Report Assesses Program to Help Inner-City Job Seekers Work in the Suburbs

Seeking a Sustainable Journey to Work: Findings from the National Bridges to Work Demonstration, by Anne Roder and Scott Scrivner, evaluates the impact of a program that provided transportation, job placement, and other services to help inner-city residents obtain employment in suburban neighborhoods. The Bridges to Work program was run by Public/Private Ventures and supported by the Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller Foundations, as well as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and involved participants in four metropolitan regions during the 1990s. But while it appeared an intuitive solution to many of the challenges facing inner-city job seekers, the program was very difficult to carry out, according to the report. In particular, organizers found it hard to recruit participants and coordinate transportation to different employers. The report says that while about two-thirds of the people in the program did find jobs in suburban areas, the majority of them stopped using its services after a short time, particularly as the economic boom of the late 1990s created more jobs nearer to where they lived.

Publisher: Public/Private Ventures, 2000 Market Street, Suite 600, Philadelphia, Pa. 19103; (215) 557-4411; fax (215) 557-4469; http://www.ppv.org; 60 pages; $10 or free for download on the publisher’s Web site.