Emma "Matty" Yturralde was the opposite of a bank's dream borrower: A newly divorced single mom with a $13-an-hour job. Her finances were so tight, she had a tenant sleeping in her living room.

She had a car, but it was in the shop almost as often as it was on the road. The bus ride to her job at Kmart took an hour and a half. Too proud to ask for a ride home, Yturralde, now 49, said she would sometimes wait outside the store to see if a co-worker offered one.

Her life changed in 2003 with a $2,000 grant for a car and a $4,000 auto loan at 4 percent interest through the nonprofit program Ways to Work, which enabled her to buy a 2001 Daewoo. The store where she worked closed a few months later, but she was able to drive to a new job at a store farther away.

"If I didn't get the loan at just that time, I don't know what would have happened to me," she said. "Maybe I would have lost my job, maybe I would have gone on welfare or worse."

Advocates say Ways to Work, which has underwritten $36 million in loans to 24,000 families since it began as a small program in Minnesota in 1984, is part of a new model for social service programs, one that delivers human services aimed at economic self-sufficiency. Only low-wage earners with at least one dependent child are eligible. Borrowers in the program, which is in place at about 50 human services organizations in 25 states, either have poor credit or no credit. The program is targeted at getting them not just a car, but also a decent credit score and a bank account.

The nonprofit, which has grown swiftly and hopes to quadruple the number of loans it makes over the next five to six years, has a repayment rate of 90 percent. The program grew nationally with early funding from the McKnight Foundation and loan capital from Bank of America Corp.

Most of the loans are two-year loans for up to $4,000, with interest rates capped at 8 percent and monthly payments capped at $182.

Without loans through the program, its clients could have to pay 24 percent or more in interest elsewhere, said Jeff Faulkner, president of Ways to Work.

"We commonly refinance loans where the APR (annual percentage rate), including fees, is 35 to 50 percent," he said.

Just-released findings from a study commissioned by Ways to Work found its borrowers reported take-home pay increases averaging 41 percent, with their average annual income growing to $15,312 from $11,904. More than half the recipients said they were able to get better jobs because of their cars. Nearly four out of five parents with young children said they were able to put them into a more satisfactory daycare arrangement.

The program works like this: Local social service agencies that decide to offer it can get a support package from the national Ways to Work organization. Local agencies use money from the national program to make collateral payments to local banks, which make the loans. The money for the collateral comes from foundation grants, Bank of America loan capital and federal transportation funds.

Family Services of Western Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh-based social services agency, which handled loans for 86 cars in 2005, is the largest Ways to Work program in the country and says that 85 percent of its loan recipients were able to increase their salaries and 70 percent improved their credit rating.

People who worked with Family Service Agency of San Mateo County in California to get the car loans say the amount of work they miss after getting a car is down 92 percent. Their transit time to work is cut by 91 percent and more than one-quarter say they have been able to attend job-related education they couldn't have reached without a car.

The local agencies that make the loans carefully vet recipients, who have to write a personal statement about their situation. The underwriting process can take anywhere from two to five weeks.

In 2005, roughly 13,000 people received a loan application though the program. About 5,500 completed the application, but only 2,500 were approved for a loan. Of those, about 2,000 took the loan they were approved for.

"That's clearly creaming, and it's also self-selection, but it's really important both for the program and the people we actually serve that we give the loans to people who are most likely to succeed," Faulkner said. "We don't want to make their credit worse than it already is."