The End of Welfare As We Know It? 
Or Ending Neighborhoods as We Have Come to Know Them?
By James Jennings

Welfare reform, as laid out by the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Opportunities Act of 1996, is inimical to social and economic development in poor and working-class neighborhoods, especially those that are predominantly Black or Latino. This new policy seeks to change the presumed self-destructive and dependent behavior of poor individuals. It ignores the community development and revitalization strategies and neighborhood institutions, many supported by foundations, that strengthen neighborhoods and their institutions as a response to social and economic problems.
 

Based on national reports and information about experiences at the local level, we can point to the salience of government and foundation partnerships with community-based organizations (CBOs). The work and leadership of foundations, often in partnership with other sectors, has demonstrated that CBOs are crucial in planning and implementing effective revitalization strategies. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) highlighted this realization in a 1992 evaluation, prior to national welfare reform, of the Neighborhood Development Demonstration Program. The report concludes, “Community-based organizations have made numerous contributions to America’s neighborhoods. They have organized services, mobilized local development capital, channeled the enthusiasm of neighborhood volunteers, and articulated community needs to public and private sector decision-makers.”

Key actors for enhancing living conditions of individuals and families in poor and low-income working class communities include a range of CBOs: faith-based institutions, community development corporations (CDCs), health clinics, public schools, and small businesses. These groups command an impressive list of potential assets and resources, including their mission and experience working with residents. They have successfully promoted volunteerism and are involved in economic development activities such as housing, youth development, and health promotion.

Yet these effective strategies did not inform welfare reform policy making at the state or national level. The civic dialogues about welfare reform essentially ignored the role of community-based organizations. What we heard instead were unsubstantiated and ahistorical presumptions about the dependency of poor individuals and families, accompanied by a wholesale retreat by government from its work with neighborhoods.

The irony is that today’s welfare reform policies weaken the institutional infrastructure of poor neighborhoods – imposing enormous red tape and bureaucratic regulations; generating precipitous demands for services; and dampening civic participation and self-sufficiency – what welfare reform was, in rhetoric, supposed to bring about. These new demands have forced many CBOs to abandon long-range, and demonstrably effective, community and economic development strategies.

HUD’s posturing about welfare reform reflects some concern about its institutional impacts. HUD periodically praises the way welfare reform is working in moving people off the dole, while it continually calls for strategies and approaches that focus on community and the economic development of neighborhoods. In his 1998 State of the Cities report, HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo endorsed policies that generally “boost business investment and job creation in central cities and connect people to work opportunities, improve workforce preparedness and job skills, and increase access to child care.” But these are the very kinds of policies ignored during the push for welfare reform. If the intent of welfare reform was to increase labor-force participation, why weren’t labor and economic development strategies in the public policy mix?

A few new reports are beginning to assess how welfare reform is undermining the capacity of community-based organizations involved with community and economic development. “Increasingly CBOs are looking to and being asked to play an important role in local welfare-to-work activities,” observed the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation’s report, Welfare to Wages: Strategies to Assist the Private Sector to Employ Welfare Recipients (August 1998). Other studies addressing this issue – including The Kellogg Foundation’s Engaging With New Welfare Laws (1999) and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiatives’ report, We Need to Stand Together: The Impact of Welfare Reform on the Dudley Street Neighborhood and the Community’s Response to the Challenge (February 1999) – generally conclude that welfare reform is producing and imposing new demands and pressures on CBOs that is hampering their mission and work.
Top-Down Public Policy

Recently, I completed my own preliminary study of the institutional impact of welfare reform on several Black and Latino neighborhoods in Massachusetts. A series of interviews with 20 community-based organizations in one neighborhood, each with a wide range of missions and foci were conducted under this study. Like the above reports, we found that welfare reform in Massachusetts is a major impediment to involving CBOs in the revitalization of inner city neighborhoods.

Welfare reform threatens the institutional infrastructure of poor neighborhoods because it is a top-down driven public policy, involving enormous bureaucracy and red tape and a huge demand for information about new welfare rules and regulations imposes a large burden on community-based organizations. CBOs are responding and have had to train staff and managers about the world of welfare without any support or funding from state government.

Every CBO representative interviewed for this study reported a lack of information from state government about impending rules and regulations. For example, one CDC executive director reported, “A major challenge facing my staff and organization is to know the welfare reform regulations. Where do we send people for jobs and training? What are their rights? What are the rules or waivers? We took the initiative to solicit information to provide to our constituents...” Another neighborhood agency reported similar experiences: “We received information on welfare reform through the human services network and the women’s legislative caucus. The DTA [Department of Transitional Assistance] did not provide us with information.” Yet another CDC executive director observed, “DTA has not contacted us, we have contacted them…We are not equipped to know if our information is up-to-date. It changes too much.” And according to still another agency director, “I do not know, nor does anyone else, how DTA implemented welfare reform. The department has not informed recipients well nor have they informed organizations on how to respond.”

Along with the lack of understanding or regard for the role CBOs perform in neighborhoods that these statements reveal, our study also found that welfare reform places enormous new demands for services on CBOs, without corresponding support from state government. Each interviewee reported increasing demands for job referrals, housing, food assistance, and day care services. According to one, “We are inundated with requests for help. Churches in our local area are reporting increases in their food pantry activity...We have experienced increased requests for jobs, for referrals, and for training…”

Such precipitous demands are weakening the infrastructure of many CBOs. Some groups are moving toward direct provision of services, redirecting organizational resources away from activities aimed at strengthening neighborhood institutions through strategic and participatory initiatives. Their attention and resources are diverted from long-term strategies and programs aimed at strengthening neighborhood institutions and enhancing the effectiveness and quality of civic participation.

For example, CBOs have spent many years training adults and youths for jobs, and they generally understand that the most effective employment and training strategies include skill training linked to jobs, supportive and mentoring services, and assistance to individuals over a period of time. Welfare reform ignores these experiences and pushes short-term training and immediate job placement. In Massachusetts, that means quick community service placements. CBO leaders see this narrow emphasis on forcing recipients to work on any job as simplistic. They believe the approach looks workable in a booming economy due to a surfeit of entry-level jobs, but it will backfire once jobs aren’t so readily available.

Already, CBOs involved with job training in the neighborhoods surveyed are experiencing increasing recidivism. Clients are returning due to job turnover or the low wages that they earned at the available jobs. And in another employment-related experience, some agencies are questioning their own acceptance of community service placements referred by the local welfare office. While providing a placement for recipients, it has generated significant new costs to their already financially strapped operations.

A third way welfare reform is weakening CBOs, the study found, is through its monolithic view of people in need of services. Welfare recipients include long-time residents and newcomers, immigrants, the young and the elderly, mothers, and families, as well as those with serious medical and physical disabilities. Because welfare reform reflects a “one size fits all” framework, CBOs can’t tailor responses to specific categories of people.

An example of this is the requirement in Massachusetts and some other states that all welfare recipients report to centralized, newly created employment and training centers for assessment. They are not allowed to first approach a community agency. They must first be “processed” by a central bureaucracy, where the emphasis is on a stamp of “job ready.” To be referred to a training program, clients must have the most extreme, debilitating conditions. Even then, training is short term and aimed at entry-level employment. Not until this point are so-called “job-ready clients” referred to CBOs. The agencies must focus on job placement – not supportive services or skills training.

That’s why at least one CBO felt compelled to rescind a contract with the state. As reported by an observer, “The agency found itself actually losing funds. The staff was encountering a population it was not capable of serving given their funding, staff, and infrastructure. Though they had held a good employment and training track record with the department before…They made the difficult decision to not seek funding rather than take on such difficult contractual obligations.”

Increased CBO Vulnerability

There is a serious tension, perhaps even contradiction, between the intent and public values driving welfare reform and the growing understanding of how low-income and inner-city communities can obtain and maintain social and economic vitality. This tension actually dampens the spirit of self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship in neighborhoods, making it more difficult for CBOs to design and support effective economic and community development strategies. Current welfare reform policies sacrifice attention and strategies aimed at economic investment to costly bureaucracies and red tape, chasing and monitoring poor people and children in accordance with welfare time limits and caps on assistance that deny benefits to children.

Approaches narrowly focused on forcing poor people into immediate employment are misguided and don’t allow government to take advantage of the strengths and accomplishments of neighborhood institutions. Changing individual behavior will not produce more jobs or more housing. It certainly will not produce the neighborhood resources and dynamics necessary to meet the social and economic needs of children and families.

The pressures on community-based agencies also create organizational distress. In Engaging With New Welfare Laws, referenced above, Ann Withorn and her colleagues reported that welfare reform generated internal and external tensions for the neighborhood agencies they surveyed nationally during 1998. The source of these tensions included the demand for immediate changes in the treatment of individuals receiving public assistance; the need for new skills and training in assisting individuals and families; and the need to respond to bureaucratic regulations. During periods of economic distress, welfare reform will increase considerably the vulnerability of CBOs, affecting the lives of individuals, children, and families. In addition, agencies serving immigrants believed they have become more politically vulnerable – in danger of having their funding cut and being scapegoated in neighborhoods where other agencies are serving non-immigrant but impoverished sectors.

Welfare reform “as we know it” also discourages civic participation and collaboration in building strategies to resolve neighborhood problems. Instead, it encourages a specter of big government and mistrust, as well as racial and ethnic conflict among citizens.

We can’t afford to overlook neighborhoods and neighborhood institutions in future civic discussions about welfare reform. CBOs are necessary if welfare reform is to succeed in moving people into jobs. Policies aimed at improving employability and life chances of neighborhood residents must be integrated with the mission and work of CBOs, to reflect our growing knowledge about how neighborhood-based programs can help people, and their communities, realize social and economic gains.
 

James Jennings is a professor of political science at the William Monroe Trotter Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He wishes to acknowledge Rejane Guerier, Carter Irvin, Anne Gathuo, and Estella Carrion for assistance with this project and article.
 

Welfare Reform Web Resources

• The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), www.clasp.org, provides regular updates on welfare reform developments at the local, state, and national levels. CLASP’s audio conferences help participants keep abreast of breaking public policy developments.

• The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, www.cbpp.org, studies on a host of issues including the impact of welfare reform on low-income families.

• The Institute for Women’s Policy Research’s Welfare Monitoring Project, www.iwpr.org, makes available many reports including its March 1999 study, “The Effects of Welfare Reform on Housing Stability and Homelessness: Current Research Findings, Legislation, and Programs.”

• The Urban Institute’s Assessing the New Federalism Project, www.newfederalism.org, is a rich resource of welfare reform-related materials, including its recently released report, “Families Who Left Welfare: How Are They Doing?”

• The Welfare Information Network, www.welfareinfo.org, provides information on welfare reform developments. One recent publication discusses the intersection between housing accessibility and welfare reform.

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