Personal Grit Plus Some Outside Help Are What It Takes
Considering the anger, doubt and political posturing associated with public assistance, we need to know about people like Linda Brown.
Everyone loves a success story whose heroine evolves from a second-generation welfare recipient to a successful family support worker who advises women much like her former self. It’s great hearing how the heroine, now proud and confident, goes on to open her own in-home day care center.
Stories like that of Brown, a longtime D.C. resident who last Tuesday left the For Love of Children (FLOC) social service agency for her new career, appeal to everyone: Those who say the only good welfare recipient is a former one and those who see public assistance as a much-needed boost. Although such stories can make getting off welfare look simple, the actual living, Brown says, wasn’t simple at all. People who see welfare as a useless system benefiting do-nothings are being, well, simple.
“If you haven’t lived it,” Brown says, “you’d assume they’re all lazy.” A few people do take advantage of welfare, says Brown, 42. But “the majority are families out there trying to make it.”
Brown is glad to describe how she made it - from welfare-hating teenager embarrassed by her mother’s food stamps, to nine-year welfare recipient, to budding entrepreneur. What freed her was learning what was within her reach: a home of her own, a good job, love for herself. Discovering a few good things are possible, Brown says, makes everything possible.
She was 12 when her mother turned to welfare after her father abandoned his wife and 12 children. At 18, Brown, a high school dropout, gave birth to Rolanda, the first of her four children by a man whose inconsistency added to her troubles. Leaving her mother’s home, Brown and her baby moved into a tiny apartment, paid for with her 99-cents-an-hour waitressing job.
When son Carl was born in 1974, Brown went on welfare, learning that when you are making it on public assistance, “you’re barely making it.” In 1981, Brown joined a women’s support group at FLOC in hopes of getting into the agency’s housing. Suddenly, “someone actually was listening to me,” Brown says, and helping her learn parenting and coping skills.
When she joined FLOC’s Hope and a Home program - which provides three years of affordable housing and educational resources to 27 families, helping them to become involved community members - Brown was still on welfare. Her $420 a month was split among rent, clothes, utilities and other family needs.
Suddenly an education, and the good job it could attract, seemed worthwhile - and possible. Dragging her infant son, Reggie, to classes, she studied for her GED. When Brown passed the test, “you could hear me holler from here to New York,” she says. Next came certification as a nurse’s assistant and jobs at two local nursing homes.
Then FLOC unexpectedly offered her a job. Stunned, Brown thought, ” ‘Me?’ … It told me they respected me.”
Family worker Mary Jo Schumacher says staff members recruited Brown because “she’s been through a lot in life, yet has the openness to learn, to see into the future in ways that could help families who don’t always see a future. She gives people her vision.”
Just like many of her clients at FLOC, Brown knew how it felt to “get a check that’s supposed to pay the rent but wanting to buy shoes for your kids; how food stamps never last a whole month. … But they couldn’t pull the wool over my eyes. I knew what they were doing because I’d been there.”
These days, Brown is happily buying “little people’s stuff” for her in-home daycare operation, which starts in mid-October. She and her longtime love will marry this winter, 12 years after the birth of their youngest child, Jovoughn. “I want it acknowledged that we are husband and wife,” Brown explains.
They bought their northwest Washington home six years ago with the help of the Homebuyers Club, a non-profit program that meets at FLOC and helps people with bad credit or no credit to own homes.
Ask Brown the best way to help welfare recipients and she doesn’t miss a beat. “Start by getting them support,” she says, “something like the Homebuyers Club, which taught me … another way to do things.”
Years ago as a welfare recipient, Brown had a choice: Get housing from an agency whose clients paid a pittance for rent or from the transitional, more costly Hope and a Home program. A friend who knew Brown wanted more out of life, asked her, “If you pay only $12 a month, why would you ever leave?” So Brown opted for help with a future. As a result, she envisioned and obtained her own home. And a whole lot more.
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