Welfare Hints from Eloise
Lochhead, Carolyn
Welfare Hints from Eloise by Carolyn Lochhead When President Clinton vetoed welfare reform on January 9, he quashed states' hopes of receiving block grants and, with them, greater freedom to...
...Social workers would visit teen mothers at home (that is, in most cases, at the home where they grew up, since welfare would no longer provide teens the cash with which to pay their own rent...
...Nothing about juvenile delinquency...
...If we approach people like that from the beginning, I think you have a very different response than we've been getting...
...Instead of a monthly check, they would receive vouchers for various living expenses equivalent to the current grant of $607 a month, along with vouchers for intensive social services, including drug, alcohol, and mental health treatment...
...In an attempt to head off some long-term dependency, the reforms would radically change California's approach to unwed mothers...
...This man ran for president saying 'I'm going to end welfare as we know it' . . . Well, I'm sorry, but...
...The reforms would primarily affect the first two groups...
...Carolyn Lochhead is Washington correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle...
...He's put nothing on the table that talks about how do we begin to help teen moms, nothing about that...
...Beneficiaries would receive a flat cash grant regardless of family size, reduced every six months, for up to two years...
...If the state offers intensive help of many different kinds but only for a limited period, the theory goes, some people will realize they must act...
...And I thought that the child-loving Democrats would do something different...
...The proposed remake is the brainchild of Eloise Anderson, 53, whom Wilson recruited from Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson's innovative welfare team...
...For the temporarily unemployed, the emphasis would be on getting work...
...Nothing...
...He has put nothing on the table to talk about substance abuse among parents...
...In a return to an older social-work model, before the welfare rights movement of the 1960s made cash the solution to poverty and dismissed social workers as intrusive, Anderson would institute intensive "home visitation...
...Her familiarity with the system has bred contempt for welfare as we know it...
...Nevertheless, confident that block grants will eventually pass, California governor Pete Wilson is pressing ahead with his state's first overhaul of Aid to Families with Dependent Children since the program was started for widows and orphans in 1935...
...In fact, Clinton did try to do something different, with his misbegotten plan for universal health care...
...New research, she says, shows that home visitation reduces child abuse, unintended pregnancies, and unemployment...
...Wilson plans to introduce his legislative package in March or April, after holding hearings around the state...
...Welfare Hints from Eloise by Carolyn Lochhead When President Clinton vetoed welfare reform on January 9, he quashed states' hopes of receiving block grants and, with them, greater freedom to manage welfare as they saw fit...
...The workers would keep an eye on the entire household situation...
...Another major change is that beneficiaries without work experience and deemed at risk for long-term dependency would be ineligible for cash grants...
...And our response is, 'Well, what do you think you can do, since you can't stay here for long...
...We expect them to walk in and say, 'You know, I've got a problem, my husband and I have separated, I'm without a job, I need some help,'" Anderson says...
...Children especially would have a better chance, Anderson believes, if they could be helped before they started failing in school or suffering the extremes of neglect required to trigger intervention now...
...An important special provision would apply to unwed teenage mothers...
...nothing that he has put on the table deals with the issues that we believe are big issues in this AFDC population...
...They would be authorized to intervene not just to help the teen mother, but also to address a young brother's involvement with a gang, say, or the alcoholism of an adult in the family...
...But the question remains: Will Washington politicians agree to go along...
...Intervention, of course, requires the client's cooperation-or else...
...A five-year lifetime limit would apply...
...The message to recipients is clear...
...For one thing, women would no longer have to be single to receive aid, upending AFDC's original assumption that widowhood or desertion was the cause of women's need for state support...
...Now director of the California Department of Social Services, Anderson, the daughter of a maid and a janitor, began her career as a social worker in Toledo, Ohio, trying to help women keep their children and get off welfare...
...Because the long-term AFDC population is relatively small but the source of so many costly social problems, Anderson says the Wilson administration is willing to spend heavily on intervention, drawing on savings expected in the rest of the system as time limits shrink caseloads...
...At last, AFDC would cease to be a disincentive to marriage...
...hardcore welfare dependents, some 15 percent of the caseload, who often start receiving AFDC as teenagers and who may have other problems, like substance abuse, mental instability, or illiteracy, that make them only marginally employable...
...The plan distinguishes four groups of welfare clients: the temporarily unemployed, who make up about half the caseload and who usually leave the system within two years without help from the state...
...If implemented, her scheme will transform the largest welfare system in the nation, covering 2.6 million people and consuming more than a quarter of all the money spent nationwide on AFDC...
...The reforms draw on decades of welfare research, data from California's respected collection system, suggestions from the counties, Anderson's own formative experiences, and her twice-monthly visits to welfare offices around the state...
...Anderson contends that this already happens, but much later in the family's history-after children have suffered more, and it is often too late to give them a decent start...
...The five-year cutoff is intended as a strong incentive for people to take hold of their lives...
...Eloise Anderson, for one, is scathing about the presumption of those who would block serious attempts by states like hers to tackle these problems in favor of the status quo...
...She describes AFDC as "government-sponsored child abuse," a deeply destructive program that has crippled poor communities, undermined family formation, marginalized poor men, and victimized children...
...the disabled...
...Nor is there any guarantee that California's new approach to welfare will succeed...
...Right now, Anderson says, welfare recipients feel they can get treatment or not, with no sense of urgency...
...On the other hand, mothers would be expected to work...
...The numbers were so striking, Anderson says, "that it became clear that we cannot continue to walk away, just giving these families money and assuming that money is what they need...
...The purpose here is to break a cycle documented in California's welfare data: AFDC is feeding people into the state's costly foster care, drug treatment, and juvenile delinquency systems...
...How can we help you to be at work at least part-time in six months?' . . . People live up or down to the expectations we have of them...
...She reserves particular scorn for President Clinton...
...A home worker who discovered problems, like drug abuse or child neglect, would take some kind of action...
...Over time, she predicts, the new approach could cut long-term dependency by two-thirds and slash juvenile crime and foster care...
...Still, it is hard to imagine that the reformers have come up with anything worse for children or more costly to society than the bankrupt welfare system that exists now...
...Under California's proposal, if a welfare recipient refused help and came up against the five-year time limit, the ultimate sanction would be removal of children from the home...
...When she unveiled her reforms on January 10, she vowed her "drastic" changes would lift "the cover off the cesspool of AFDC" and cast the light of day on its festering social pathologies...
...Intact families and men caring for their children would be eligible if they met income and asset tests...
...If they are treated as capable adults, rather than helpless and irresponsible ones, some will meet the system's higher expectations...
...He has put nothing on the table to talk about mental illness among parents...
...Some child care and other services would be provided, to facilitate an intensive job search based on a successful model developed in Riverside County...
...Most children in California's foster care system, she says, were not beaten or sexually abused but simply neglected...
...and children whose parents are ineligible but who need assistance...
Vol. 1 • January 1996 • No. 19
