The homestretch

photographs by Mark Ostow, text by Yvonne Abraham

Every single month, Malikkah Phillips's welfare caseworker makes her sign something to say she understands she'll be kicked off the rolls this coming November 30. Just to make sure.

The 25-year-old mother of four, who has been getting state benefits for eight years, is a welfare reformer's dream. She was pregnant at 15 with her first child, Chuckie. She tried to stay off benefits, and to continue her education -- and with help from her parents, who still live nearby, she succeeded for the first two years. "I was working two jobs and going to school," she says. "You know, I was 15, and I said, `I'm not gonna be a stereotype.' "

Although Phillips gave in and went on welfare when her second child was born, she stayed in school. Three years ago, then-governor Weld's threats to kick folks off the rolls scared her into getting her GED and going on to Bunker Hill Community College for an associate's degree in human services. She'll graduate in May and hopes to be working full-time, well before her cutoff date.

Reformers would no doubt take Phillips's story as a vindication of welfare reform, proof that the we-mean-business attitude -- backed up by the compulsory-work requirements and cutoffs -- actually works. To see it that way would be an enormous mistake. By November, Phillips will indeed have become the ideal former welfare recipient. But it will have taken superhuman determination, very good luck, and an enormous support network to get her there. And very little of that will have been provided by the state, which so far has been big on results, but not on helping recipients get them.

Phillips sits in the living room of her badly ventilated Mattapan apartment, wearing shorts and a pair of battered Winnie-the-Pooh slippers. It is a freakishly warm March evening, and she is hot and exhausted. Her four children -- 10-year-old Chuckie, eight-year-old Ashley, six-year-old Shayla, and four-year-old Asim -- are playing together, and take turns sidling up to their mother and clambering over her for fun, much to her mock-annoyance. The kids are bright, funny, and polite. Chuckie makes honor roll every time, and is glad to be asked to bring out proof of his accolades. With a giant grin, his chest all puffed up, he quietly presents the manila folder, stuffed full of commendations, to a visitor.

The older children do their chores without protest when Phillips asks them, and in return, she makes sure she gives them plenty of time and attention. She has them do their homework first thing Friday night, so that weekends can be family time.

"Stand behind me," Phillips says to Shayla, who is standing on the couch, still wearing her Thomas Gardner Elementary School uniform. "You are filthy dirty today."

The six-year-old flashes a huge smile. "I had fun at school today," she says, putting her tiny arms around her mother's neck. Phillips picks up one of her daughter's stockinged feet and grimaces at the damage. "I bet you did," she says, shaking her head. "You been walking around on the ground with no shoes?"

Deciding to make a better life for her kids was the easy part for Phillips. Getting there has been another story. When she first went back to school, obtaining daycare for them was such a complicated bureaucratic nightmare that it was almost a full-time job in itself. Because she was mistakenly told that she didn't have enough study hours, she didn't qualify for long-term child care, so she had to apply for emergency care every month.

"Every month I had to renew my vouchers," Phillips says. "I had to go to welfare to get authorization for a voucher, then I had to go downtown to get the voucher, and getting appointments with people is impossible, and you can only talk to your worker, and they're real busy, so that can take a week." In those first six months, her grades were bad, mostly C's. There wasn't time to study.

Eventually, Phillips got help from Melanie Malerb, a lawyer with Greater Boston Legal Services, who won her longer-term child care. Since then, she's had plenty of A's. Right through her studies, Phillips has been in touch with nonprofit agencies that have taught her about her rights as a recipient, and stepped in to help her when what the state provides falls short of her family's needs. She's also involved in the Welfare Education Training Access Coalition

(WETAC), formed by Massachusetts educators in 1996 to keep welfare mothers in school. And lately, she's been part of their outreach group, educating other welfare recipients about their rights and obligations as they, too, move closer to their cutoff dates.

Phillips is bewildered that this state is making it so difficult for recipients to get the kind of education that would keep them off the welfare rolls permanently. Right now, welfare recipients who are required to do 20 hours of work or community service a week to qualify for their benefits are not allowed to count their education toward those hours. That has community-college enrollments plummeting, as women with already impossible lives jettison their educations in favor of minimum-wage jobs with no futures.

"I heard [Department of Transitional Assistance commissioner] Claire McIntire say welfare is not to help people get master's degrees," Phillips says. "Okay. But they're gonna kick people off who can only read at the fifth-grade level!"

Lest folks see her as whiny, Phillips wants to make one thing clear: she believes in reforming welfare. "It's good that they're making teenagers go to school before they get to my point," she says. "Welfare reform is not bad. But they're lumping everybody in together, and they're kicking people off welfare that don't even have a high-school diploma."

Phillips herself will be fine. Her WETAC work has given her the kinds of contacts she'll need to find work when she's done. This time next year, she'll be a working mother of four with law-school ambitions.

"I know all these people who are gonna make sure I'm okay," she says. "But what about all the people who don't have anybody? What are they gonna do?"