It’s been a quarter century since President Bill Clinton and his embattled campaign to reform welfare brought the nation’s eyes on Kansas City, LINC and the Full Employment Council.

The President had signed a bi-partisan bill in 1996 that would make many people’s welfare eligibility contingent on work — an action many feared would bring devastating effects, especially on children in chronically poor households.

In Kansas City, the President said, a collaboration already under way between LINC and the FEC could show the nation what was possible.

“(Other) states and communities now have a responsibility to create a story like yours,” he said.

It’s been a hard road to today, helping poor or traumatized households enter and thrive in the workforce. And LINC didn’t necessarily agree with the restrictions in the new law.

But LINC and the FEC’s work with families helped lay a path for welfare reform that has played a key role in what a newly released study is calling “a fantastic success story”:

Since the early 1990s, child poverty in America has fallen by more than half.

The Child Trends study identified two major factors for the historic decline. First, more parents, especially single mothers, were able to persist and thrive in the workforce than perhaps was expected.

Even more impactful, lawmakers began looking for other ways to support the working poor, expanding benefits like the earned income tax credit, food stamps and the child tax credit. These helped families balance work obligations and child care.

The percent of children in poverty, according to the study, fell from 27.9% in 1993 to 11.4% in 2019. The number of children living in poverty was 19.4 million in 1993 and 8.4 million in 2019.

“This is an astounding decline in child poverty,” Dana Thomson, a co-author of the Child Trends study, told the New York Times. “Its magnitude is unequaled in the history of poverty measurement.”

Even before the Clinton administration and Congress were shaping a welfare reform bill, LINC and the Full Employment Council were already changing the local welfare landscape.

There’s a reason, when Clinton spoke in Kansas City at the FEC headquarters, Sept. 10, 1996, that FEC Director Clyde McQueen sat at the President’s right and LINC President Gayle Hobbs sat at his left.

“These people in Kansas City know what they are doing,” the President said. “It’s miraculous what they are doing.”

LINC’s Caring Communities organization was less than five years old then in its mission to improve the social services system and was building critical partnerships, including its work with the FEC, which was established in 1984.

LINC and the FEC targeted single parents and children in poverty to build a crucial comprehensive support system with early childhood care, housing, healthcare, legal aid and more. Other target populations included children in foster care and people on Medicaid.

The FEC, as the administrator of the public workforce system, focused on job training and skill-building to lead workers in these populations to careers in sync with their interests and aptitudes.

The drive was not just toward employment, McQueen said, “but retention in that career.”

The LINC and FEC project in 1994 had obtained federal waivers through the state to adapt welfare regulations so that employers who hired workers on welfare would have the value of the workers’ welfare checks diverted to the business as an incentive and to subsidize higher wages.

Under the waiver, the workers hired off of welfare also would keep benefits such as Medicaid and child care support — benefits that had been lost when welfare recipients found employment.

Kansas City, the USA Today reported in 1997, had become “one the nation’s leading welfare-to-work laboratories.”

“This is hard work,” Hobbs wrote in 1996 in the American Public Welfare Association’s Public Welfare magazine. “It is easy to underestimate the difficulty . . . and the resolve necessary to implement welfare-to-work efforts.”

Early on, too many of the workers from welfare did not last with their new employers. LINC and the FEC redoubled efforts and increased career training, adding more focus on soft skills and post-employment case management.

“It didn’t just matter how many people you put to work but how long they stayed on the job,” McQueen said. “We broke ground on that nationally as a community, because the national debate (in welfare reform) had just looked at how many people you put to work. It didn’t look at how long did they stay. It didn’t look at how much money they were making, what type of careers did they get into and the cost of the effort.”

Kansas City and other communities making reforms, Hobbs said, “will need to focus on a participant’s employability instead of eligibility.”

LINC founder Bert Berkley knew the task was vast.

“If people are to be self-sufficient, they need jobs,” he said. “To get jobs, they need skills, transportation, along with affordable housing and affordable daycare. To hold jobs they need encouragement, self-esteem and a fair wage.”

LINC’s broadening work for children and families has carried on through Caring Communities sites now anchored at more than 50 schools in the Kansas City area, and in programs like LINCWorks that train and support parents who are receiving state aid. LINCWorks’ team of advocates help parents build career and life skills to break free from dependency.

LINC has subsidized legal aid for families, helping them get ahead of housing crises and staving off evictions. LINC has also helped hundreds of households get access to rent and utility bill assistance to help them stay in their homes and their children stay in school.

The FEC continues to provide equitable opportunities for employment, helping recruit and prepare a workforce in collaboration with business and industry in Kansas City, helping families with debt-free training, supportive services, and ongoing assistance.

The work of this systems-based partnership, most importantly, has proven to be sustainable, McQueen said.

LINC’s regional family support system, funded by the U.S. and Missouri social services departments, and the FEC’s work funded by the U.S. and Missouri offices of labor and workforce development, has lifted parents and their children into higher-paying careers, bringing them benefits crucial to early childhood health and development.

“This success has been sustained for over a quarter of a century,” McQueen said, “and continues to grow in innovation, efficiency and performance.”

But the road ahead, in Kansas City and nationwide, remains steep.

Hardship and insecurity still weigh over millions of American households, the Child Trends study warned. More than 20 million Americans are still poor today.

The American investments in families and individuals must continue, it said.

“The lessons of this decline provide powerful insights into how we can continue to reduce child poverty,” it said. “By better understanding what progress has been made—and what led to it—policymakers will be better able to sustain, and accelerate, further progress.”

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer