Community Action Coalition Inc.
Richard Rolfsmeyer, Director
1810 S. Park St., Suite B
Madison, Wis. 53713-1200
(608) 266-9720
(608) 267-8849 fax

The lot of a poverty worker in Madison is not an easy one, Rick Rolfsmeyer says. Here's a college town with a great reputation, ranked No. 2 among America's most liveable cities in a recent (August 1993) edition of Money magazine. A beautiful, clean city, full of trees, placed in a spectacular setting between two lakes; loaded with professional, high-paying jobs through the University of Wisconsin and the State Capitol, resulting in a poverty rate of less than 3 percent ... and, just below the surface, a pool of poverty that's not easy to see. Of some 180,000 people in Madison and 250,000 in the surrounding area, fully 44,000 are below the federal poverty guidelines, and an undetermined but significant number are just over the line and still having a tough time making it.

The problem, Rolfsmeyer says, is that there's almost no middle economic ground in Madison. No smokestack industry, few opportunities for blue-collar workers, and a market for educated workers so tight that, when the Community Action Coalition advertised a $21,000 job opening, five Ph. D.'s applied.

For a resident with a GED or high-school diploma, or even in many cases a college degree, job opportunities are limited to fast-food burger flipping at wages requiring single parents to work two jobs or couples both to seek jobs outside the home, leaving children unsupervised and spurring additional problems with family dysfunction.

And, while Madison's progressive community has traditionally been both kind and generous to the region's poor people, the combination of a high-tax backlash, an anti-welfare state administration and a small but growing number of minority residents (8 percent of the population, including blacks, Hispanics and Southeast Asians) are starting to create a new mood of minority-bashing; the community's residential patterns and services are also startlingly segregated, with most minority and poor families living in downscale communities.

Rolfsmeyer, a self-described "farm boy" with a high-school education and some hard knocks in his youth that included drug dealing, a bit of prison time, and drum gigs backing up Chubby Checker, is anything but a traditional agency director, and he runs a far-from traditional agency. Although the CAC has opened and operated most of the traditional programs, from Head Start to WIC, family planning and job training, it gets them running and spins them off, rather than establishing an ever-growing social-services hierarchy. Nearly 20 of Madison's major service providers, in fact, trace their ancestry to the CAC.

Today, after a period of soul-searching and new directions, the organization -- freshly re-named "Coalition" in place of the old "Commission" -- is setting its new goals based on what Rolfsmeyer sees as the CAA's original charge in the '60s. That charge, as he sees it, is to take the old saying about "give a man a fish or teach him to fish" and do BOTH. So it will continue, for instance, supplementing the region's Second Harvest food bank with its own distribution system, which provides food free and delivered to 38 food pantries serving 9,000 families; but it will also pursue innovative programs like its one-on-one counseling for potential entrepreneurs, offering people who want to run their own businesses virtually every form of support except cash.

Its community gardening program scatters 13 gardens serving 400 participating families on leased land in virtually every low-income neighborhood, including an innovative garden for youngsters (financed by a Kraft General Foods grant through Oscar Mayer) that pulls together summer gardening with winter school curriculum material, and involves the university Extension Service and the 4-H clubs in a creative partnership. Ten VISTA volunteers (one-fourth of the organization's staff of 40, which runs on a $1.5 million annual budget) live in poor neighborhoods and work as community organizers, essentially providing technical assistance and training for neighborhood grassroots groups.

"We're reemphasizing our primary mission," Rolfsmeyer said. "Give poor people the skills they need to solve their own problems, don't just do it for them. They've got tons of ability, but they just need the skills. It's Democracy 101, it's Civics 101."

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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