Community Voices Heard

The Parks Opportunity Program (POP) is the largest public sector paid transitional jobs program in the country. When initiated in March of 2001, the POP Program, along with other Transitional Jobs Programs in New York City, represented a significant shift away from forcing welfare recipients to perform unpaid workfare assignments (known as WEP) toward paying people a wage for working in city agencies on a transitional basis. This report uncovered the experiences of a random sample of 100 of the first 3,500 program participants through intensive one-on-one interviews, comparing participants’ experiences in both POP and WEP. Participant responses, in addition to findings from other transitional jobs research, welfare to work studies, and documents generated by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and Human Resources Administration, tell an important story about the value of paid transitional jobs over WEP and the policy and programmatic challenges yet to be addressed.