PHILADELPHIA A new study of five types of welfare-to-work programs in Los Angeles County shows that no one kind has a lock on providing the best service.  The best way to move welfare recipients into the workforce is an amalgam of different approaches.

The study was conducted by the Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania and by the Manhattan Institute.

The study of welfare-to-work programs in Los Angeles County finds that faith-based programs are highly effective in boosting client optimism and helping clients stay in jobs. Government-run and for-profit programs are especially effective in providing job-training services.   

The five programs studied are government-run, for-profit, secular nonprofit, faith-based with implicit religious elements and faith-based with explicit religious elements. Approximately 430 clients of 17 welfare-to-work programs were involved in the study hat Works: Comparing the Effectiveness of Welfare-to-Work Programs in Los Angeles.  

"The study supports what has been called niche effectiveness," said Stephen Monsma, a non-resident fellow at Penn's CRRUCS and a political science professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif.  Monsma co-authored the study with J. Christopher Soper, a political science professor at Pepperdine.

"Faith-based programs were highly effective in increasing client sense of hope and optimism, in enabling employed clients to maintain their employment and creating a social network through on-going contact.  Government-run and especially for-profit programs seemed to be effective in teaching marketable job skills," Monsma said.

The study indicates that clients who participated in for-profit welfare-to-work programs were more likely than clients of any other program type to gain employment.  Almost 60 percent of all respondents who were unemployed at the start of the study reported full-time employment after 12 months.  Overall, only 31 percent of all clients studied were employed full-time after 12 months.  

Soper said that the different strengths and weaknesses of the five types of welfare-to-work programs studied shows that the ideal program is collaborative with different types of providers forming partnerships to assist clients in finding full-time employment.

"Given the success of the for-profit organizations included in the study in improving their clientsemployment situation and in enabling them no longer to need welfare benefits, there is reason to believe that for-profit organizations should be given a greater role in working with welfare clients," Soper said.  

"Our study does not support those who deprecate government-run and for-profit programs as uncaring and ineffective.  Those who argue that faith-based programs are too small and unsophisticated to meet the complex needs of persons struggling to find employment and escape welfare and poverty also find little confirmation in our study," Soper said.  

"In fact, we were impressed, given the very limited staff resources and low budgets of most faith-based organizations, that they did as well as they did in comparison to their much better funded secular counterparts," he added.

The report is available at http://www.crrucs.org.