Faces of Change: Personal Experiences of Welfare Reform in America
Faces of Change Analysis: Welfare Policy Through the Lens of
Personal Experience
Faces of Change: Database of Stories
In 1999, the Alliance for Children and Families launched a Faces of
Change project in collaboration with Alliance member Community
Service Society of New York. The study collected 415 first-hand
accounts of current and former welfare recipients affected by
welfare reform.
The project resulted in two books, the first containing first-hand
accounts from 100 current and former welfare recipients and the
second containing a policy analysis, as well as a searchable archive
of all 415 stories.
Faces of
Change: Personal Experiences of Welfare Reform in America
[TOP]
Contributor(s): Thomas E. Lengyel
Purchase the book.
Preview Chapter 1.
 |
|
Introduction
A major goal of the Faces of Change project has been to give
voice to a group of citizens who find themselves at the
bottom of the economic ladder. Recipients of public benefits
are invisible people and lead invisible lives, at least to
most Americans. Their invisibility and lack of public
presence has proven a rich medium for the emergence and
growth of popular stereotypes of welfare recipients. Such
conventional images have been absorbed by legislators and
policy makers and been incorporated in not-so-subtle ways
into the laws that now govern the authors’ lives. The title
of the legislation that changed welfare, the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)
of 1996, posits use of welfare benefits as first and
foremost a question of individual responsibility. So
stating, it frames economic status in moral terms: The exit
from welfare and the path to self-sufficiency lies in
accepting responsibility for one’s life. Implied, and
occasionally articulated, is its corollary: Those who
receive welfare have yet to fully accept this
responsibility. However, the narrators’ accounts portray
their lives as embedded in and influenced by family life, by
their social network and by community context, thereby
providing direct testimony about the real nature and scope
of responsibility in lives as lived. This voice deserves a
place on the national policy stage, balancing the
uncontested individualistic premise that has thus far
dominated welfare reform debate. |
|
|
The lives of the citizens in these pages are not issue
oriented or issue driven. They cannot be adequately captured
in focused vignettes or policy statements. The stories
document the adaptations of whole families, and even
extended families, to PRWORA’s structure of incentives and
sanctions, and more generally to impoverishment. The
accounts enrich policy debate and public awareness by giving
us life under welfare as an integrated fabric that weaves
together many elements, from household resources, to
external opportunities, to kinship, personal history and
friendship. As we shall see, stories of whole family
adaptations provide a refined lens that reveals the
sometimes unanticipated consequences of public policy. More
than that, they rise above the status of cases or examples
to become stories of real people. They provide the human
meaning of welfare reform.
First person accounts of life under welfare reform
constitute a critical addition to our national understanding
of how this particular set of public policies has changed
individuals and their families. We have chosen to apply the
term authors to those who offered their candid personal
experiences for public view. In a genuine sense, they speak
in their own terms. They have exercised considerable freedom
to choose what was important to them to describe and to
elaborate at will. The body of the texts offers testimony on
this point.
The stories narrated in this volume represent the
unvarnished accounts of Americans whose lives have been
changed by welfare reform. Most of the citizens whose voices
are heard here have received cash benefits from the welfare
system, many have utilized job training in their attempts to
secure employment, while others have used food stamps,
Medicaid or local welfare programs. Some have become
involved with welfare reform less directly as they stepped
forward to assist their adult children who themselves were
subject to the new welfare paradigm. What emerges as
universal is their struggle to survive impoverishment,
protect their children, and salvage hope for a better future
and decent quality of life. |
Faces of
Change Analysis: Welfare Policy Through the Lens of Personal
Experience [TOP]
This excellent book tells the real stories behind the statistics
of welfare reform. It takes a systematic look at the gap between the
rhetoric of success and the reality of an inadequate safety net for
our neediest families. Anyone who wants to know how welfare reform
is really working should read this book.
–Alan Weil, director, Assessing the New Federalism Project, The
Urban Institute
Contributor(s): Thomas E. Lengyel, David Campbell
Purchase the book.
Preview the Introduction.
 |
|
Editor’s Note
In 1999, the Alliance for Children and Families launched
Faces of Change: Welfare Reform in America in
collaboration with the Community Service Society of New
York. This project set out to gather personal narratives
from a sample of people who had recent contact with the
welfare system. The first phase of the research gathered 218
stories, of which 100 were published in April 2001 as
Faces of Change: Personal Experiences of Welfare Reform in
America. The full archive of stories is available and
searchable on-line at: www.alliance1.org.
The policy analysis that follows is based on our study of
208 of those stories. We apply the term “authors” to the
individuals who related their experiences to us, since they
are, literally, the authors of these accounts. They also
represent the irreducible human side of the social policy
that is welfare reform, and are therefore the faces that
embody this momentous change. That is the source of the
title of the project.
Quotations from Faces of Change stories are presented
exactly as they were given orally, or, in some cases, as
they were written out longhand by the authors. Any elements
added during editing for readability appear in brackets.
Each quotation is followed by a parenthesized code that
gives the state of origin and sequence number of the full
story, keyed to their publication in Faces of Change
and on the Alliance Web page. Readers are invited to consult
the full narrative accounts at those locations for more
context and information about each author and their
experiences.
|
Faces of
Change: Database of Stories
[TOP]
The Faces of Change project collected first-hand stories in two
phases: the first collected 218 stories, and the second collected
197. The Faces of Change database of stories allows users to access
these 415 stories in two ways.
Users may browse
by state or search by
word or phrase.
|