The Pittsburgh Foundation

Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 

Assets: $420 million (1997) 

Major Program Categories: Families, Children and Youth; Community Development and the Environment; Education, Arts and Culture and the Humanities; Health and Special Needs Populations; Special Projects and Philanthropic Relations 

Case Study Focus: The Gaps Initiative: Employment Retention Demonstration and the Transportation Initiative 

Contact: Jane Downing, Program Officer
email: downing@pghfdn.org

Annette Green, Program Officer
email: greena@pghfdn.org 

One PPG Place, 30th Floor
Pittsburgh, PA 15222-15401
phone: 412-391-5122
fax: 412-391-7259

The Pittsburgh Foundation's major employment-related program, The Gaps Initiative, sprang from its desire to identify a focus for its Families, Children and Youth funding program. In 1993, the Pittsburgh Foundation began a new phase in its history, as it became a wholly separate institution from the Pittsburgh-based Heinz Endowments. This event sent both foundations in new directions. For the Pittsburgh Foundation, it meant an opportunity to assemble a new program staff. 

The foundation's selection of Gerri Kay as vice president of programs signaled a philosophy of integrated program strategies. As Kay began the process of hiring program staff, she looked for experienced individuals with an interest in solving problems and the capacity to work collaboratively with colleagues. The programs emerging since then bear the clear marks of collaboration and cooperation. 

As new staff were hired, the Board of Directors launched a planning process. The foundation established five program categories: Families, Children and Youth; Education; Community Development and Environment; Arts, Culture and Humanities; and Health and Special Needs Populations. Equally important to the shape of the foundation's future work was the articulation of four themes that cut across the program categories: 

• Racism 
• Persistent Poverty 
• Economic Vitality of the Region 
• Quality of Life

Identifying Needs

With welfare reform as a platform for discussion, the foundation and the county public assistance office convened job developers, service providers, public housing residents and others to explore the barriers to self-sufficiency for those who would soon face reduced benefits and work requirements. Two problems identified in Focus on Our Future were further elevated at this convening: transportation to connect residents to jobs and employment, particularly employment retention. Although the foundation works on the two issues separately, its operating culture facilitates information sharing between the initiatives. The next several pages describe the foundation's work on these two issues.

Focus on Our Future: What the Study Found

Focus on Our Future uncovered significant agreement among consumers (recipients of services), service providers, and funding organizations about the priority needs of families in targeted communities. These needs included more child care and early education programs, parent training and family counseling services, accessible health care services, and increased collaboration and coordination among existing services.  In addition, recipients consistently identified service providers' lack of cultural sensitivity as a problem. Service providers felt constrained by inadequate funds and staff. The local funding community expressed enthusiasm for community foundation leadership in developing a "coherent, broad scale approach" to neighborhood health and social problems.  According to the study, unmet needs and gaps in service were most crucial in several areas: Jobs for parents Housing for families Child care that facilitates parents' employment Health care for children and their parents The study recommended that the foundation convene an exploration of new strategies to serve families with young children, and use its grantmaking dollars to fill the identified service gaps.

Employment: Keeping Former AFDC Recipients on the Job

The Gaps Initiative

The Gaps Initiative focused on assisting the parents in these families to stay employed for two or more years. The demonstration was structured to respond to federal TANF rules and the state's welfare reform implementation, Road to Economic Self-Sufficiency Through Employment and Training (RESET) Program. In addition to TANF's five year total lifetime eligibility limit, RESET requires that most adult heads of households begin to seek work immediately and record an average of 20 hours of work per week within the 24-month period allowed by federal regulations for continued TANF eligibility. 

Criteria for Grantmaking: The Gaps Initiative

The Gaps Initiative looked for proposals that:  Demonstrated an understanding of the target population (TANF heads of households) and the challenges they are likely to face in maintaining employment;  Demonstrated an understanding of the world of work and employer needs;  Demonstrated a successful track record providing services to the target population;  Had staff who value, respect and reflect the racial and cultural group(s) to be served;  Offered clearly defined strategies for helping TANF clients overcome barriers to maintaining employment; and  Offered financially feasible strategies with potential for continuation by the Department of Public Welfare. In addition to traditional questions about recipient recruitment strategies and overall project strategies to ensure participant retention, the application posed a more provocative one: How will your services help the participants learn to secure, for themselves, basic necessities that will help them maintain employment?

Supporting Job Coaching and Case Management

Foundation and public assistance staff developed a Request for Proposals (RFP) for projects that would demonstrate the effectiveness of various job coaching/case management strategies. Both parties agreed that their long-term objective was to develop new or better programs which the state could then incorporate into its welfare reform job retention strategy. The relationships with the state were already under development to assure that the information gleaned from the demonstration would be given genuine attention. 

The Pittsburgh Foundation's RFP sought strategies that would: 

• Serve TANF families in Allegheny County, especially female heads of households with children 13 and under; 
• Provide comprehensive assessment of client needs; 
• Remove barriers that deter people from maintaining employment such as lack of child care for young children, adult supervision for older children, lack of transportation, proper clothing and health insurance, poor literacy and/or inappropriate workplace skills; and 
• Ensure that TANF heads of households maintain employment for at least two years. 

Interested agencies were given approximately five weeks to prepare proposals, during which time the foundation and public assistance office conducted two pre-proposal information meetings. Foundation staff were also available to meet individually, or talk by telephone, with those unable to attend the meetings. 

The foundation established a community advisory committee to assist with the formulation of the RFP and to review grant proposals. The committee reviewed the proposals for those that best met a set of selection criteria and selected five proposals that were ultimately approved by the foundation's Board of Directors. 

Program Implementation

The four grantees participating in The Gaps Initiative include: 

• A multi-service community organization located in The Hill District, an inner-city neighborhood that is the historical center of Pittsburgh's African-American community; 
• A collaboration between a Children's Hospital program that provides on-site health and social services in several small towns around Pittsburgh and a multi-purpose human service center; 
• A collaboration between a multi-component community-based organization and a training and employment agency serving the city's Northside; and 
• A consortium of the local Urban League, ACTION-Housing, and the county Department of Federal Programs (which administers, among other programs, the Job Training and Partnership Act).

Of the four grantees, two have projected very specific outcomes including, in both instances, a general retention rate of 85 percent. One of these projects has proposed additional outcomes related to participant and employer satisfaction, and the other plans to gather data on the number of participants no longer requiring various forms of public assistance. A third grantee plans to use a control group to compare the results of its clients with those not receiving its services. 

Evaluation

The foundation set aside $50,000 for evaluation, but this amount proved to be insufficient. Mathematica was familiar with the federal government's interest in learning from welfare reform efforts. Local Pittsburgh partners worked with Mathematica to develop a proposal to the federal Administration for Children and Families, which subsequently committed $300,000 towards the first year evaluation effort with additional support in years two and three. 

In addition, staff has organized a learning community composed of Gaps Initiative grantees, foundation representatives and the county public assistance office. This learning community is designed to facilitate ongoing exchange of information and lessons among the grantees. Resource people have been invited to participate, including those who either work directly with TANF recipients or whose work is in some way affected by welfare reform, e.g., public officials responsible for day care and public housing, representatives of the local IRS office, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and an affordable housing organization. 

While foundation staff Beverly Lovelace and Annette Green are responsible for the management of the learning community, they rely on a consultant to carry out many of the logistical tasks. The grantees identify topics for discussion and resource people are brought in to make presentations or otherwise share information with the members, but each meeting is also structured to allow discussion about project implementation issues. 

One issue the learning community has explored is the impact of TANF on agency interaction with consumers. To work with grantees to reorient their service delivery to a client focus, the foundation engaged two consultants - one the training director of a local family-focused nonprofit and the other a staff person at the local child protective services agency. 

The proposal application poses an important question that has proven to be a continuing issue for implementation: How can grantee organizations help clients develop and use their own networks and community resources rather than public assistance and service agencies? Foundation staff acknowledge that these concerns reflect a different world view than agencies have had in the past. 

The Critical Role of Staff

For a community foundation, a major test of effectiveness is whether or not donors can "connect" with foundation programs. One strategy used to make this connection was a donor briefing on welfare reform that included representatives from the county public assistance office. It was one of the foundation's best-attended briefings. 

Staff also asks foundation donors to be partners through their donor-advised funds, and have successfully attracted almost two dozen to support the foundation's discretionary agenda. One donor has contributed to current distribution for this project, but staff believe this initiative might also attract some donors now making decisions about their estates. One message this initiative may convey to donors is that the stewards of the foundation's resources are thoughtful and knowledgeable about community needs and innovative ways to address them. 

Transportation: Getting People to Work

• Economic Vitality of the Region 


The foundation defines this as "the region's ability to generate, attract, nurture and retain enterprises that create family-supporting jobs, to prepare a workforce for these jobs, and to compete successfully in the global marketplace." Access to transportation that can link job-seekers with employment opportunities is a job-related objective articulated for this issue. 

• Persistent Poverty 


The foundation's goal is "to reduce, remove, overcome specific individual and societal obstacles to economic self-reliance...." 

• Racism 


The foundation's goal is "to achieve equity between African-Americans and whites by encouraging existing institutions to treat everyone with the same relevant standards...." Note: African-Americans are the largest racial minority in the Pittsburgh area and have been identified by the foundation as the largest group affected by racism locally.

Meetings have included representatives of the foundation, the Allegheny County Assistance Office, the City Planning Department, the City and County Housing Authorities, City and County JTPA programs, the Chamber of Commerce, employment services providers, the regional hospital council, a transportation management organization, and, most important, the Port Authority, the regional transit service provider. More recently, the regional planning entity, which is responsible for transportation planning, has been included. 

Building Relationships within the Public Sector

Points of focus include public housing developments, from which new employees could be recruited if they could get to work, and industrial parks and regional malls that desperately need employees and, in some cases, already employ people who find it difficult to match their work schedules to the available transportation. Staff believe permanent improvements to the system can be made across the region. 

In the course of a year, the participants have taken action on a number of tracks. The Port Authority has made schedule adjustments in over 40 routes to accommodate evening and weekend work shifts. Alternative transportation access projects have been piloted, a single 1-800 number is being explored to facilitate carpooling, and a $6 million proposal has been re-submitted to the federal government with new service routes addressing problems identified through the group's work. 

In addition, a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) contract has been awarded to analyze how well the existing transportation system serves people living in low-income communities and employers trying to fill large numbers of entry-level jobs. The Pittsburgh Foundation has extended its convening role to coordinate the participation of five funding partners underwriting this project. 

One unanswered question remains: "Where, geographically, are the family-supporting jobs?" Downing acknowledges that the long-term goal is breaking through the transportation barriers to family-supporting jobs. With the GIS project completed, she believes this question can be answered. 

She also notes that those participating in the transportation initiative have focused primarily on getting people to work. But, she suspects, the initiative may also need to address some intra-community transportation issues to facilitate worker links to their support systems - child care, health, training and other services. This work is merging with a United Way Self-Sufficiency Task Force. But, she explains, "I don't know what this means in terms of grantmaking. My mind still says that unless we get the public agencies involved somehow, there is not enough philanthropic money to support para-transit service on a long-term basis."