Bureaucratic hassles can bar many working-poor families from seeking critical benefits such as child care, food stamps, and Medicaid. They're often deterred by too many separate application processes, long waits for service, and trips to multiple offices to get the benefits they need and qualify for. But that's changing in Denver, where officials have streamlined various application and funding processes to cut through red tape and get more benefits to households in need.
The Mayor's Office of Workforce Development now offers, under one roof, an opportunity for working families to apply for a variety of benefits, including employment training and other job services, with minimal paperwork.
"We've heard time and again how convoluted and inaccessible the process is for qualifying for and receiving work support assistance," says Shepard Nevel, the office's executive director. "These are programs designed to help get people back in the driver's seat, whether they are laid-off, high-skilled workers or low-income families trying to make a clean start."
Visitors to the one-stop shop may also apply to receive Denver's local earned income tax credit, or EITC, which supplements the wages of low-income workers. This year, 6,000 families received an average refund of $425 from the local credit.
By piggybacking on the federal EITC application process, the city has reduced overlapping paperwork for its own local EITC applications by 95 percent. Further, it has used flexible funding from the federal welfare program -- Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF -- to fund the local EITC, earning national recognition for creative use of federal assistance.
"We approach [public assistance] like a tiny business: Sometimes you have to do more with less," Nevel says.
In addition to financial assistance, Denver's workforce center features registration for Quick Start, the city's innovative skills-training program. Using TANF funds for tuition assistance, the program offers classes for health care, trade, and industry jobs to help people rejoin the workforce. Employee and education specialists work for both the college and the city -- an overlap unique to Denver, Nevel says.
"It's particularly good for low-income or laid-off people who aren't coming right out of high school but still need that opportunity," he says. "We have tried to 'workforce-ize' our welfare recipients rather than 'welfare-izing' our workforce system."
