• Updated

In May of last year, Ohio Means Jobs launched an 18-month program, the Employment Incentives Program, to help transition clients off of public assistance benefits to become self sufficient. Now they have their first graduate of the program, Tyree Graves. "There’s kind of a - what we call the ‘benefit cliff’ keeping people from moving off public assistance or taking those higher paying jobs base on the fact that it was economics," Joe Patton said, executive director of Allen County Job and Family Services. "So we tried to take some of those economics out of it with incentives and Tyree is one of our first graduates out of the program and we’re looking for a lot more to come."