Giving Back
How older Ohioans overcame age—and poverty—to serve their communities: The story of SCSEP
Ashtabula
Ashtabula is a city where the train doesn’t stop any more.
Fifty years ago, it was a regular stop on the New York Central Railroad—midway between Cleveland and Erie, Pennsylvania, in the upper right-hand corner of Ohio, alongside scenic Lake Erie. Every day, trains brought people, freight, dollars, and jobs.
But today, you can board a train only in Cleveland or Erie. Ashtabula languishes.
“It’s definitely a county with problems,” says Ed Fleisher, who administers the SCSEP program for Ashtabula County’s Workforce Policy Board. “There’s not a lot of new industry coming here. We have fairly high unemployment and lower levels of education. The kids that get an education are gone.”
But SCSEP is right there to help Ashtabula’s older residents—- those who want and need to work and those who want to invest time and energy in the local community. According to Fleisher, SCSEP is “the difference in whether they drive a car or get a medicine they need to take.”
It’s the difference for Ashtabula, too. Community organizations, like Meals on Wheels, “come to rely on us.” SCSEP participants work in the food operation, the administrative operation and the transportation operation. “Without us, they’d have a difficult time running the program.”
Ashtabula is an unpretentious working-class community. Of its 20,962 residents, fewer than 20 percent hold managerial or professional jobs. Fewer than 20 households in the City of Ashtabula have an income of $200,000 or more a year.
Unemployment is 7 percent—more than 2 percent above the national average. Nearly 30 percent of employed adults hold manufacturing jobs—all of which are endangered by outsourcing and the woes of the auto industry.
Ashtabula lies 55 miles east of Cleveland. It is beginning to show the first signs of suburban sprawl. In 10 years, Fleisher believes that Ashtabula might become part of the Cleveland metropolitan area. But for now, it is a city where the hospital is by far the largest employer, where the median household income is $27,354 (one of the lowest such figures in Ohio), where “for whatever reason, the lives of many of these people don’t add up.”
Olive Jones’s life is adding up better than it did nearly five years ago.
Her husband of 34 years died after an extended illness. “My husband wanted a stay-at-home wife,” so Jones had not worked since the 1960s. As a young woman, she had been a billing and filing clerk for a local insurance agency. But she had “never turned on a computer” and she was wracked with doubts.
“How do you dress? How do you act? I had no idea.”
Yet she didn’t waste time finding out. Her husband died on August 28, 2001. “By Sept. 28, I had my interview with Ed.” He placed her as a trainee with the county council on aging. She helped coordinate senior citizen trips. She did so well that the council hired her full-time on its own payroll within weeks.
Jones is now 65, but she hasn’t slowed down. She estimates that she has organized trips for more than 1,000 people— to casinos in Detroit, to Arizona, to shopping malls. She acts as public address announcer, sightseeing coordinator and caller for the game of Bingo that seems to go on perpetually. When the bus returns to Ashtabula, “I get hugs.” She also gets $6.35 an hour for a 40-hour week. Without SCSEP, “I would be sitting at home, no question about it.”
Jones learned about SCSEP in a way that would gladden the hearts of marketing professionals everywhere. She saw a phone number on a card. In Ohio, when you turn 60, the governor mails you a Golden Buckeye Card. It congratulates you on your landmark birthday and tells you which benefits are available to you. Jones had tossed her card into a file and forgotten all about it. But shortly after her husband’s death, she was cleaning out the file and . . . Bingo. An 800 number appears on the front of the card. It promises job guidance. Jones picked up the phone and has never looked back.
“I will continue as long as I am mentally capable.”
Although she gets $900 a month from Social Security (her husband put handles into sledge hammers at a local factory for his entire adult life), she needs money for a reliable car, and so she can visit a son in Georgia. But she is a frugal sort. “I put money in the bank.”
“To me, it’s a wonderful program,” says Jones, who has lived either in Ashtabula or within 40 miles for her entire life. “Mentally, I would have been very depressed. You need a reason to get up in the morning.”
Ida Edwards had the simplest of reasons to enroll in the program: “My Social Security was running out before the month ran out.”
For the last year, she has worked at the local Head Start program while she gets on-the-job training as a SCSEP participant. She serves as a monitor aboard a van that takes children to speech therapy. She talks to the children, sings with them, plays with them and helps them find their hats and coats.
She is 75 years old, and had been out of the workforce for “10 or 12 years.”
Edwards grew up in South Carolina, married young, had children and lived in New York and Cleveland. She settled in Ashtabula about 45 years ago. She has been a widow for 30 years. She’d be willing to marry again, “but no one has discovered me,” she says, her eyes twinkling.
Edwards is one of about 700 African Americans who live in Ashtabula. The population is more than 95 percent white.
When she enrolled in SCSEP, “I felt a little leery about anybody hiring me at my age. I had no computer experience. I didn’t really know what I could get.”
She would work fulltime if she could find something appropriate, and she continues to look. But for now, “I like being with younger people because it makes me feel young.” When one of the Head Start kids calls her “Grandma”—and many do—she says it puts her “someplace between smiling and crying.”
Ida Edwards could not have made ends meet if she weren’t frugal. She had hoped that her husband would leave her a little something, but he had to go into a nursing home before he died. To qualify for Medicaid coverage, the family had to spend down its assets. “Wouldn’t you know, the very month he died was the month we finished depleting.”
As soon as her husband died, she began to grow fruits and vegetables and to can them. “Tomatoes, string beans, cabbage, peaches, I can them all.” She doesn’t spend money on luxuries and has no plans to start. “At least I’m not in debt. I got food, I got a roof over my head. I’m OK.”
Olive Jones and Ida Edwards were relatively easy to place because they had excellent attitudes and personal qualities, Fleisher says. Some SCSEP participants are far more challenging.
“We’re as busy now as I think I’ve ever seen us.” But how do you place someone who’s functionally illiterate? Or a deaf and mute person? Or someone who has suffered disfiguring injuries? Fleisher has managed to help all three.
“We have a lot of poverty, a lot of blight, a lot of areas where you lock the doors.”
The SCSEP program is the candle that lights the way.