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Making 'Welfare to Work' Really Work
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Welfare Reform Can Succeed-Final Thoughts
Current welfare reform will fail to improve the lot of poor women because it ignores the enormous impact of gender and race discrimination and the gender wage gap in the workforce, the effects of domestic violence and sexual abuse on a woman's ability to function and to work, the almost universal lack of education and training opportunities beyond those geared to traditional, low-wage women's work, the critical need for family-friendly work and benefits, the need for high-quality, universally based child care, and the impact of health on a woman's ability to work.
Nonetheless, helping a great majority of poor women, children, and families raise themselves out of poverty is within our reach. The failure of programs and the enormity of the problems makes one despairing of change. However, careful review of hundreds of successful community interventions reveals that although underfunded, expedient, shallow programs almost always fail, intensive, creative, highly flexible, well-funded programs led by energetic visionaries succeed beyond anyone's dreams (Schorr & Schorr, 1988). For example, many community-based housing programs, often without federal assistance, such as Habitat for Humanity, combine volunteers, private funding, and work by residents to build and rehabilitate housing. A brief survey of some of these programs shows successful approaches that combine social services with housing programs. Solutions to poverty and homelessness will not be easy. They will have to be creative, thoughtful, and well planned. But the alternative, attributing blame to the poor and abdicating significant meaningful assistance, is simply unacceptable in a society that calls itself progressive and just. Unfortunately, because of policymakers' unwillingness to significantly fund these programs, because of their reluctance to commit to a long-term human capital approach, and because individually we all consciously and unconsciously distance ourselves from "the poor" and are unwilling to see them as us, the poor remain the poor-separate, apart, the other.
On the other hand, we know that real long-term success is possible. We know this is more than theoretical-there are programs out there that have worked and that are working now. We know enough about what people need and about what kinds of approaches and procedures work best to design and implement programs that (1) will successfully move people off welfare and into the workplace, (2) will help them stay there, and (3) will use the available dollars effectively and efficiently rather than wastefully. We hope the information in this report helps policymakers sort through the myriad options before them and settle on the kinds of programs that will achieve long-term success.
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