Published on: Thursday, July 14, 2011

By Matt Birchenough

Prince George’s County took steps to maintain support for the county’s senior citizens by announcing it would provide additional funding to the Senior Community Service Employment Program.

The County Department of Family Services is allocating an additional $50,000 to the program, which is a community services and work-based training program for adults age 55 or older who meet income eligibility guidelines, according to Department of Family Services Public Information Officer Jermoni Dowd.

The income eligibility is 125 percent of the federal poverty level, according to Dowd, who added that participants must also be unemployed and willing to learn. The maximum time allowed in the program is four years.

The fiscal year 2011 budget initially called for cuts to the program that would cut participants’ weekly hours from 20 to 12, effective July 1. However, the additional funds will restore hours by four to a total of 16 per week through September.

The increase in funding will help limit the effects of the budget on some of the county’s older residents’ opportunities to stay working.

“The additional dollars that the county will provide will help to minimize the impact of reduced income for some of our most disadvantaged older adults in the community,” said Dowd in an email. “The program also provides a paycheck for those who may not have any other source of income.”

However, getting a paycheck provided only part of the motivation for SCSEP participant Bunny Relerford in working in the program.

“I was looking for something to do after I retired, and when I found the Senior Community Service Employment Program, it just sort of fit my bill,” said Relerford, 64, who had worked in supervision and management for Time Warner and then Comcast before retiring.

“I first got started out as a participant SCSEP manager, meaning a case manager, and I handled those cases of the participants that were in the program, which was right up my alley and was sort of tailor-made, because I’ve always ran teams and sales and just sort of monitored people’s records.”

Relerford described the opportunity to again use her skills as part of the workforce as rewarding.

“Being able to use my field and my talent and having that independence of working ... being a retiree, it’s not always just the money but staying in the workforce and really being needed in seeing the needs and meeting the needs of others,” she said.

The program is funded by the Older Americans Act and administered by the Department of Labor. Participants work in community service positions and are paid the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, which does not always provide a large enough check for some seniors.

Relerford, who said she has benefited from additional income from her deceased husband’s social security and her retirement from Time Warner, acknowledged that some participants rely on the program for their only source of income.

“I’m not in a bad place, not too bad, but I know there are some people in our program — they don’t have an additional income,” Relerford said. “With the Metro access, which is some people’s transportation, they’re paying $14 a day to get to work. The 20 hours, that wasn’t very much, $7.25 is not a lot of money, so when that transportation went up, that really did take up almost more than half of that paycheck for 20 hours.

“Then when you look at being decreased to 12, and thank god the extra four came back in to 16 hours, it’s almost unfair … somebody would expect somebody to work or be involved in a program for that small amount of money.”

However, participants also benefit from job training that the program provides.

“Participants receive job skill training while on their job site and are encouraged to use these skills to boost their work experience in order to find unsubsidized employment,” Dowd said.

“I try to look at it to motivate the people that I’m in contact with to look at the training possibilities and possibilities of finding an unsubsidized job,” Relerford said. “It was an opportunity to be involved in helping a group of people … to stay in the workforce so that we could get more training and more technology training so if we needed to have those kinds of jobs, we wouldn’t be left behind.”