Living on public assistance in Ravenswood

Jackie Williams, 53

Starting in June, sometimes even earlier than that, Jacqueline Williams, 53, makes her way to the Staples store on the bustling 21^st street in Astoria, Queens. Even though her 14-year-old son has just started his summer vacation, she is there to buy school supplies for his next class. Prices are lower at this time of the year.

“I don’t care about the brand,” she says of the notebooks, erasers and highlighters she puts in her cart. She usually searches for two-for-one promotions to save money.

Williams is one of thousands of public housing residents living on public assistance after losing her job in March 2009. She’s been unsuccessfully looking for another one ever since, and in the meantime, fills her days with volunteer work in the senior center at Ravenswood Houses, as required by public assistance. It’s an arrangement that’s going so well that her boss frets that she’ll find a real job and quit.

“Jackie is amazing,” Kryss Shane, program director at the center, said in an email. “She is bright and warm and allows seniors to feel comfortable around her very quickly. She is always willing to assist other staff/workers and understands both the importance of what we do and the requirement for a sense of humor.”

But volunteering doesn’t pay bills, and raising a teenage son is expensive, even when public assistance covers your $285-a month rent. While keeping a cheerful attitude, she looks for jobs and stretches the $100 she receives every two weeks to make a living.

“I’m getting tired of this… welfare, you know?” she says. “Because I like working. I really enjoy working.” And as soon as she gets the opportunity, she grabs it. During the city’s primary election in September, Williams worked the whole day until 10 p.m. at P.S. 166, for which she’ll receive $200, plus an extra $200 for having attended a six-hour Board of Election training class on how to use the voting machines. Just one thing disappointed her at the end of the day: only two people showed up to vote at her table.

Williams also says that she cleans people’s houses for $25-30 whenever she is asked to. And on a recent Saturday she helped a fellow worker at the senior center move some tables to a friend’s house for a yard sale. She worked for four hours, but no one showed up and no goods were sold. So she received no money.

The only thing Williams can do is keep trying: keep going to the Goodwill office on Tuesday, keep going to job interviews and keep hoping. But discouragement sometimes takes over: “Right now I need a job but nobody would even open the door and say: come in, I’ll give you a shot, you know?” Williams says. “All I want is just a little job. And I went to JC Penny and I’ve been to McDonald’s, just to get something. To say I got a job, you know? Nothing. Nobody calls.”

Williams is not the only unemployed NYCHA resident who is looking for a job. Less than half of all families living in NYCHA households have employed members, according to the 2009 NYCHA Resident Data Book.

Though the Housing Authority promotes many training and employment programs to help its residents find a job, “My only complaint is that they don’t hear” about the programs, says Carol Wilkins, president of the Ravenswood Residents’ Association.

At the time she was laid off because of funding cuts, Williams had been working as an after-school teacher’s aide at P.S. 111 in Queens for two years.  Her second-grade students were very disappointed. “It was a very emotional day when I left,” Williams recalls. “The kids were telling me: ‘Tell them we’re gonna get you some money, Miss Jackie.’”

At P.S. 111, Williams was paid $300 every two weeks. After she lost her job and she applied to public assistance, her income dropped by two thirds – $100 every two weeks. And she began looking for another job. So far she hasn’t had any luck.

Every Tuesday she’s required by the Human Resources Administration to go to the Goodwill office on 42-15 Crescent Street, Queens, for her weekly job search. There, she waits – sometimes even hours – for her job developer to send her to a job interview. She’s gone through many, “but all they say is: ‘I’ll call you,’” Williams explains. And since March 2009, they have never called back.

The phone call she’s waiting for now should come from the Aqueduct Racetrack on Rockaway Boulevard, where she applied for a cashier and maintenance job. They would pay her $200 a week, four times what she receives from public assistance.

In the meantime, public assistance requires Williams to volunteer within her NYCHA development, Ravenswood, situated in Astoria, Queens.

She first volunteered in the Ravenswood Department of Sanitation, but working with the garbage and being exposed to the fumes caused her health problems that still affect her. A little over one year ago, Williams started suffering from vomit, dehydration, and loss of weight. On July 7, 2010, dehydrated because of the heat and of her stomach problems, Williams was walking on the sidewalk in Ravenswood when she fainted and hit her mouth on the ground. The next thing she remembers is waking up in the hospital, with no teeth.

After the accident, the Housing Resources Administration transferred her from the Department of Sanitation to the Ravenswood Senior Center, where she began volunteering in November 2010. Even though her health conditions have improved, she still feels sick every three or four months and she’s still toothless. She has undergone three surgeries so far to get her teeth back, but the problem has not been solved. As a consequence, Williams lost 30 pounds in one year.

With no income whatsoever, Williams completely relies on public assistance to pay for her NYCHA rent, which is up to $285 a month. She also receives $360 food stamps every seventh day of the month to buy her groceries at Western Beef. All other expenses are on the welfare money she receives.

“I haven’t bought myself anything for at least 15 years,” Williams says. The only money she spends is for her son, Tyquan Gary, the only one of her four children still living with her. His two older brothers live with other family members while his 35–year-old sister lives with her own family in Florida. Tyquan is described by Williams as having “a good head on his shoulder” and, although a teenager, he understands her mother’s struggles to make ends meet.

“He doesn’t ask for much,” Williams says. But she also explains that things are harder now than when he was a kid. “He’s 14. He don’t want name-brand stuff but he’s just not gonna wear anything like before when I used to put it on…” she says. “But the thing now, he got the friends. All his friends seem like they wanna wear name brand stuff. That’s because their parents work …That’s a big difference!”

This is why Williams once bought him a North Face backpack that cost her $90, 45 percent of her monthly welfare money. “I don’t want to disappoint him by saying no, you can’t have it,” Williams says. “He does everything I normally ask him to do. I ask him to go to school and do what he’s supposed to do. And he does it, and that’s all I can ask for, you know?”

When she talks about her son, Williams’ eyes brighten. Although her financial capabilities are limited, she does whatever she can to raise him in a good way and make sure he lacks for nothing. On the 22^nd of each month, Williams pays $174 for her cable TV, an electronic device she deems indispensable. “That’s how I keep him in the house,” she says. And, along a TV set, Williams once bought an Xbox.

But TV and video games are not the only means at her disposal. Tyquan is enrolled in the “I Have a Dream” program, which “motivates and empowers youth from the Ravenswood Houses to realize their dreams by providing a long-term program of academic support, mentoring, and cultural enrichment, while guaranteeing the resources needed to achieve their educational and career goals,” according to the program’s website. Tyquan was assigned two mentors when he was in 3^rd grade, the same mentors who will follow him until his high school graduation. “They really help me towards keeping him off the street,” Williams says.

Rubbing her temples, then her eyes, with her long, bright pink fingernails, Williams admits that she would even work minimum wage now just to get out of this two-and-a-half-year-long unemployment period. Living on welfare means buying school supplies for her son in June, when prices are low. It means worrying that he has no winter coat yet. It means worrying about how she’s going to help him pay for the college education he says he wants. With no bank accounts, no savings, the furthest ahead Williams can think of is the end of the month, when she has to pay her cable bill. In the meantime, she keeps actively working at the Ravenswood Senior Center, waiting for Medicaid to pay for a new set of teeth she’s been missing for more than one year, waiting for a job opportunity to pop up.

Her twisted smile is even more significant. Enlightening.