The staff at Jewish Vocational Service (JVS) is beginning to feel the fatigue. For more than two years, they have marshaled all their resources to deal with a steep increase in demand for their services in helping people find jobs.
But as the economic downturn continues and unemployment in Los Angeles County hovers just below 13 percent, the staff members, like their clients, are becoming more and more desperate.
“Every entry point in our system — someone on welfare, someone accessing our training program, someone attending our computer skills class, someone coming to career services — is impacted to such a point of desperation,” said Claudia Finkel, chief operating officer for JVS. “The clients we’re seeing and the level of skills we’re seeing in individuals is just astonishing.”
The reality of long-term unemployment, underemployment or pay cuts is filtering through the entire Jewish social service system.
Safety-net agencies all report seeing a new sort of client.
“The second wave of pain is hitting in a dramatic way,” Andrew Cushnir, executive vice president and chief programming officer for The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, said. “We’re seeing people who have spent their savings; they’ve drawn down their retirement funds; they’ve exhausted the capacity of family members to support them. And now, people are coming forward at a point where they’d never imagined they would be in their lives.”
These clients are being integrated into a network of Jewish social service agencies that, although stretched increasingly thin, has been lauded for its targeted and comprehensive response.
In March 2009, Federation launched its Emergency Cash Grant program, which has by now distributed almost $1.5 million in one-time infusions of between $750 and $1,800 directly to individuals and families to cover medical expenses, housing costs, food, employment support or emergency childcare.
About a dozen social service organizations and synagogues can process the one-page applications, and Federation usually cuts a check within days.
Whether these grants, generous if limited, can help this new, desperate wave of people who have depleted all their other options remains to be seen. The grants were not intended for the chronically impoverished but to help people with a one-time boost.
Tracey (only her first name is being used to protect her privacy), a single mother of three, says the $1,800 grant she received kept her from becoming homeless when her private fitness business plunged in August 2009.
“I was a month behind on my rent, my landlord was threatening eviction, and my cupboards were almost bare. Having to tell my children we didn’t have enough money for food was really frightening,” she said.
Her rabbi at Kehillat Israel in Pacific Palisades told her about the grant.
“What it did for me was it bought me the month that I was behind on the rent, and it bought me time to get back on my feet and catch my breath,” she said. “And it also touched me on a different level. It really was my community taking care of me.”
The Jewish Community Foundation gave $250,000 to the cash grant program when it was launched and this week announced it was awarding another $250,000 to the fund. On top of that, the Foundation created and funded the Jewish Family Relief Network in May 2009. That program has divided $750,000 among front-line social service organizations — JVS, Jewish Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Los Angeles, Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles (JFS), Jewish Free Loan Association and the BJE (formerly the Bureau of Jewish Education). The Foundation money was earmarked for new clients, and linked the agencies for easier cross-referrals and case management.
BJE said it split Jewish Family Relief Network’s $150,000 among 23 days schools for the 2009-2010 school year, helping 50 students stay in their schools. Miriam Prum Hess, director of day school operations at BJE, said recipients included board members, PTA chairs and families who were once donors to the school.
But the grant didn’t cover the 2010-2011 academic year, and Prum Hess says schools are still struggling to keep families on board.
A challenging fundraising environment and government cuts are stretching social service programs even as new and more desperate clients continue to arrive and the needs of existing clients mushroom.
“The first wave was food, shelter, basics,” said Paul Castro, CEO of JFS. “The second wave is people starting to appreciate how their lives have changed. They may have lost their home, lost their job, and for many of them the stress on the family has really escalated. We’re seeing families who can’t afford to get divorced, so they are staying together, but the pressure within the family unit is at a much higher level than it’s ever been. Some of the things we’re seeing are greater substance abuse and more domestic violence.”
California’s recent budget negotiations spared JFS’ domestic violence programming and kept intact the budget for a program that keeps seniors in their own homes. But many of the wraparound services that seniors rely on have been curtailed.
As job competition favors younger people, investment revenues fall, government programs are cut, and families who had been supporting aging parents can’t even pay their own bills, JFS has seen a 22 percent increase in the number of seniors accessing its services, from nutrition programs to counseling services to case management, according to Nancy Volpert, JFS director of public policy.
JFS’ SOVA Community Food and Resource Program is at an all-time high, supplying a week’s worth of groceries to 10,708 people in August 2010, compared to 9,173 people in August 2009.
Dr. Randy Schaffer never thought he would end up at SOVA. Schaffer worked as an oral surgeon for 18 years in New Orleans but landed with his sister in Chicago after Hurricane Katrina wiped out his business, his savings and his home.
With the help of Jewish agencies there, he got a job as a salesman and then moved up in the company. Another company sent him to open an office in Los Angeles in August 2008, but within months the company eliminated his job. He couldn’t afford the apartment he and his 13-year-old son were living in and certainly couldn’t help his two older daughters in college.
He met with a JVS career counselor who aids SOVA clients on site. She helped him apply for an Emergency Cash Grant, which allowed him to move into a more affordable apartment. With the help of JVS, he decided to earn a master’s degree in education and started teaching, but within a year he fell victim to LAUSD’s last hired/first fired policy. Once again, with guidance from JVS, he decided to pursue a master’s in nursing, and his goal is to become a nurse educator when he graduates in 2012.
Synagogues are also seeing the effects of unemployment. Temple Kehillat Israel (KI) and Sinai Temple last year co-sponsored a job fair. Around 500 job seekers circulated among 50 employers with openings for everything from manual labor to a high-level position at Paramount Pictures.
Matt Davidson, program director at KI who helped organize the fair, doesn’t have an exact count, but he said multiple dozens of people found jobs through the fair last year, and he has high hopes for this year’s fair, Nov. 10 at the Olympic Collection. Around 100 employers are expected, and the fair is also being sponsored by Temple Beth Am, Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills and Congregation Kol Ami, in partnership with Federation, JVS, JFS, Los Angeles Jewish Chamber of Commerce and the Board of Rabbis of Southern California.
Castro at JFS says even with the laudable response from the Jewish community, the social service network is continually getting more fragile.
“The reality is that, as time has gone on, there are fewer and fewer places for these people to go,” Castro said. “So what we’re fearful of is that more people will become chronically impoverished. And there is not the same safety net there was four or five years ago to address this.”
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