Program Description

Program/Practice Description: Project Match's Pathways Case Management System is intended to be used by welfare agencies within a mandatory setting. Pathways provides a set of tools and protocols for (1) ensuring monthly contact between caseworkers and welfare recipients; (2) developing and monitoring customized, month–at–a–time self–sufficiency plans; and (3) promoting a teamwork approach among agency staff. The system takes into account all the roles that welfare recipients must learn to balance: among them, worker, parent, partner, and community member. Pathways has four key components: an activity diary, a monthly group meeting for welfare recipients, interrelated monthly case review and debriefing sessions for agency staff, and a tracking system.

An adaptation of the case management system known as Pathways to Rewards incorporates incentives and is intended for voluntary settings. It has been used with public housing families in Chicago.

Innovations and Results: Pathways is based on a Project Match conceptual framework known as the Incremental Ladder to Economic Independence, which allows people to start where they are developmentally and build gradually on what they are already doing in different areas of their lives (work, school, family, and community). In Project Match’s experience, the ability to balance these competing roles is often the characteristic that distinguishes successful individuals. An in–depth study of Pathways participants in one upstate New York county found that virtually every participant incorporated a range of activities into their monthly plans, suggesting that during the monthly meeting welfare recipients were bringing up a wide range of concerns and issues in their lives, not just about work, and that welfare staff were acknowledging these concerns and issues as important to the welfare–to–work process. In other words, Pathways tools and techniques have been successful at encouraging welfare recipients to address the different facets of their lives that affect self–sufficiency and also successful at training welfare staff to integrate them into welfare–to–work plans.2

1 Toby Herr and Suzanne L. Wagner, Beyond Barriers to Work: A Workforce Attachment Approach That Addresses Unpredictability, Halting Progress, and Human Nature (Chicago: Project Match, 2007). Back
2 Suzanne L. Wagner, Charles Chang, and Toby Herr, An Unanticipated Story of Caseload Declines: The First Two Years of the Pathways Case Management System in Oswego County, New York (Chicago: Project Match, 2002). Back