From Welfare Reform to Adequate Income
The National Campaign for Jobs and Income Security

by Tim Sampson

On May 6, 2000 in Chicago, the National Campaign on Jobs and Income Support (NCJIS) rolled out an ambitious effort to challenge welfare policy and politics as usual: 

More than 2,000 delegates from 44 states participated in a series of activities. Most were low-income leaders from grassroots organizations. The meeting marked the first time that such a wide range of community organizations, neighborhood groups, and networks had jointly planned and executed a mass meeting on national policy issues. 

Allies from 50 national religious, civil rights, policy, labor, women’s and other organizations attended. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and Children’s Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman gave keynote speeches. Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) announced their introduction of federal living wage legislation. 

The delegates marched to a state office building to press for better policies on enrolling low-income children in KidCare, the Illinois Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and for the inclusion of immigrant children in it. 

The Campaign released Access Denied, which documents arbitrary and often illegal practices denying child care, food stamps and Medicaid to eligible low-income families. In response to these findings, representatives of the federal Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) and the Food and Nutrition Service made commitments to change policies and enforce existing protections.

The NCJIS grew out of a two-year organizing process initiated by the Center for Community Change. Discussions with key organizing networks, policy advocacy groups, and grassroots welfare and low-income organizations led to the formation of a national organizing committee. (See box for a list of member organizations.) Differences between networks, organizing  styles and approaches, life experience, policy advocates and grassroots leaders make for a lively process! This diversity, of course, also represents a major strength of the Campaign. 

The strategic concepts of the NCJIS are deceptively simple and at the same time hugely challenging: 

1. To encourage, foster and support local and state action; 
2. To provide a vehicle for active leadership and the voice of welfare recipients and low-income people; 
3. To combine grassroots organizing power with policy expertise and advocacy; 
4. To make poverty visible and shift the terms of the public welfare debate to address jobs and income security for all; 
5. To engage religious, union, public interest and advocacy allies; and to educate, inspire and involve middle Americans in determining social policy.

At the national level, the Campaign used the information in the report to challenge the National Governors Association (NGA) to address the needs of TANF recipients for child care, health care, transportation and other vital services. The meager, defensive response of the NGA to the criticisms in the report, which highlighted the ways in which some states were already diverting funds for other purposes contrary to the spirit of the law, generated substantial media attention. This public effort was the NCJIS’s first effort to refocus national attention from ending welfare to addressing poverty, which persists – and even deepens – despite the economic boom.

Where We Stand Today

I believe that the Campaign is particularly timely because the public’s perception that welfare reform has been a success needs a closer look. Although the welfare rolls have been cut, the primary reason is clearly the greatest economic boom in U.S. history. Welfare rolls had already begun to fall substantially before the welfare reform law took effect. 

Many former recipients are working at low wage jobs that do not lift them out of poverty. Changes in state laws limiting access, and new sanctions loom large in reducing the rolls. Race and gender discrimination has intensified with women of color much less likely to have benefited from welfare to work resources. 

In 2002, Temporary Aid To Needy Families (TANF), the program established by the 1996 welfare reform law, must be reauthorized by Congress. Decisions on TANF, together with legislative action on key related food stamp, child care, health care, housing, and work and training programs, will reshape social policy relating to poor and low-income families. For this policy round to shift focus from anti-welfare to anti-poverty, Americans must once again rediscover poverty. As in the 1960s a booming economy and relentless corporate propaganda have obscured the growing number of low-income working families, children and elders. They are squeezed between the increasing costs for basic living necessities and stagnant wages or income support, which have not kept pace with rising costs nor soaring profits. 

We must decide how to address problems such as affordable housing and access to basic health care and understand and accept the challenge of providing adequate income for those unable to work in traditional employment and for those who provide child care, elder care, and vital support to their families. 

Welfare is such a negatively loaded word that many are opting to emphasize jobs and employment, neglecting other issues that affect family income. Winning living wages with benefits, decent minimum wage levels, job guarantees and jobs with a future is clearly one major policy front. But what about those without employment, who provide critical child and elder care for their families, or aren’t able to work? They need income support, affordable housing and basic health care too.

A public policy agenda that encompasses both work and income support would include such elements as: 

• Local, state, and federal living wage laws; 
• Comparable wage provisions for workfare jobs; 
• Public and private child care and universal health care coverage;
• Housing, transportation, targeted economic development and investment; 
• Expanded state and federal Earned Income Tax Credits and Unemployment Benefits; and 
• Child and elder care refundable tax credits.

James Jennings’ article in the Winter 1999 issue of this newsletter raised thoughtful questions about the impact of welfare reform on neighborhoods. There is a vital connection between neighborhood social and economic development and neighborhood/community building strategies and national social policy. We need to develop inclusive alliances that marshal all of these efforts and more. 

Perhaps equally important is including the voices of those most directly affected by the programs and policies being debated. It is in everyone’s interest for low-income families, children, youth, and elders to participate – with both voice and power –  in the public dialogue. Dignity and justice require this. It is the essence of democracy. 

For example, one key element of the NCJIS is Grass Roots Organizing for Welfare Leadership (GROWL). Convened by the Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO) with the support of the NCJIR, GROWL now includes 30 grassroots welfare rights groups. It has strategic alliances with several research and media advocacy organizations. GROWL provides voice and political clout to low-income women and women of color who until now have been absent from debates about welfare policy. 

More and more middle-class Americans must become aware of and listen to those who have been left out and locked out of the new economy. Only then will we begin to realize which policies can help us, our families and communities, as well as the poor. We must also realize which policies can harm us as well as them.  Then,  a  new  approach  will emerge.

In 1968 the Vietnam Moratorium got millions of people involved in public activities aimed at ending the war. This national dialogue – sparked by protests which preceded and followed – was a turning point for the anti-war movement. Imagine a similar national dialogue on ending poverty and the benefits of adequate income for all!

If this is the work to be done, how can foundations be involved? I respond to this question as an outsider, of course, but as a friend of the family based on my 35+ years of having received encouragement, discussion, agitation, and yes, money from many foundations for my neighborhood organizing work in Los Angeles, home care-worker organizing in Oakland and many stops in between! 

Here are some of my ideas:

1. If you fund community economic development or other asset-based neighborhood  and  community building work, look for ways that living wage job, welfare rights, and income support organizing might connect these projects.

2. Consider a special venture capital investment in the NCJIS, which might target local or state organizational development. 

3. Encourage your grantees to check out, join, cooperate, and link their work to the NCJIS.

4. Increase organizing, grassroots leadership development, public media capacity building and other grantmaking to organizations directly or through the NCJIS – possibly in partnership with other foundations.

5. Raise the Campaign’s policy and strategy issues with your board and staff. Join with other foundations to set up meetings with NCJIS leaders and staff to discuss and debate the issues and strategies raised by the Campaign. 

6. And most important, offer critical comments, ideas, suggestions for the Campaign regarding its goals, strategies, and activities.

In the next several years jobs and income support, adequate income for all, can be at the center of social policy decisions and poverty can be seriously addressed in the U.S. We must also strive to deal with global poverty. Indeed these issues are inextricably connected. If not now in this year of Jubilee, when? And if not us, who?
 

Tim Sampson, a founding staff member of the National Welfare Rights Organization, has just retired after 30 years of teaching in social work at San Francisco State University. He lives in Oakland, CA and can be contacted at tsampson@sfsu.edu Although Tim serves on the NCJIS Organizing Committee representing the Applied Research Center, this article represents only his own views. Of course he acknowledges lots of help from his friends!

NCJIS Organizing Committee

• ACORN
• Applied Research Center
• Center for Third World Organizing
• Chicago Coalition for the Homeless
• Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles
• Community Voices Heard
• Gamaliel Foundation
• Greater Birmingham Ministries
• Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
• InterValley Project
• Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition
• Michigan Organizing Project
• National Training and Information Center
• Northeast Action
• Northwest Federation of Community Organizations
• Sacramento Valley Organizing Community (IAF)
• South Carolina Fair Share,
• Welfare Rights Organizing Coalition
• Wider Opportunities for Women
• Women’s Educational and Industrial Union

For more information, including the NCJIS’s Platform Principles, go to the Campaign’s Web site at www.nationalcampaign.org or write or call NCJIS c/o Center for Community Change, 1000 Wisconsin Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. 20007 202/342-0567.

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