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Topics: Work

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 3: Laying the Groundwork
Job Trianing Experiences
Outdated Job Training System
Victims of a Changing Economy

Chapter 4: Working with the Business Community

Chapter 5: Designing QUEST
Principles of QUEST Emerge

Chapter Three: Laying the Groundwork

"The issue of employment had been with us for a long time," said Pat Ozuna, a co-chair of COPS's job training committee. "We had been hearing about it in bits and pieces, one family here, another there. But when Levi's closed, it really hit us hard because it was so many people at once."

Around the same time, Metro Alliance was hearing similar stories. "People in the neighborhoods talked to us about wanting better jobs," said Metro Alliance co-chair Marcia Welch. "Many wanted to go into health services. We found out that the hospitals here were importing people from the Philippines. We had people here who wanted to be nurses, but they didn't have the opportunity."

The Levi's closing intensified their efforts. "We were starting to talk about work and the salaries Our people were making. We talked about everything that affects the family, and work was one of them," said COPS co-chair Virginia Ramirez. "But something had to happen to bring it out. When Levi's closed, people were so upset. It was a tremendous opportunity for us to really get people to understand the things that were affecting them. More than anything else, the political will had to be there, and Levi's gave us that."

Investing in people: At its May 1990 annual convention, COPS voted to make job training and workforce development one of the organization's top priorities; Metro Alliance soon voted the same priorities. "Economic development is meaningless," Pat Ozuna told the assembled COPS leaders and politicians such as San Antonio Mayor Lila Cockrell and gubernatorial candidate Ann Richards, "unless we have programs to invest in people."

The leaders had to educate themselves about labor economics, job training program design, and demographic changes that were depriving families in Metro Alliance and COPS neighborhoods of good jobs. For much of 1990, dozens of volunteer leaders—all of whom had full-time jobs or the duty of taking care of a family in addition to their work with the organizations—devoted thousands of hours to hundreds of house and church meetings and research actions on existing job training programs, economics studies and the local economy. The leaders were careful to listen not just to high-powered economists and business leaders, but also their own neighbors. Often the stories from their communities contradicted the rosy portrait painted by the business community.

Commitment: In the spring of 1991, COPS formed a job training core committee to oversee the entire effort; Metro Alliance joined soon after. This group included leaders such as Gay Guerra, Al Gray, Mary Rivas, Genevieve Flores, Coralee Fenner and Eloise Ortega, and met every other Monday for almost two years.

"The commitment of our leaders was just amazing," recalled Ozuna, who initially chaired and spearheaded the campaign. "They spent hundreds of hours researching, just for Project QUEST and that was only one of the issues the organization worked on. Even before the research into job training, there were hundreds of individual meetings and house meetings just to bring the issue of work to the organization's attention. There were 40 people on the job training committee after the Metro leaders joined, and they all spent up to 20 hours a week on it."

Much of IAF's work takes place in house meetings held throughout the neighborhoods of member congregations. The meetings, usually involving one or more COPS or Metro Alliance leaders and up to a dozen people from the community, help leaders reconnect to their neighbors and hear the community's concerns. They provide an opportunity for conversations among neighbors about common difficulties (such as layoffs and low wages), allowing people to process their private pain and make it public, to realize that others in their neighborhood share it and then to get down to business. IAF organizing converts despair into constructive passion for change, and in close to 300 house meetings, COPS and Metro leaders found a lot of anger to tap.

"You can learn more at a house meeting with 10 people than in a church meeting with a hundred people." Ozuna explains. You talk about what's happening with your family, because the people that are sitting around you are people like you, and they understand. This is a community that shares, and everybody's in the same boat."

Frustrating system: The house meetings brought to the surface a high-pressure stream of resentment about the existing job training programs that people relied on to teach them new skills. "Our people were suffering all kinds of indignities," Ozuna says. "People going to proprietary schools and getting a worthless piece of paper, going into debt. A 'job training' program where they would say, 'here's a newspaper, go out and find a job.' You would come to a job training agency, and the staff would talk down to you. Eventually you fill out your papers, and they'd say, 'We'll call you when we're ready.' And you're sitting at home for weeks, your children are going hungry, and you're wondering 'When am I going to start my training?' The whole attitude was, 'Who are you, anyway? You're garbage!'"

Sometimes more than a hundred people—some illiterate in English, others high school honor graduates—would be sent to a classroom, all taught the same lessons by one or two "trainers." Often trainees had to share books. No day care was provided, so parents had to bring their children to class.

"Once you'd gotten a story like that," Father Jost noted, "you could repeat it, and other people would say, 'Yeah, I've seen that.' That's often the opening of a house meeting: telling one of those stories and asking if people had heard anything like it."

Research Actions

"It became clear that what had happened with Levi's was a pattern," said Father Al Jost. "The jobs that offer security are leaving. The data made it clear that the only way to make it in the future was to have a trained workforce."

Economic forces: COPS and Metro leaders also met with economists and job training experts, including former U.S. Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall (now a professor at the University of Texas' LBJ School of Public Affairs), Chris King and Robert Wilson, also of the University of Texas.

"I learned how hard it is for people now with this new global economy," says Pat Ozuna. "Unless you have some kind of good training, there's no way people can go from high school to good jobs. My husband is a mechanic, and he learned from his dad how to be a mechanic. You can't do that anymore. You need all this machinery and high tech equipment. When I started as a secretary, all you had to know was how to type. That won't do it anymore. You need computer skills."

They also learned about the existing flawed job training system. "We needed to understand how JTPA worked," said Pat Ozuna, "because before you can change anything, you need to know the ground rules." What they found gave them the basis for a new approach to job training.

"We discovered that the money was connected to the institution of training, not the person being trained," Father Jost recalled, "and therefore there was no accountability for how the money was spent." The leaders found that the government would pay a private training provider hundreds of dollars for a quick training program in, say, computer programming, when a much better class in the same subject was available at nearby Palo Alto College for $20. Taxpayer money was paying administrative costs for training providers that were not training San Antonians for good jobs. Instead, trainees were learning how to write resumes that listed no skills employers wanted. Finally, the leaders identified what city, state and federal funds might be redirected to pay for a new job training program.

From Listening to Teaching

"As we were becoming more educated through our research, we would feed that information back to the house meetings and research actions to find out whether it rang true," Father Wauters recalls. "We'd come back and present those statistics in the house meetings, and people would add to that their own stories of the loss of real income. They'd say, "Yeah, when we were working at Roeglein, we were making $8 an hour, and now we're making $5 an hour, so we understand that "

New perspective: Pat Ozuna remembers when the character of the meetings started to change "As we did our research actions, the house meetings evolved from just listening to their horror stories to educating them about how the problems were created." The meetings transformed the anger over lack of good jobs into clamor for job training opportunities and, eventually a willingness to sacrifice time and money to participate.

As the house meetings continued into 1991, they built momentum for change. "You could feel this gathering sense of progress," said Virginia Ramirez. "As we learned more and began to see what needed to be done, you could feel the anger and the power growing. With all that energy on our side, we knew we were going to make something happen."

At the same time they were teaching, and learning from working-class San Antonians, Metro Alliance and COPS leaders were also talking with another group of city leaders who could help them do something about the lack of good jobs in San Antonio.

Job Training Experiences

• Gilbert Gallego went to a private school to become a pharmacy technician. He took out a $4,100 loan and spent nine months in classes. When he graduated, he found out his diploma was useless because his instructors were not certified. He had no job in that field, but still owed a $4,100 debt.
  
• Margie Castro was one of the workers laid off by Levi Strauss. She, like many others, entered the local Job Training Partner ship Act or JTPA, the federal government's principal job training program. The company she was placed with was to teach her how to sew baseball caps. She saw her salary drop from $8 to $5 an hour, while the company collected on the job training subsidies for a skill she already had.
  
• Juanita Sanchez, a single mother with four children, scraped together $600 for a three-month course to receive training for home health care work. She couldn't afford any more time or money to take a longer-term training course to become a LVN. When she finished her course, her best job opportunity was to work in a private home at less than the minimum wage 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Outdated Job Training System

• Outdated rules: JTPA rules encouraged short-term rather than long-term training, usually no more than two months, far short of the time needed to teach basic literacy and math, much less more advanced skills. A recent Texas Employment Commission study found that the median stay in a Texas JTPA program was only 14 weeks. Other studies showed that short-term training at best equipped trainees for dead-end, low-wage jobs. For example, nearly three-quarters of all Texas JTPA placemeets fell into low-wage job categories.

  The system was designed for the old economy, in which most layoffs were temporary, and workers only needed a few simple skills to find another good job. In the changing economy of the late 1980s and 1990s, however, that policy was and is flawed. IAF leaders were among the first to realize that instead of merely helping people look for jobs and learn a few basic skills, the system needed the greater resources required to give people long-term training.

• Political favoritism: JTPA funds were often directed to training providers based on their political relationships rather than their effectiveness. The leaders discovered that the San Antonio Private Industry Council board controlled the city's JTPA funds. But "the PIC was controlled by many of the job training providers who received JTPA money," said Mayor Nelson Wolff, who campaigned on a promise to clean up the program. Their interest lay more in making a profit churning people through quick, inadequate programs than in training people for good jobs. And since the training providers controlled the PIC board, they were able to stifle reform.

• Improper incentives: Many of the agencies would not only perform the training but would also evaluate applicants to find what training they were suitable for. This encouraged a few unscrupulous training providers to "evaluate" clients as suited for whatever job the provider happened to have trainers for regardless of whether there was an actual demand or market for those jobs. The agencies were also reimbursed for each evaluation, so several performed five or six evaluations on the same person! No effective sanctions existed to punish providers who failed to provide trainees with jobs after being paid for "training" them.

Victims of a Changing Economy

• Jose Jimenez started work at the Roeglein meat packing plant when he was 14 or 15. He had some education but not much. He worked there nearly 20 years, eventually earning $7.50 an hour plus benefits. It was not a huge salary, but enough to support his wife and three children. Then he lost his job when the plant closed. He could only find a job as a busboy, earning $4.50 an hour, including tips. The job had no benefits.
  
• Oralia Gonzalez is a single parent with three children. Her job at the sewing machine was the primary means of support. Even though she had only a grade school education, her work at Levi's was enough to support her family and to make the payments on a small house. But after losing her job, her prospects were dim. Her English was poor. She was afraid of losing her house. She didn't know if she could keep her kids out of the gangs.
  
• Estela Sotelo, the oldest daughter in a family of six, was a bright student who worked hard, pushed herself and was an honor student in high school. She was a leader in the youth group at her church. She won a scholarship to Trinity University in San Antonio, a prestigious private school. However, her father, a construction worker, lost his job and could not find another. To help her family meet the financial crisis, Estela didn't enter school, but took a job at a food stand in the airport. She still hopes to go to college, but because she interrupted her studies, she lost her scholarship.
  
• Mary Moreno worked at Levi's for over 12 years. Her husband was a mechanic at a factory making turbines. Both were laid off within two months of each other. Her family lived from week to week on the edge of financial and personal disaster. She needed to have an operation, but wasn't sure if her insurance would pay the bills. To help the family, their son in high school had to go to work part-time. He dropped out of all his school and church activities to keep an evening job in a fast-food restaurant. Mrs. Moreno's husband found only odd jobs as a mechanic for nearly two years. She looked for work for nine months before finding a low-paying job.

Chapter Four: Working with the Business Community

The IAF leaders who gathered in the conference room at the downtown office of Frost Bank had put together this meeting of the city's major business leaders to discuss the possibility of their supporting a new job training initiative. And now here was one of the most powerful men in town telling everyone that it was futile.

Strong relationships: Why were these powerful business leaders willing to meet with COPS and Metroleaders—housewives, ministers, bus drivers—and listen to their ideas on job training? Over two decades, the organizations had built up a sizable reservoir of credibility and relationships with business and political leaders. Banker Charles Cheever, for instance, had tangled with COPS in the 1970s when they protested the Economic Development Foundation's attempts to lure only low-wage employers to San Antonio. But in 1988, COPS approached Cheever, then chairing the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, to represent the business community in a new joint endeavor.

"I was impressed with their work on the San Antonio Education Partnership," Cheever remembers. "That's where I really got to know some of the people in COPS and Metro Alliance, and saw that they were intelligent, sincere people who had a conscientious agenda and could work with the business community." Cheever later agreed to serve on the board of directors of Project QUEST, taking over as chairman when banker Tom Frost was named chairman of a state job training task force.

Building respect: Frost, whose bank had been a target of those first COPS actions in the early 1970s, had also grown to respect the organizations. "Even though they started out with a radical approach, the projects they were supporting were reasonable, and they were responsible in the way they approached the community," Frost says today. "My agenda has not always had the same priorities as theirs, but we've found that we have a lot of areas in which we agree."

Over time, business leaders had learned that IAF's strategy of economic development through investment in communities was in the long-term self-interest of business and cities. IAF leaders met regularly with Frost and other San Antonio business leaders; in one such exchange, Frost agreed to become involved with QUEST. "They were concerned about job training programs," Frost recalled. "I said I'd heard in the press that there were some problems, and they said, 'We have a solution.' Through several different conversations, I was impressed that they were correct, and that led to my involvement in Project QUEST."

Connections: IAF leaders asked Frost to call several of San Antonio's large employers, including Callie Smith of Baptist Hospital, John Howe, president of UT Health Science Center, McCombs, and others, and request their participation in a meeting to discuss job training. Virtually all of them agreed. When asked why he agreed to come to a meeting with COPS and Metro Alliance leaders, a local hotel magnate said "When my banker calls, I come running."

When the business leaders gathered at First Bank in July of 1991, the IAF leaders had the confidence of, as Mark Twain once put it, "A Christian with four aces." They had done their homework on job training throug a year of research and had earned a place at the table. "It wasn't frightening to me to sit with Mr. Frost and the mayor," Virginia Ramirez said, "because you're talking about your people, and you know that your strength is your people. And that gives you the courage to talk to these businessmen."

That hard work, credibility and confidence is what enabled them, at the initial meeting with business leaders, to transform potential disaster (Red McCombs's opening comment) into triumph. Virginia Ramirez remembers what happened next.

"I knew we were going to be successful when Red McCombs said, 'There are no jobs in San Antonio,' and then the CEO from Baptist Hospital, Callie Smith, said, 'No, that's not true. I have 200 jobs I can't fill.' And all of a sudden it started coming together. That was the turning point. That's when it hit me that this was going to work."

Preparation: The IAF leaders had anticipated such skepticism. They had heard the line from some corporate pessimists that there were no jobs in San Antonio, and they didn't want to let that myth throw a cloud over this meeting. Their research had disclosed that employment in the burgeoning health care industry, among others, was booming. So they made sure to invite executives from that field, to refute the notion that no good jobs were out there.

"Most of them had bought into the myth that there weren't any jobs in San Antonio," COPS's Pat Ozuna recalls. "Sometimes we had to push them a little bit. A construction company executive said, 'I don't have any trouble getting roofers.' And we asked, 'How about sheet metal workers?' And he said, 'Well, now that you mention it, we are having a little trouble getting some sheet metal workers. . . .'"

By the time the meeting was over, the executives had agreed to work with the organizations on the workforce development concept that eventually became Project QUEST. And as with the house meetings, they used this meeting and many others not just to listen to the business leaders, but to educate them, get their reaction to their preliminary thinking and eventually secure their cooperation in QUEST.

Business commitment: "John Howe, for example, suggested that we have an evaluation of the program, so we'd know what worked and what didn't. That wasn't in our initial concept," Father Wauters remembered. "So it was definitely an exchange. And eventually we got to the point where we were asking for a commitment of a certain number of jobs."

At first, business leaders were reluctant. How could an employer know, two years in advance, how many positions it would have open? But Metro and COPS showed how businesses were going to benefit from this program: they'd get skilled employees. The price: they had to buy in by promising to hire the graduates. "As they began to hear us, they really did see that this was in their self-interest as well," said Father Wauters. "If they were going to compete with Houston and Dallas, they needed more skilled workers." (Eventually, business leaders would commit to hire 650 QUEST graduates.) A month after the initial gathering, IAF leaders met with 40 more local business leaders, and such sessions continued throughout the process of setting up Project QUEST. The business community's early participation made the program appealing to employers whose commitment of jobs was an essential component.

The health care jobs were crucial. "On behalf of Callie Smith, I called a meeting of local health care chief executive officers to talk about job training in November 1991," recalled Peggy Brown, administrator of the Institute of Health Education at the Baptist Memorial Hospital system. "There has been a severe shortage of qualified employees in every kind of nursing and allied health care profession for the last five to eight years. We need a steady flow of good people, and those jobs fit nicely into what COPS and Metro Alliance were looking for."

Besides identifying jobs for QUEST, those meetings have resulted in the creation of a permanent advisory group among San Antonio-area health care employers. The group meets regularly to project employment needs in this rapidly growing field. It also works with Project QUEST to create training programs in areas of need, such as a new surgical training program for nurses scheduled to begin in 1994.

COPS and Metro organized corporate involvement for political reasons as well. COPS and Metro Alliance wanted job training to be viewed as an economic development strategy, and business participation would give political leaders confidence that it was a practical one. That's also why the leaders, drawing on the organization's Iron Rule ("Never do for anyone what they can do for themselves.") built in so much accountability and spoke the language of economic development. They had to show that this wasn't a giveaway but an investment for which recipients would be held accountable.

"I've been really impressed by COPS and Metro's work on QUEST," says Brown. "When I was growing up here, COPS always sounded so radical. But as I've gotten to know them, I've been impressed in how two strong-willed groups like COPS and Metro Alliance can come together and really agree on goals that help the city. "

Power of the people: Besides bringing powerful business leaders on board, those meetings also confirmed to COPS and Metro Alliance leaders just how much power organized people could wield. Beginning with that meeting, they had woven, almost from scratch, a vital new network of relationships concerned with jobs and job training, connecting employers with potential workers, political leaders, even with each other. "In that first meeting," said Virginia Ramirez, "I realized, all these important people were sitting there, and they had never talked to each other about what jobs were available. And I realized, we had brought them all together to talk about jobs.

"I remember thinking," she continued, "'Here's Virginia Ramirez, who a few years ago could only get a job sweeping floors. Most of our people never finished high school. And now we're telling these men how we are going to change the face of San Antonio.' It was powerful, so powerful."

Chapter Five: Designing QUEST

"The employers were telling us that they needed workers," said Father Wauters, "and our people were telling us that they were willing and good workers, and they needed jobs. How could we create a marriage of those interests?" Instead of starting at the "top" consulting experts at think tanks and universities or in government, the job training core committee members looked to the grassroots, to the community.

Pat Ozuna describes how the job training core committee discussions translated ideas from the community into concrete proposals for QUEST. "Ideas would be thrown around and we would discuss them; someone would tell a story they'd heard in a meeting, and the ideas would come out of that," she said. "For example, when we started hearing about the problems with short term training, we would ask, 'Well, what about long-term training?' And that idea would go into the proposal." By the end of 1991, the broad principles of the program were clear.

Spelling out the Details

Custom design: The house meetings also uncovered reasons people dropped out of training, which in turn suggested further components of QUEST. Trainees often felt that no one cared about their progress, and many people had to drop out of classes because of family problems. "We needed counselors that were also caseworkers," said Ozuna. "We needed to have remedial schooling because some of the people had been out of school for 15 years, and they had forgotten their math. Women with small children needed day care during classes." Those components were added.

Finances: The main barrier to training for many, of course, was money. Everyone agreed that QUEST had to provide a stipend for trainees in real need. But how to safeguard against abuse? Again, the answer was to be found in the house meetings. "Several of the people there had been beneficiaries of the GI Bill, where the money was attached to the individual," said Father Jost. "They knew that was a successful program, so we decided to have the money attached to the individual, not some bureaucracy."

Ensuring success: One fear, especially among employers, was that trainees would take public money in stipends and tuition but wouldn't complete the program. IAF leaders feared a high dropout rate would damage the program's credibility. The training would be arduous, especially for people whose prior educational achievements might be lacking. The trainees, who would be receiving stipends and other support from the taxpayers, would have to be the kind of people who would be willing to work hard and stick with it through tough courses and difficult times.

An intermediary was needed to determine whether a person was likely to stick with QUEST and to offer trainees the kind of emotional support families used to provide.

The IAF leaders decided their organizations would assume that responsibility. Thus were born the community outreach committees in most Metro Alliance and COPS congregations. Several community leaders would pre-screen applicants and be there to offer encouragement through the training.

The leaders also met with some of the experts in the field of job training from the University of Texas, the Governor's State Job Training Coordinating Council, the Texas Employment Commission, the San Antonio Works Board, the Alamo Community College District, social service agencies, the city's Department of Community Initiatives and others. Those meetings taught them how to accomplish and fund the goals they had identified in the house meetings.

Broad participation: Once they had the commitment of jobs in hand, Metro Alliance and COPS appointed a committee to oversee the design of the strategy to put a plan into action. This committee included leaders of the IAF organizations as well as Tom Frost, Henry Cisneros, Nelson Wolff, Charles Cheever, and representatives of such major local corporations as the HEB supermarket chain, major hospitals, and USAA insurance company.

By the end of 1991—almost two years after the Levi's closing that precipitated the job training campaign—the IAF leaders were ready to put their collection of innovative concepts into concrete form. They approached employment specialist Bob McPherson, a senior research associate at the University of Texas's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs in Austin. Assisted by a grant from the Texas Employment Commission for a job training demonstration project, McPherson came to San Antonio to put the IAF ideas into a form bureaucrats could understand.

Intensity and tenacity: Now attached to UT's Center for the Study of Human Resources, McPherson and his colleague Brian Deaton (now with the U.S. Department of Labor) spent six weeks in a San Antonio hotel in January and February 1992, working on the program design by day, and meeting with IAF leaders, business leaders and political leaders by night. Day after day, McPherson and Deaton would produce a draft of a piece of the project and run it by the assembled participants. A discussion would ensue, and pieces would be taken out, rearranged, put back in and modified to accommodate concerns raised by the participants. COPS and Metro leaders contributed to each phase of the program design.

"The COPS and Metro leaders were tenacious, worked hard and knew what the problems were," McPherson recalled. "They wanted long-term skills training that was tied to specific jobs in the community. They wanted some kind of income support because they knew their people couldn't stay in long-term training without it. They had identified between $5 and $6 million in funds that might be available for a demonstration project."

Training for existing jobs: Many of the principles that IAF leaders had specified matched the conclusions McPherson had reached over 25 years of observing failed job training initiatives. "We knew that too many programs trained people for jobs that weren't out there," explained McPherson, "so we decided to not train for anything until there was a clearly identified job opening. QUEST is tied to the San Antonio labor market. That's the most important piece." QUEST also separated the assessment function from the job training itself, eliminating the conf1ict of interest under the old system. Previously, training providers were paid by the number of warm bodies that walked through that door, so they were steering people into whatever training the providers offered, not the jobs people needed.

"The other important component is that community people are doing the pre-screening for applicants," said McPherson. "In San Antonio, we've got two very impressive community-based organizations, so we felt we ought to let them identify which [candidates] are serious about long-term training."

McPherson, who had seen a number of well-intentioned programs sink after a few years, chose to work on QUEST because of "the power of those two community organizations that put it together," he said. "They are wellestablished entities with real grass-roots political power. By the time we were putting together the design, they already had Henry Cisneros and Nelson Wolff signed on, along with key people on the city council and recognized business leaders. Most of the time those programs don't have anywhere near that kind of support." COPS and Metro Alliance had more than a good idea: they had the power to make it happen.

By the time they had a basic design, the leaders were exhausted yet exhilarated. "It was a powerful experience," Father Al Jost recalled. "We were thinking, things look bleak right now because we're dealing with the loss of all those jobs at Levi's and the other plants that had closed. But there was also a sense that there can be a better future: the future is through training, and redevelopment of skills that are marketable and measurable and can be certified."' It was time to make that vision a reality.

Principles of Quest Emerge

• Long-term training: The house meetings revealed that families weren't making a living wage because of inadequate training for existing jobs. The interviews with business leaders and economists disclosed that the jobs that pay a living wage would require more skills. Short-term training, their research revealed, wouldn't provide those skills. "The key is, we need to provide long-term training, with skills that are measurable and marketable and certifiable," said Father Jost.
  
• Job-driven: In house meetings, the leaders heard tale after tale of people who invested hard-earned money in job training only to learn that there were no jobs available when they finished. If participants were going to invest months or years of study, jobs would have to be guaranteed. "And we wanted the jobs to pay well enough to support a family, at least $7.50 an hour," insisted Pat Ozuna.
  
• One-stop shopping: A prime complaint that surfaced in the house meetings was that people seeking job training or other government support were shuttled from office to office, filling out forms that asked for similar information, but for different purposes: job training, health care, GED training. It was time-consuming and difficult for poor people who didn't have a car or were juggling children and a low-wage job. Metro Alliance and COPS leaders were determined to avoid that, so in QUEST, applicants can go to one central agency, tell the staff their skills and interests and be directed to the appropriate place that provides training in the fields they are qualified and interested in. If they need a GED, the agency will tell them how to get one. If they need remedial training, QUEST sets that up. And the program coordinates all available social services, such as food stamps, housing aid, AFDC and transportation.
  
• Individual training accounts: In the house meetings, reported Pat Ozuna, even the people who endorsed the idea of job training would say, "This training sounds great but I need a job now. How is my family going to live when I'm in school for two years and not earning any money?" In fact, the core committee's research showed that, at the Texas A & M University Extension Service, half the enrollees in a highly successful training program were unable to graduate because of family crises and routine needs. The solution was obvious: a stipend to help clients in need pay for tuition, books, and family bills while they were in training.
  
• Community support: Volunteer leaders from COPS and Metro Alliance outreach centers encouraged good candidates to apply for training, evaluated applications, explained the rigors of the program, and monitored trainees progress. "We would not be nearly as successful at getting cooperation from employers, elected officials, and the community college district without the continued support of the community from COPS and Metro Alliance," said QUEST director Jack Salvadore.

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