of block grants capped at $16.5 billion with some latitude as long as the federal dollars were spent on four goals:
• Assist needy families so children could be cared for in their home or a relative’s.
• End needy parents’ reliance on welfare by promoting job preparation, work and marriage.
• Prevent and reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies.
• Encourage two-parent families.
TANF work participation rate
States must engage a target share of families receiving assistance in a specific list of countable work activities for at least 30 hours a week (20 hours a week for single parents with one or more children under 6), or face financial penalties. The target rate is 50 percent but is adjusted for states based on certain criteria.
Ninety percent of two-parent families must be engaged in countable work activities for 35 combined hours a week between the two parents (55 combined hours if they receive child care subsidies).
Teen parents under 20 may participate if they maintain attendance at a secondary school or the equivalent or participate in education directly related to employment for at least 20 hours per week during the month.
Countable activities
The federal law lists 12 categories of countable activities. Nine of these are called “core” activities, which can be counted for all hours of participation:
• Unsubsidized employment
• Subsidized private sector employment
• Subsidized public sector employment
• Work experience
• On-the-job training
• Job search and job readiness assistance
• Community service programs
• Vocational educational training, for up to twelve months; and
• Providing child care services to an individual who is participating in a community service program.
Three activities can only be counted when combined with at least 20 hours per week (averaged across a month) of a core activity, and are referred to as “non-core” activities:
• Job skills training directly related to employment
• Education directly related to employment; and
• Satisfactory attendance at secondary school or in a course of study leading to a high school equivalency certificate
Sources: Code of Federal Regulations, Center for Law and Social Policy
What the law did
Before the 1996 reform, states in most instances were required to provide cash assistance to anyone eligible without mandatory time limits or work requirements. The federal government turned funding over to states in the form of block grants capped at $16.5 billion with some latitude as long as the federal dollars were spent on four goals:
• Assist needy families so children could be cared for in their home or a relative’s.
• End needy parents’ reliance on welfare by promoting job preparation, work and marriage.
• Prevent and reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies.
• Encourage two-parent families.
A landmark reform bill inspired by Republicans and signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton 20 years ago this week proclaimed an end to “welfare as we have come to know it.”
But while the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act resulted in a dramatic decrease in cash assistance — cutting millions of people from the assistance rolls — an investigation by this news organization shows the welfare-to-work law fell far short of its promise of a “new beginning” for those in poverty’s grip.
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Ohio Gov. John Kasich: 20 years after reform, welfare still broken
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At the signing, attended by members of both parties, Clinton said the bill would “help people to go to work so they can stop drawing a welfare check and start drawing a paycheck.”
Time limits were placed on how long a person could receive benefits, and recipients were given work requirements. The new law also tightened conditions for getting food stamps and reduced welfare assistance for immigrants.
The result was stark. About 5.1 million families in 1994 received payments during cash welfare’s peak under the former program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. By the end of 2014, the number receiving assistance through the new program — Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) — had dwindled to about 1.7 million families. Children account for about three-quarters of the four million individuals now receiving cash assistance.
But while fewer Americans are getting cash welfare payments, there is little indication they are better off. The number of families in poverty — and the number in what researchers call deep poverty — has increased since the bill was signed.
“TANF just basically has become the emblematic example of the shredding of the safety net,” said Michael R. Smalz, senior attorney at the Ohio Poverty Law Center.
Smalz expressed a common complaint, that recipients who were kicked off the rolls weren’t given the training needed to land decent-paying jobs.
“There’s been a drastic reduction, a purging of the rolls for various reasons,” he said. So only a tiny fraction of Ohio children who are living in poverty are now receiving some form of cash assistance.”
Not everyone views the law as a failed effort. Matt A. Mayer, president of the right-leaning Opportunity Ohio, said TANF worked as advertised during the first decade, pushing able-bodied adults into the workforce.
“That should be celebrated. It wasn’t as we found, dead-end jobs. It wasn’t temporary,” Mayer said. “This was a real, permanent change and we drove the dependency rolls down quite significantly.”
But a rapidly changing economy and the Great Recession exposed chinks in the “one-size-fits-all” public assistance program as whole sectors of employment evaporated and a skills gap developed for those remaining, Mayer said.
“Where we see problems, is frankly, there are job vacancies in well-paying jobs where there’s not people who can do those jobs from a technical trade standpoint,” he said.
Even one of the main architects of the bill says fixes are needed today.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who sponsored the 1996 U.S. House bill that turned into the law Clinton signed, requested a federal waiver last year from stringent work-hour requirements so more time could be put toward training, skills development and education.
The Republican governor became the first in the nation to ask for relief after the Obama administration opened up the possibility in 2012. U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, was part of a bipartisan group of lawmakers who introduced a bill in June calling for changes in the TANF rules.
TANF continues to receive a huge investment of public funds. Ohio Works First — the TANF program in Ohio — gets $728 million from the feds and $450 million from the state. The program is administered under Kasich’s director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, Cynthia Dungey, who told federal lawmakers last year that the national TANF program had strayed from its original purpose.
There is little ability to customize casework to a client’s employment needs, Dungey told a U.S. House subcommittee, arguing that caseworkers waste valuable time doing “mathematical gymnastics” documenting their clients’ activities.
Dungey also said too many of the workshops run by outside contractors give clients “menial tasks disconnected from the skills needed in the job market.”
“It’s hard to believe such programs were a part of Congress’ original vision for welfare reform in 1996,” she testified.
‘It isn’t worth it’
Those who have been in the program say there is an Achilles heel for all welfare to work programs: What if there is no work?
“This town doesn’t have a whole lot of job opportunities,” said Christina Wallace of Springfield. “You can’t find a job in Springfield unless you want fast food and a lot of people don’t want to make a career out of fast food. I’ve had a lot of temp services calling me for jobs on the other side of Columbus. That’s a long way to drive for $9 an hour. It isn’t worth it.”
Wallace, 41, signed up for TANF not long after the law went into effect in 1997. She had separated from her husband, had two small children and was homeless, a plight often shared by many recipients.
She has since worked a string of subsistence-level jobs: six years as a restaurant server, then sporadically at temp jobs including washing bio-hazard-contaminated laundry at a medical facility and most recently as an inspector at a heat treating plant. The jobs paid $9 to $11 an hour. She finds herself out of work again; still listed on her resume is a Windows 98 certificate earned while on TANF years ago.
Natasha Ohlinger of Springfield said the four months she spent on TANF stuck with her.
“If I were to go back to work today I’d know exactly what to do, what I’d have to have ready for an interview, how I’d need to be dressed, how I need to present to myself,” said Ohlinger, 31, who says she helps out with boyfriend’s tree-trimming and asphalt business.
Now a mother of five children, Ohlinger said she entered the program when she was about 24 and needed help providing for her oldest two boys.
“At the time I was homeless,” she said. “I just lost my house. I was trying to get everything together.”
Skills gap
Studies show TANF work requirements push people into the labor market sooner, but at the expense of stable, long-term employment that comes from further education and training. While results vary widely by state — and even county-to-county — one study showed as few as 22.1 percent and no more than 40.8 percent of TANF recipients achieved stable employment three to five years after enrolling in the program.
“If I had a magic wand I would give everyone the skills and the training they need in order to fill the jobs we have in the county,” said Patrick Bailey, deputy assistant director, Montgomery County Department of Job and Family Services. “We have a whole bunch of jobs. A lot of the problem is we don’t have individuals with the skills and abilities to do those jobs. If we could match those it would make a huge difference.”
Sade Seidynaly of Dayton is grateful for the assistance she received through Ohio Works First. It helped her through a rocky time, she said. But one of her work assignments was sorting shoes at Goodwill, a job that she says did nothing to help set her up for more lucrative work.
Seidynaly said she signed up for assistance through Ohio Works after a childhood of “wacko parenting,” and later bouts of homelessness and a bad marriage left her with two small children to care for. Now a single parent with three children — ages 2, 8 and 9 — Seidynaly long ago exhausted the 36 months of cash assistance Ohio allows.
After sporadic, low-wage employment — made more difficult because of the inability to find affordable childcare – Seidynaly was hired recently as a hair stylist at a salon.
Poverty experts say Seidynaly’s story is all too familiar.
The shortcomings of TANF put far too many Americans into precarious futures relegated to low-paying, unstable, part-time or temporary work with unpredictable hours, Smalz said.
“The bottom line is that hasn’t translated into greater economic well being,” he said. “It certainly hasn’t translated into lower rates of poverty or child poverty and in some cases for those people who are out of the workforce for some time it has translated into much greater levels of extreme poverty.”
Barriers to employment
To be self-sufficient in Ohio without any government supports — the program’s desired outcome — a family of one adult and two children would need an annual income of $27,644, or $13.30 an hour, according to a 2015 report to Gov. Kasich from the Ohio Workgroup to Reduce Reliance on Public Assistance.
But it appears few unskilled single-parent workers will be able to inch above that income threshold any time soon.
Of the top 10 jobs projected to offer new employment in the state through 2022, seven average below $13.30 an hour and two others barely rise above that wage. The most job openings are forecast for food service and fast food workers who averaged $8.75 an hour in 2013.
Registered nurse — seventh on the list with an average pay of $29.10 an hour — was the only job with compensation comfortably above the governor’s workgroup figure.
The problem is, nursing and other in-demand high-skill jobs require advanced training and often post-secondary degrees that are beyond the reach of most of those in the Ohio Works First program. Drug use, lack of child care and transportation and an often complicated home life are all barriers to a successful transition to the workplace.
In 2012, just seven percent of those counted in the participation rate were in educational and training programs.
The existing rules, too, pose a barrier, officials say.
While TANF recipients can count education toward their “core” activities, allowing them to stay in the program and continue receiving assistance, that credit lasts only 12 months. It’s difficult to earn some certificates during that time, officials say, and virtually impossible to earn a degree.
“I don’t think 12 months is enough,” said Bailey, who helps oversee the program in Montgomery County. “When there’s not a lot of flexibility it hurts our ability to really help people the way we would like.”
The state’s still-pending waiver request asks for 36 months, which Bailey says is much more realistic.
“If they get that degree, they’re probably never going to be back in (our) door,” he said.
Benefit drop
Not only are fewer families on assistance as a result of the 1996 law, the amount of assistance has been reduced substantially.
Almost a third of the states have never raised the monthly benefit, ignoring 20 years of inflation. In Mississippi, each member in a family of three receives $1.86 a day. In Arizona, benefits dropped in half when factoring in inflation.
The benefit today for a single-parent family of three in Ohio is $473 a month. Although that amount has been raised since the law was enacted, in real dollars it’s about 9.1 percent less.
Linda Cook, a senior attorney who works with Smalz at the Ohio Poverty Law Center, suggests the reduction in the rolls is due to a wanton state effort to push as many people off the program as possible. Improvement in the work participation rate is the only measure by which TANF is judged, she said, and failure to meet the rate draws fiscal penalties.
“There are restrictions on the amount of time participants can spend in certain activities, so it really puts pressure on states to perform,” Cook said. “Ohio, sadly, has chosen to improve their performance basically by eliminating or reducing the number of people on the rolls.”
A 2013 report commissioned by the state noted that work participation rates had improved not by providing services or moving people to employment, but rather by sanctioning recipients out of the system.
State statistics for this past July showed only 12 percent left the program because they earned enough to no longer qualify for assistance.
“As caseloads decline, well, maybe those indicators look really good. But those seem to me to be the wrong measure of effectiveness,” said Hannah Halbert, a policy liaison with the left-leaning group Policy Matters Ohio. “I think that some of the reasons that we are in this place with TANF and the reforms is that it was based around some assumptions around poverty and work that are certainly wrong now.”
Michael McCreight, an assistant director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, said the state has done its best to serve those in need, initiating a new program July 1 that targets 16- to 24-year-olds and offers more comprehensive case management.
But McCreight said changes are needed on the federal level.
“The way (TANF) is sliced and diced really puts the caseworker at a disadvantage meeting the individual needs of a particular client,” he said.
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