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Topics: Work

Investing in People
The Story of Project QUEST

Brett Campbell

Index

Chapter 1: Awakening to a Crisis
Chapter 2: Bringing Power back to the People
Chapter 3: Laying the Groundwork
Chapter 4: Working with the Business Community
Chapter 5: Designing QUEST
Chapter 6: Persuading the Powers
Chapter 7: Project Quest in Action
Chapter 8: The Community Connection
Chapter 9: Making the Grade
Chapter 10: The Future of Project QUEST

Contents

Chapter 1: Awakening to a Crisis
San Antonio: Growth Without Prosperity

Chapter 2: Bringing Power back to the People
Twenty Years of Progress for San Antonio

Introduction

The leaders of two Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) organizations in San Antonio have created a new model for economic development. This model places people at the center of a genuine, far-reaching economic development strategy, based on educating hard-working people for high-skill jobs.

It grew out of a new social compact among employers, workers and the community at large. To help working families adjust to the rapid transition in the new economy San Antonio's Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) and Metro Alliance have engineered the development of a new kind of labor market intermediary. This new intermediary recognizes the legitimate interests of employers for effective, capable and competent workers while addressing the needs of workers for jobs that provide decent wages, health benefits, a career path, meaningful work and stability in the framework of a dynamic economy.

Project QUEST: The result is Project QUEST (Quality Employment through Skills Training), created through collaborative relationships involving IAF leaders, the business community leadership, employers of high-skill workers, the City of San Antonio, the regional Private Industry Council (PIC), the governor, the Texas Employment Commission, education and training institutions, and state social service agencies. It is a job training program that begins not with job training schools, but with people. Project QUEST discards old assumptions and addresses real employment opportunities and needs in the community. It trains workers for employment that will be available upon completion of instruction. Project QUEST centers on the market empowerment of the worker, rather than the financial support of job training providers. It is a program created through a new relationship between the community of employers and the community of the unemployed and underemployed.

Most important, Project QUEST would not have existed without the IAF organizations, COPS and Metro Alliance, acting as mediating institutions, bridging the gaps created in today's market economy. These organizations built upon the nearly two decades of organizing in San Antonio and the accountability they had accrued in the process to find a solution to a problem plaguing many American cities. Years of training leaders in the communities of inner-city San Antonio bore fruit when these leaders, their families and their neighbors worked together—and with the business and government leaders of the city and state—to put together a plan not just for their own employment but for the long-term economic development of their city. In the process, they are building a skilled, educated workforce that will enhance San Antonio's economic well-being for years to come.

Closing pathway: Project QUEST arose out of a disaster: the sudden closing of a Levi-Strauss cut-and-sew factory on San Antonio's South Side in 1990. Coming on the heels of several other plant closings and workforce reductions, as well as impending defense cutbacks that threatened good-paying employment, the Levi's closing pointed to the loss of good-paying blue-collar jobs and rise in the low-paying employment in low-skill service industries. At the same time, high skilled jobs such as those in the health industry, were going begging for lack of skilled workers.

New opportunities: The leaders of COPS and Metro Alliance took this crisis and turned it into an opportunity to remake the economic relationships governing the city. In this book, Metro Alliance and COPS leaders describe how they put their principles and values into action, conceiving and pushing to implementation a complex multimillion-dollar job training program. The extraordinary work of ordinary people has created a job training and creation project that could serve as a model for cities around the nation. And it all began around the kitchen tables of the IAF leaders on San Antonio's South Side. For every person mentioned in this book, there are a hundred other volunteer leaders who have devoted thousands of hours to the effort to bring good jobs at good wages to San Antonio. This book is dedicated to them. v

Chapter One: Awakening to Crisis

It was still dark in San Antonio, Texas, at 6 a.m. on the chilly morning of January 18, 1990, when Father Al Jost's clock radio blared on. Before Father Jost could shut the noisy machine off, he recognized a voice on the radio. It was Elvira Solis, a leader in his church's religious education program. She was being interviewed by the morning news reporter. With dawning horror, Father Jost, a Franciscan friar on San Antonio's South Side, realized what they were discussing: the just-announced closing of the Levi's plant where she worked. The plant made the popular Dockers casual pants. More than 1,000 employees, mostly Mexican American women, would be out of a job within two months.

"I just went cold," Father Jost remembered later. "I knew three or four people who were automatically out of a job, major leaders in our church. Besides them, I knew other people who had been common laborers before they started working at Levi's. A lot of the Levi's workers were single mothers who were the heads of their households. I remember thinking, 'My God, I know someone on every street who's going to be affected by this."'

It's fitting that the story of Project QUEST literally begins with the sounding of an alarm. The Levi's announcement was a wakeup call not just to Father Jost, but to the city of San Antonio. It symbolized a phenomenon that had been growing over the years, but so gradually that no sense of crisis had developed with it. The Levi's closing forced residents to take a hard look at a low-wage economy that didn't work for most San Antonians.

Struggling on the South Side

As you drive through the South Side of San Antonio, evidence of economic disruption surrounds you. The neighborhoods have long been impoverished and industrialized; it bears a disproportionate supply of junk yards, used car lots, families living in trailers, burglar bars and gang graffiti. Many homes were built on tiny lots and expanded over the years by families struggling from paycheck to paycheck. But even though they were blue-collar, South Siders knew they could provide their children a decent home, an education and a chance for a brighter future. They could do this because, despite their lack of education or skills, they could find work that required little training yet still paid a decent wage: at Kelly Air Force Base, the Roeglein meat packing plant, construction companies, Miller Curtain, San Antonio Shoe and the Levi's plant.

"People basically had the sense that if you worked hard and showed yourself to be a faithful and loyal employee, you'd get what you needed to make it," Father Jost remembered. "People tended to gravitate to the jobs their parents had. You got jobs through relationships; that's how it worked." But all that started to change about 10 years ago.

"There were really two stories going on at the same time in San Antonio in the 1980s," Father Jost explained. "There was this boom in development for some parts of town, but the people on the South, East and West Sides were getting chewed up at the same time. People seemed to be working more and having less time with their families, less time to spend in the community. They were working harder, making less, and weren't really getting anywhere. After the meat packing plant closed down, I remember seeing people selling fruit along the streets, doing anything they could to make some money. The plant closings didn't really jibe with the message that business was great here."

An Economy in Transition

What was happening on San Antonio's South Side as the 1980s ended was no isolated phenomenon. In San Antonio as elsewhere, families were caught in the transition between the old economic reality and the new. San Antonio lost more than 14,000 jobs in manufacturing, textiles, transportation, construction and other industrial occupations during the 1980s. At the same time the city gained almost 19,000 relatively well-paying jobs in fields that demanded relatively high skills: from health care and education to auto repair and legal research. Other gains occurred in low-wage, low-skill jobs, such as those in the tourist industry. Those jobs, however, didn't pay enough to support a family.

San Antonio's struggles are part of a worldwide economic metamorphosis triggered by technological advances, the decline of union power, integration of national economies and increased competition for U.S. products from foreign companies. Making matters worse, changes in tax and other economic rules by the federal government during the 1980s benefited a few privileged interests at the expense of many more U.S. workers, leading to plant closings, job transfers abroad and declining opportunities.

The low-skill/moderate-wage jobs, such as those at Levi's that lifted poorly educated workers into the middle class, disappeared. In the past, workers could earn a living wage by performing unskilled labor in steel mills, auto factories or mines. Now, the jobs that pay high wages demand specialized education and training to operate higher tech machinery or to manipulate words and ideas. Many employers attempt to protect their profits by cutting the incomes and security of workers. Families experience the downward pressure directly, as employers lower workers' wages, cut their hours to part-time, trim back their health care insurance or lay them off in increasingly common corporate downsizings and restructurings.

Dramatic change: San Antonio, with its low-skilled labor force, was an early victim of this trauma. "If you were growing up here 20 years ago," remembered COPS co-chair Pat Ozuna, who has lived her entire adult life on the South Side and raised three children there, "you were going to get a job at the manufacturing plants we had around here, or at Kelly. You can't count on that anymore. "

As residents of San Antonio's South Side discovered, the world of work has changed dramatically over the last two decades. Workers entering entry-level jobs often cannot find career paths. Employed workers discover that seniority does not necessarily give them increased opportunities for promotion or protect them from layoffs. They cannot assume that they will stay with the same employer or even career throughout their work life, but must face starting over with another employer or career. Educational credentials do not necessarily give reliable access to good jobs.

Higher demands: Furthermore, the paths to good jobs have changed. Employers have always found family connections useful for recruiting and screening young workers for entry-level jobs with relatively low demands for skills and experience. And families could prepare workers with the skills employers required; for example, a father could teach his son how to repair a car engine, creating a "family-to-work" transition. At the very least, families could provide workers with the one trait most demanded by employers: a strong work ethic.

Now, willingness to work hard isn't enough. Given employers' higher demands upon entry-level workers, families alone cannot give their children the skills they need to find good jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has predicted that half of the fastest growing occupations in this decade will require significant education beyond high school. But even those who do have such credentials are finding they need specialized skills and experience in the field to impress employers.

San Antonio was ill-prepared for these changes. Before the economists and politicians realized what was going on, ministers like Father Al Jost and Father Will Wauters of an Episcopal Church on the South Side knew something was wrong. They saw the impact of a changing economy on their parishioners.

"I saw the strains, the burdens that so many people were under," Father Jost recalled. "Divorces increased. I saw women becoming heads of households, not making it on one income. And even when two members of the family might be working, they weren't making enough money to support a family. The result of that was a lot of domestic violence, a lot of drinking, a lot of drugs. There was no sense of purpose in life. It wasn't just the people from Levi's. We saw people trying to work through this burden, trying to make a better life for themselves and their families and not being able to."

Impact on children: The symptoms affected children as well. "They felt there wasn't any tomorrow, nothing to work towards," said Father Wauters. "The manufacturing jobs where their parents worked—Levi's, Roeglein, Kelly Field—were being taken away from them. They saw their future flipping hamburgers at McDonald's."

South Side parishioners were bearing the brunt of San Antonio's unbalanced economy; the shutdown of the Levi's plant had brought that lesson home. But because this was a citywide problem, it was clear that any solution would have to transcend the South Side. So, still shaken by the bad news to which he had awakened, Father Jost reached for the phone. He called the one citywide organization that might be able to find that solution. "As soon as I got past the shock," he recalled, "I called the COPS office. I said, 'We need to do something."'

San Antonio: Growth Without Prosperity

San Antonio is a poor city, that's getting poorer. While the population and number of jobs are both growing, the pay for many of those jobs is abysmally low by urban U.S. standards. An increasing percentage of San Antonians work in the low-wage service sector of the economy, in occupations such as private household work and food preparation, health service, and cleaning and building service. Meanwhile, middle-income jobs comprise a smaller proportion of the local job market.

This is no accident. For many years, the city's business leaders cultivated a low-wage economy in San Antonio, pursuing low-skill jobs that provided little social mobility for families. In 1930s, for example, business leaders rebuffed Ford Motor Company's attempt to locate a manufacturing plant there, fearing it would spark a rise in wages. As recently as the late 1970s, the city's Economic Development Foundation issued a report calling San Antonio a low-wage haven and urging business to relocate there to take advantage of a reliable but low-paid work force.

Figure 1.1 [not available online] shows that during the 1980s, the distribution of jobs in San Antonio shifted away from middle-wage jobs toward high-paying or low-wage employment.

San Antonio's wage structure is related to a gap between the rich and poor. As seen in Figure 1.2. [not available online] San Antonio's poverty rate was the second highest among the 15 largest U.S. cities.

Figure 1.3 [not available online] shows the changes in employment in Texas that have had repercussions throughout the state.

Source: Partnership for Hope, the Urban Institute, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and Texas Employment Commission.

Chapter Two: Bringing Power back to the PeopleFor nearly

20 years, COPS and the Metro Alliance have brought together San Antonio churches and congregations of diverse faiths and ethnic backgrounds to improve their families' quality of life by reshaping San Antonio's political culture. The organizations have initiated new ideas for the creative use of local, federal, and state public dollars so that working families could rebuild their neighborhoods, physically and socially. They have developed goals and strategies from the experiences and dreams of working families. They have created a culture of accountability, negotiations, respect, and compromise within which the powers of a city can guide its destiny.

COPS and Metro Alliance have changed the way people think about power and politics in San Antonio. Policy decisions with major economic or social consequences cannot be made in this city without taking into account COPS and Metro Alliance and the people they represent. As a result, government policy and spending of public dollars more accurately reflect the needs of all the citizens of San Antonio, not merely the privileged few.

While the organizations neither endorse candidates for public office nor support political parties, they have set agendas for action by both public and private sector institutions. Over the last two decades, COPS and Metro Alliance have redirected more than $850 million dollars in infrastructure development to the inner city. However, the real success of IAF organizing isn't measured in dollars, programs or votes. The ultimate goals are empowering communities and developing leaders.

COPS: Confronting the Establishment

In 1974, a coalition of Catholic churches on San Antonio's West Side engaged Ernesto Cortes, a San Antonio native, to put together the organization that would become COPS. San Antonio then was on the threshold of change: the city's Mexican-American community had just become a numerical majority. But city policies, perpetrated by an almost all-Anglo city council elected at-large to minimize minority voting strength, still emphasized development on the mainly Anglo North Side. Meanwhile, the mostly Mexican American West and South Sides of town, and the predominantly African-American East Side, were deteriorating from official neglect.

Top concern: Cortes talked to the people in congregations and neighborhoods, learned their interests and taught them to organize for change. Their immediate concern was storm drainage; the West Side turned into a swamp whenever it rained heavily. Homes and cars flooded, children were swept to their deaths and most activity ground to a halt until the waters receded days later. COPS leaders discovered that bond money approved by voters over three decades for drainage projects on the West Side had instead been spent to benefit suburbanites and developers, primarily on the North Side of town.

Bold tactics: COPS tried to get the city to address the problem, but their efforts were repeatedly rebuffed. Shut out of conventional political channels, the organization used confrontational tactics to force the power structure to listen to their concerns. In 1975, hundreds of COPS members lined up at the teller cages at the city's oldest and largest bank (whose president wielded considerable political influence) to change pennies into dollars, and then dollars back into pennies, tying up the lobby for a day. The purpose was to get the local power establishment to recognize COPS's demands by demonstrating the power of organized people. This and similar tactics worked: the local establishment began to meet with them, and in 1975 the city council agreed to draw up a $46 million bond issue to fund many of the overdue projects. Thanks to COPS-sponsored voter turnout drives, that bond issue passed, as did others. As a result, new libraries, parks, schools, streets and drainage projects were built in previously neglected neighborhoods.

Over the next few years, COPS forced the city to clean up blighted areas and to construct storm drains, curbs and better water mains to prevent flooding. It also stopped freeway construction that would have disrupted long-standing communities, halted construction of a supermall that threatened the source of the city's source of drinking water and forced adoption of an interim ordinance restricting polluting development.

The Metro Alliance: Citywide Clout

In the early 1980s, residents of areas outside COPS' West and South Side strongholds took note of COPS's stunning successes, and formed two new IAF-affiliated San Antonio organizations: the Metropolitan Congregational Alliance (MCA) and East Side Alliance (ESA). They worked to control water and utility rates helped institute the city's first energy conservation plan, made developers pay more of the cost of development and prodded the city to improve neighborhood security through community policing. The two organizations also worked with COPS on citywide issues such as bond elections, aquifer protection and adequate drinking water supply for the city.

ESA and MCA merged in 1989 to form the Metro Alliance, whose combined strength, along with COPS, gave IAF a citywide presence, influence in more city council districts and therefore greater clout. Since the merger, Metro Alliance has also taken on new issues, such as keeping dangerous gasoline storage tanks out of residential neighborhoods and a parental empowerment initiative that teaches parents to play a larger role in their children's education.

Changing the City's Political Culture

Metro Alliance and COPS now represent nearly 50 congregations and 90,000 families. The decay of the central city has been reversed, and once-declining areas are springing back to life. COPS and Metro Alliance could legitimately claim a large share of the credit. By January 1990, when the Levi-Strauss plant closed, the organizations had gained enough power and experience to address the rapid decline of good jobs in San Antonio—an issue considerable more complex than any they had taken on before. COPS and Metro Alliance have tapped into the legitimate anger that many San Antonians have felt about unfair city policies and helped transform that anger into a passion for work and change. They have empowered whole communities and created a legion of new neighborhood leaders who are taking the future of their city into their hands. Though their tactics have changed over the years, the underlying philosophy that guides them and the justified anger that fuels them has not. "A lot of people misunderstood COPS in the early days," says San Antonio Mayor Nelson Wolff. "But they were after the same thing everyone was after: decent streets, parks, housing, job opportunities. For a long time they were banging at the door, and now, after a 20-year period, COPS and Metro Alliance are very much in the door and they're very much in a powerful position in the community. So the tactics and the way they accomplish things have certainly changed, but not their philosophy. If they can get it done with sugar and spice, they'll get it done that way; if they can't, they'll be banging on the door again."

Twenty Years of Progress for San Antonio

During the past two decades, COPS and Metro Alliance have improved the life of the community in San Antonio in several ways.

Education

Palo Alto College: COPS forced the Alamo Community College District board of directors to place Palo Alto College on the previously underserved southwest side of town.
San Antonio Education Partnership: A partnership with the city, school district, colleges and universities, and the business community, SAEP prevents dropouts by awarding high school students with a "B" average and 95 percent attendance rate a partial scholarship to a San Antonio college or university, or a job opportunity. Since 1990, more than 1,500 students have gone to college as a result of this initiative.
After-school programs: A partnership with the city, local communities and school districts, these programs provide elementary and middle school students recreation and academic assistance in an extended learning day. City officials credit the programs with reducing crime and improving academic performance. By the end of 1994, 300 elementary and middle schools in San Antonio will have an after-school program.
Alliance Schools: A partnership with the Texas Education Agency, local school districts and individual schools, this initiative encourages parental involvement and school restructuring to give parents and the community more ownership of the schools. It's credited with improving school performance.

Housing

At organizations in San Antonio are responsible for the construction of 1,000 units of new housing, rehabilitation of 2,600 existing units, and purchase of 1,300 more, and the numbers grow every year.

Housing Trust Fund: IAF leaders pushed the city council to set aside $10 million to endow the Fund, ensuring an annual stream of $500,000 to $1 million for flexible home financing. This helps low-income families who don't qualify for other housing programs buy their own homes. Select Housing Target Areas: Formulated with city officials and the San Antonio Development Agency (SADA), the program redevelops blighted neighborhoods.
Homeownership Incentive Program (HIP): Enables moderate-income families to receive a 30-year, zero-interest second mortgage to use as a down payment on a new home.
Bond issues: Over the years, COPS and Metro Alliance have worked to include in bond issues items such as street repair, drainage improvements, park and library construction and upgrading, community centers, and other capital improvements. They have worked to educate voters and get out the vote to support the bond issues. The organizations have also drawn up master plans for parks and libraries in underserved areas. As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised through bond issues and spent to rebuild inner-city neighborhoods; and new parks, libraries, community centers and health clinics serve the people there.
Community Development Block Grants (CDBG): Each year COPS and Metro Alliance present budgets outlining their priorities for the city's annual federal CDBG money. Most of their proposals are accepted. CDBG provides $18 million annually for housing and capital improvements. San Antonio's program has been recognized nationwide as a model CDBG project.
Safety: COPS and Metro Alliance have worked to protect communities by spurring the city to institute community policing, enforce compliance with city health and safety codes, and use zoning laws to protect neighborhoods from dangerous or disruptive industrial development, junkyards and polluters.

Government Accountability

Single-member districts: In 1977, COPS was instrumental in bringing single-member city council districts to the city, ensuring fair minority representation after decades of Anglo domination. In 1984, they got out the vote for a referendum that made the South San Antonio Independent School District board elected from single member districts, improving accountability to parents and the community.
Reducing rate increases: In 1975, COPS held public actions demonstrating that the City Water Board's huge proposed rate increases were unnecessary and were caused by city subsidies to developers. They stopped the subsidy and reduced the rate increase. Later, COPS held the city and contractor accountable for cost overruns in the South Texas Nuclear Project. Since then, Metro Alliance and COPS have been a constant watchdog at rate hearings, exposing extravagant or fiscally unsound expenditures and forcing reductions in unjustified rate increases for water and electric service that would have hurt lower-income residents.
They have checked the developer dominated city council's practice of subsidizing extension of utility services to far-flung private subdivisions that were weakening the inner city. The participation of Metro Alliance and COPS in these issues has permanently transformed San Antonio's political structure. "COPS was the force most responsible for the present structure of government in San Antonio," says former Mayor Henry Cisneros.

The Industrial Areas Foundation

The Industrial Areas Foundation is the center of a national network of broad-based, multiethnic, interfaith organizations in primarily poor and moderate-income communities. Created over 50 years ago by Saul Alinsky and currently directed by Ed Chambers, it now provides the leadership training for more than 30 organizations representing nearly 1,000 institutions and more than 1 million families. The central role of the IAF organizations is to build the competence and confidence of ordinary citizens and taxpayers so that they can reorganize the relationships of power and politics in their communities in order to reshape the physical and cultural face of their neighborhoods. The IAF works with organizations in the New York City area, Texas, California, Arizona, Maryland, Nebraska, New Mexico, Tennessee and the United Kingdom, and is assisting the development of about a dozen more in other regions. The Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation Network, which includes The Metro Alliance and COPS in San Antonio, brings together 400,000 families and 500 congregations in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Louisiana and Nebraska.

The IAF trains ordinary families to organize their congregations and communities to take responsibility for their futures. It organizes people based on the Iron Rule: "Never do for anyone what they can do for themselves." The IAF's mission is to make democracy work for all citizens through the restructuring of power and authority. It teaches ordinary people to organize their communities to participate as partners with government bureaucracies, corporations, banks, elected officials and others who commonly exercise power in American society.

"The quality that makes the IAF organizations so distinctive," says political analyst William Greider in his 1993 book, Who Will Tell the People?, "is their relentless attention to the conditions that ordinary people describe in their own lives. Their authority is derived from personal experience, not from the policy experts of formal politics."

Together in the last two decades IAF families and congregations have:

Re-directed billions of dollars of public investment to inner cities: IAF organizations have directed Community Development Block Grant, bond, and other moneys to rebuild inner-city neighborhoods. In San Antonio alone, IAF organizations have been responsible for the building of more than $850 million of new streets, drainage, sidewalks, parks, libraries, community centers and clinics the past 20 years.
Created thousands of new homes: IAF organizations have directed state, local and federal resources to leverage new housing developments in neglected communities. Nehemiah Projects have built or are building over 3,000 new homes in the most devastated neighborhoods of New York City, Baltimore and Los Angeles.
Revitalized neighborhood schools: IAF organizations have been working since 1986 with over 100,000 families in over 100 schools in 30 districts in Texas, Arizona, California and New York to bring schools, families, and their communities together to improve public education. Public-private partnerships in Baltimore, San Antonio and Houston reward successful graduates with scholarships and jobs.
Raised the living standards of poor workers: The Moral Minimum Wage Campaign in California in 1987 increased the incomes of poor workers by more than $1 billion by raising the state's minimum wage to $4.25, then the highest in the nation.
Brought water and sewer services to the colonias in South Texas: The IAF Network initiated and led two statewide referenda that pledged $250 million in grants and loans to develop safe drinking water and sewer services in poor, semi-rural neighborhoods—home to more than one-quarter million Texans.

Index