Project Quest
Jack Salvadore, Executive Director
310 S. Frio St., Suite 400
San Antonio, Texas 78207
(210) 270-4690

The name "St. Philip's College" might sound like a high-tone prep school, but it's really one of San Antonio's three community colleges, no traditional red-brick campus but an all-business institution holding class in a neat row of adobe-colored airplane hangars on what used to be Kelly Air Force Base.

One hot spring afternoon, 11 very serious students wearing trim blue uniform shirts listen alertly as Nelson Allday fills them in on the arcana of wave-form comparison, a complex matter involving poster-size graphs and charts with titles like "Pattern for Four Cylinders, Showing High Firing Line in No. 3 Cylinder." Allday, a rangy man with a Texas twang, leans on his table and speaks of wiring harnesses and instrument clusters as the class follows along in their workbooks turned to the page on "Cab, Chassis and Trailer Wiring Systems."

Allday's a good teacher. He keeps the class involved, and the students respond, jumping to answer as he fires out questions, breaking from the book to get them thinking about their own cars and how they work, and how this relates to the charts on the classroom wall.

"If I breeze down to U-Haul," he asks, pointing to a rough sketch of a trailer on the blackboard, "can I just breeze up to that thing and back up, hook on and pull it away?"

"Naw! You'll get a ticket," a young woman in a jumpsuit blurts back. "You'll have no brake lights, no turn signals."

Before long, Allday has a real wiring harness out on the table, yards of wires in a webby tangle, and the students are up, clustered around, pointing at it with pencils and telling him what goes where.

It's a typical day in a typical class at Project Quest, the San Antonio-based program that may just be the nation's most creative and hopeful effort to train a lot of people for a lot of good, high-paying jobs and do it fast.

Started as a project of San Antonio's outstanding Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) community-organizing program, Project Quest was designed as an effort to move jobs by the hundreds into the city's heavily unemployed Hispanic community and to jawbone local employers into earmarking good, skilled jobs for local people. The concept was built on an audacious set of principles, and as the first jobs come on line and find trained, willing workers to take them, it seems to be working.

Planning started in 1991 with a COPS task force of 35 volunteers, headed by Father Al Jost, a Catholic priest and community activist, who started by analyzing the city's economy. They found that San Antonio had lost 14,000 skilled jobs in manufacturing, transportation and communication during the 1980s. During the same period, it gained 50,000 service-sector jobs. While more than half of the new jobs were low-pay, often part-time, and high-turnover positions, fully 20,000 of them -- far more than the number lost -- were high-wage, high-skill jobs.

So COPS set a simple goal: Identify specific jobs within that high-end category, and work with the employers to devise competent classroom and on-the-job training programs that would turn out fully qualified graduates. Enlist unemployed residents of the mostly Hispanic West Side in the training courses; give them both moral and financial support to keep them on track through the training; and at the end of the course, turn them loose into good, paying jobs that would be there waiting for them.

Task force members sat down with the chief executives of all the region's high-tech businesses -- including aviation companies, hospitals, banks, and computer firms -- and eventually won pledges from more than 20 firms to hire trainees for more than 500 jobs.

Project Quest was loosely modeled after the GI Bill, with a fund available to provide applicants financial assistance based on their need for tuition, training fees, books, supplies, even transportation and day care, up to a possible maximum of $500 a month. Trainees must be drug- and alcohol-free; in addition to straightforward job training, they may receive additional support including remedial work in language, math and other basic skills; counseling, and other social-service support.

This kind of individualized and complete support doesn't come cheap. Project Quest's annual budget is $3.7 million, a sizable treasury for a non-profit organization but one that the state, the city and the quasi-governmental Private Industry Council were more than willing to cough up on the basis of the program's promise and the competence of its staff. Now an independent non-profit organization, Quest's executive director is Jack Salvadore, a retired Air Force general who came to the project from a post as commander of the USAF Recruiting Service.

Up and running in the summer of 1993, Project Quest quickly grew close to its predicted scope, with 550 students in training, culled from more than 4,000 individuals who expressed interest in its initial announcement. With most training programs requiring two years, it's a bit early to look at numbers; but its first graduate, Cynthia Scott, moved directly from class to a $9-an-hour full-time job with benefits as a licensed vocational nurse at the city's Baptist Memorial Hospital. The single mother of three children, she was a welfare recipient before she came to Project Quest, receiving $271 a month in AFDC.

"It's hard to get off the welfare system," she said. "They've made it difficult. You're not allowed to do this, you're not allowed to do that. When I graduated and started working, I went in and talked to my social worker, and he said, 'You know you won't be getting any more checks, don't you?' I said, 'Ha!' I'll be getting checks, but not from you." Project Quest expects to graduate 500 more workers with attitudes like that by the end of 1995.

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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