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Tag: Training

The Work Behind Work: Combatting Homelessness with Jobs

February 14, 2024 / By Seth Pickens, Daniel Flaming, Manuel Gomez and Ana Alvarez

The most common reason unhoused individuals give for why they do not have a place of their own to live is unemployment and lack of income. Homelessness is primarily a problem of income. Upstream interventions that lead to employment will significantly reduce the number of men, women and children who experience homelessness.

Tools from the Realization Project: Resource Library for Identifing and Helping Workers at Risk of Persistent Homelessness

December 9, 2022 / By Daniel Flaming / Economic Roundtable

The Realization Project is a system-change demonstration project of the Economic Roundtable. It has produced public domain library of screening, instructional, personal restoration, and employment tools. The project uses predictive analytic screening tools, which can be downloaded here, to identify unemployed workers with a high risk of becoming persistently homeless. 

Locked Out: Unemployment and Homelessness in the Covid Economy

January 11, 2021 / By Daniel Flaming, Anthony W. Orlando, Patrick Burns and Seth Pickens / Economic Roundtable

COVID-driven loss of jobs and employment income will cause the number of homeless workers to increase each year through 2023. Without large-scale, government employment programs the Pandemic Recession is projected to cause twice as much homelessness as the 2008 Great Recession. The Economic Roundtable used data from the 2008 Great Recession to estimate the linkage between job loss and homelessness and forecast the amount and type of pandemic-driven homelessness in Los Angeles, California and the United States. 
Photograph by Nebojsa Mladjenovic, "1693 Leave this prison and be free.... ~ Rumi~." Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on December 20, 2013, taken on February 26, 2009. Protected under the CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED license.

Prisoners of Hope: Welfare to Work in Los Angeles

July 1, 2003 / By Patrick Burns, Mark Drayse, Daniel Flaming and Brent Haydamack / Economic Roundtable

Why aren’t more welfare parents becoming economically self-sufficient after participating in the LA County Welfare to Work Program, GAIN (Greater Avenue for Independence)? What has happened to these parents since entering the labor market after GAIN? The answers to these and other questions are presented in “Prisoners of Hope,” a report originally requested by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on December 19, 2000. 
Photograph by the Greens MPs, "Laurel Tree House Childcare Centre." Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on May 23, 2013, taken on May 23, 2013 in Glebe NSW 2037, Australia. Protected under the CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED license.

Running Out of Time: Voices of Parents Struggling to Move from Welfare to Work

July 1, 2002 / By Daniel Flaming, Patricia Kwon and Patrick Burns / Economic Roundtable

How do people change their lives? What kinds of help do working poor parents need to lift their families out of poverty? What obstacles do they face in trying to get a sustaining job? More than eight thousand people answered these questions through a survey undertaken to learn directly from working welfare parents and other poor families about the problems they face and the kinds of help they need to become self-sufficient. 
Photograph "P1060350-Edit.jpg [Poverty is a Cage]" by Neil Ballantyne. Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on May 29, 2011, taken on May 28, 2011. Protected under the CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED license. The Economic Roundtable has not changed, remixed, transformed, or built upon the material, and is not using it for commercial purposes.

The Cage of Poverty

September 1, 2000 / By Daniel Flaming, Mark Drayse and Peter Force / Economic Roundtable

In his 1963 letter from the Birmingham jail Martin Luther King, Jr. described the despair of people “smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.” It is important to understand the extent to which this image of entrapment still describes the wage-earning lives of the working poor as they try to support their families. 
Los Angeles County, Department of Public Social Services, 2014.

On the Edge: A Progress Report on Welfare to Work in Los Angeles

January 1, 1999 / By Daniel Flaming, Mark Drayse and Peter Force / Economic Roundtable

The loss of a welfare safety net for most adults for most of their lives makes the quality of jobs available to the working poor and their success in finding and keeping jobs increasingly important. The economic and civic life of the Los Angeles region will be shaped by connections that are made, or fail to be made, between the growing ranks of working poor and opportunities for steady, sustaining, productive employment. 

South Bay Economic Adjustment Strategy

November 1, 1998 / By Daniel Flaming, Mark Drayse, Michael Beltramo-Beltramo and Associates, Tom Jirovsky-Kosmont and Associates Inc, Frank Taplin-Kosmont and Associates, David Rigby-UCLA Department of Geography and John Wilson-USC Department of Geography / the County of Los Angeles South Bay Communities and Community Development Commission

The South Bay Economic Adjustment Strategy has been prepared to help elected officials, public sector staff, business leaders, and citizens take coordinated, effective action to recover jobs lost because of defense cutbacks. The strategy has been prepared under a grant from the Office of Economic Adjustment in the Department of Defense that was administered by Los Angeles County’s Community Development Commission. 
Photograph "Clondalkin dole protest" by The Workers Party of Ireland (no individual photographer mentioned). Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on August 15, 2010, taken on September 10, 2009 outside the Social Welfare Local Office, Clondalkin (County Dublin), Ireland. Protected under the CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED license.

Survival Skills: Welfare to Work in Los Angeles

January 1, 1998 / By Mark Drayse, Cher-Amie Inocentes, Daniel Flaming and Peter Force / Economic Roundtable

Recent welfare reform legislation mandates that aid recipients become employed and economically self-sufficient. The allowable interval of continuous assistance is limited to 24 months for current recipients and 18 months for new recipients, with a lifetime limit of five years on welfare. At least 150,000 current welfare recipients in Los Angeles County must move into the workforce, securing at least partial employment by December 1999. 
Photograph "Long Beach McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Plant; 28.07.1995" by Aero Icarus, Zürich, Switzerland, obtained and used 1995. Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on August 26, 2010, taken on July 28, 1995. Protected under the CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED license.

Economic Restructuring in Long Beach: Opportunities and Challenges in a Post-Aerospace Economy

September 1, 1997 / By Mark Drayse, Daniel Flaming and David L. Rigby,UCLA Lewis Center For Regional Policy Studies / Economic Roundtable

The City of Long Beach and other centers of aerospace production that reaped the rewards of the 1980s defense-spending boom must now confront the realities of restructuring. Since World War II, the Douglas Aircraft plant made Long Beach an important center of the US aerospace industry and dominated the local economy. In 1992, the Long Beach aerospace industry employed 36,100 workers, which was 22 percent of the city's total employment. Almost all of these workers were employed by McDonnell Douglas. Long Beach aerospace workers earned a total payroll of over $1.5 billion, which was 30 percent of the city's total payroll. These figures understate the total impact of aerospace on the Long Beach economy, through linkages with firms in other industries that provide inputs to the aerospace industry, and purchases of goods and services by aerospace workers.

Post Cold War Frontiers: Defense Downsizing and Conversion in Los Angeles

January 1, 1996 / By Michael Oden-Rutgers University Project on Regional and Industrial Economics, Ann Markusen-Rutgers University Project on Regional and Industrial Economics, Daniel Flaming and Mark Drayse / Economic Roundtable

This study examines how firms, workers, and regional economic development institution are dealing with the severe effects of defense downsizing in the Los Angeles region. Between 1988 and 1994 the Los Angeles region lost 127,000 jobs in defense-related industries, including aircraft, missiles, instruments, and electronics. The long economic slump set off by defense cuts has incited a major debate between the advocates of regional institution building and proactive economic development and those arguing for the laissez-faire approach of reducing taxes, wages, and environmental costs. 

Los Angeles County Economic Adjustment Strategy for Defense Reductions

April 1, 1992 / By Daniel Flaming, Michael Beltramo-Beltramo and Associates, Odessa Dubinsky, Elizabeth Reid, Katherine Bulow-Bulow And Associates, David Hensley-UCLA Business Forcasting Project and Allen J. Scott-UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies / Los Angeles County Community Development Commission, United States Department of Commerce: Economic Development Administration

Background An interdisciplinary research team analyzed information about the labor market, economy, industries, and defense linkages of Los Angeles County. The report recommends an economic adjustment strategy to reduce severe job losses projected as a result of cutbacks in defense funding for Los Angeles County industries. 

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