Pilot program preps Fresno welfare recipients for web work

A pilot program among Fresno County’s Department of Social Services, the local Economic Development Corporation and Bitwise Industries is striving to reduce the county’s welfare rolls by training people how to do computer coding to build websites.

Two classes of trainees – a total of 15 participants in the CalWORKS public assistance program – are learning how to write computer code for websites, following on the heels of the first group of eight graduates who completed their training this summer.

It’s one of a number of welfare-to-work training programs that the Fresno County Economic Development Corp. coordinates under a contract with the Department of Social Services to prepare people for anticipated industry needs.

“The typical thinking in welfare-to-work is, ‘How do we get these people a job – any job?’ ” said Bitwise CEO Jake Soberal. “But what we’re doing here is training people for a career that any of us would be thrilled to have our children enter. We’re training folks to not just get back in the employment line … but to get to the front of the line in jobs that expand the economy.”

In a presentation to the Fresno County Board of Supervisors last month, social services director Delfino Neira said Fresno County has about 9,000 people for which the county is required to provide welfare-to-work services. Overall, he added, the permanent job-placement rate of individuals who have gone through various training programs is between 2 percent and 3 percent.

Although the sample size of trainees from Bitwise’s Geekwise Academy is small, the results are promising – a 25 percent placement rate. Of the first group of eight CalWORKS graduates from the six-month coding course, two have landed paying jobs and others are in the running for full-time work, said Beth Mily, executive director of Geekwise Academy.

“We can take a student from no coding experience, no experience whatsoever in development, all the way to being able to build their own websites, to work in teams and to work with clients,” Mily said. “The students who stick with it are really eager. They come into this environment (at the Bitwise hub for technology businesses), they have an opportunity to see people working in the industry, and they begin to see this as a viable career option.”

“They don’t want to be on government assistance for their entire lives,” she added. “They’re really motivated to change their lives, and for their children as well.”

Since Geekwise Academy was started about 2 1/2 years ago, it has trained nearly 3,500 people in web development and software coding classes, Soberal said. That’s a combination of its nighttime six-week classes for working professionals, as well as its collaborations with local schools, including Fresno’s newest high school, Patiño School of Entrepreneurship. The program for CalWORKS is an extension of that work.

Soberal said he was asked last year by Fresno County EDC chief executive Lee Ann Eager whether Geekwise could train welfare recipients to do web development coding. “I said there isn’t any reason why not, as far as I could see,” he said.

That sparked the process of developing a pilot program to discover how best to deal with the challenges posed by a different population of students, many of whom had been out of the job market and out of school for years. It’s proved to be a learning process not only for the trainees, but for the trainers as well.

“All of these folks have obstacles they’re trying to overcome in a number of different situations,” Mily said. “They all have little ones at home, and that means sometimes day care is an issue or picking up a kid early from school if they get sick, just little life things that happen. Sometimes they don’t have time to practice, or can’t get too close to get the material, and that can be a real struggle.”

Throughout the training, CalWORKS students face the equivalent of a full-time job. They’re in class eight hours a day, five days a week for the six-month program. They each receive a laptop so they can continue practicing what they learn at home. If they don’t have Internet access at home, they have access to Hashtag Fresno, another division of Bitwise that provides a 24-hour workspace with high-speed Internet access and other amenities to allow students to study outside of class.

Mily said another obstacle in keeping enrollment small so far is a lack of awareness among both CalWORKS potential students and the Department of Social Services job specialists who work with clients. Geekwise has the capacity for about 25 students in each CalWORKS class, but there are only five students in an accelerated group and 10 in a standard six-month class.

“Right now the information most of the job specialists have is, ‘There’s a coding program, it’s this many hours, and it’s going to take this long,’ ” she said. “Our job has been to work with the job specialists to explain the purpose of the program and how it could potentially change a life.”

Some CalWORKS clients also have the assumption that web coding sounds exotic and out of reach. “Some think, ‘That’s not for me. … It doesn’t fit my profile. I don’t know anything about math, so I can’t do that,’ ” Mily said. “They don’t understand until they get here that there’s no specific archetype individual who can be good at this.”

Mily said qualifications for the class are being able to type 30 words per minute; have basic familiarity with computers, including checking email and using web browsers; and basic competency and literacy.

“A lot of the development work is just a lot of practice, so we’re not talking about engineering or IT kinds of things where you really need a high level of math or high-level of understanding all these concepts,” she said.

On a recent afternoon, Rachel Calderon, a 33-year-old CalWORKS recipient from Fresno, was one of a team of three women dubbed the “Designing Divas” who presented their assignment, a website for a fictional florist shop, only five weeks into their six-month class. It’s something she said she couldn’t have imagined being able to do just a couple of months ago.

“In the beginning, it’s nerve-wracking,” Calderon said. “It’s something different. If you’ve never coded, it’s a whole new ballgame.

“But as you learn, it starts to make sense. … There’s a lot of work that goes on behind a website. You never realize what goes into it; you just see a nice, pretty page on the screen.”

Calderon said her 11-year-old son “thinks it’s pretty cool” that she is learning how to build websites.

“I showed him at home, ‘OK, when we type this, that pops up on the screen,’ and then I let him do it,” she said. “I told him to type this, and then look at the screen. He said, ‘I did that?’ and I said, ‘Yes, you did that.’ ”

By the end of the class, Calderon said she hopes to have “a good grasp of it so I can get a career and live off of it.”

“The opportunity is great,” she added. “You don’t get a chance like this very often, so I’m taking advantage of it. Technology is growing, and it’s never going to fail.”

This story was originally published October 2, 2015 at 4:38 PM with the headline "Pilot program preps Fresno welfare recipients for web work."