4 Critical Issues; 4 Ways to Make a Difference Today

As early as this week, Congress may vote on key issues that will overwhelmingly affect women, families and communities -- particularly those still struggling to survive the ongoing economic crisis. Readers of this blog know that we've been highlighting a number of ways you can take action to ensure just policies are put in place before positive change becomes more difficult to achieve; below we offer a recap of four of those actions, and hope you'll help urge Washington to protect the interests of women and families across America.

1. Congress must protect access to child care and Head Start for more than 300,000 children and their families. Let our government leaders know how important quality, affordable childcare is to our country's future. Learn more about how to take action.
   
2. Beginning today, emergency unemployment insurance expires, affecting millions of long-term jobless workers.  Meanwhile, legislators are still debating who among the richest of the rich will get to keep their tax cuts. Tell Washington that real economic recovery should benefit women, families and communities, not the wealthy or Wall Street.
   
3. Urge Congress to retroactively renew the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Emergency Fund, which has helped create more than 250,000 subsidized jobs and increase services for low-income families wounded by the economic crisis.
   
4. Comprehensive immigration reform is still the goal, but the DREAM Act is a step in the right direction. Tell Congress they must pass this important legislation and grant citizenship rights to at least a million undocumented youth who are working tirelessly on behalf of their families, communities and country.

Together, let's capitalize on the window of opportunity presented by the Lame Duck session and secure changes that will make a real difference in women's lives.

TANF Extended -- Minus Crucial Emergency Funding

Time to share a little "good news/bad news" on the TANF front.

For the good: Just before departing for Thanksgiving recess, the Senate voted to extend TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) funding through September 30, 2011, circumventing what would have been certain disaster for our nation's neediest if the program had been allowed to expire in December, as the bill originally stipulated. According to Ms Foundation grantee the National Women's Law Center, the House will now take up -- and likely pass -- the full bill at some point in the coming days, marking a major win for families in need nationwide.

But there's significant bad news to report as well...

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Ms. Foundation Grantee Speaks Out on Failure of TANF Extension

We've written a number of times on this blog about the importance of TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) and the critical need for the Senate to pass an extension to the TANF Emergency Contingency Fund, which allocated federal funds to create temporary jobs during the economic crisis. We're sad to report that last week, the Senate failed to pass the measure, falling just three votes short of the 60 needed to extend these benefits.

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TANF Sanctions Threaten America's Neediest

There's an epidemic in America's most vulnerable communities -- and federal policies are directly responsible for its spread. Widespread and erroneous financial sanctions are leaving TANF recipients with less money in their pockets, if not shut out of the system entirely.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is designed to offer America's neediest families crucial financial support during times of crisis. But according to a recent report from Ms. Foundation grantee Legal Momentum, financial sanctions -- commonly and erroneously imposed for minor violations -- have resulted in hundreds of thousands of families being denied full access to the benefits they've been awarded.

The report -- "The Sanction Epidemic in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program" [pdf] -- found that in 2008, 85,000 families a month received reduced benefits (or "partial" sanctions), with an average reduction of $146, about 38% of the $383 average monthly TANF grant. According to Legal Momentum, these sanctions "often come as a result of minor violations" --including something as simple as "failing to file a document."

...The report describes the case of “a 43-year-old black woman, living in an emergency shelter and suffering from both shingles and AIDS, who was sanctioned for failing to attend an appointment at the Department of Labor. According to her, when she called the Department of Labor to say she would be 20 minutes late for her appointment she was told it was too late and was sanctioned.

As a result of these sanctions, desperate families find themselves struggling even harder to survive; as Legal Momentum points out, "sanctioned TANF families often report maternal or child hunger, eviction or homelessness, and lack of medical care."

But there's more: in addition to these partial sanctions, states are also within their rights -- and encouraged by federal policies -- to visit "full" sanctions on beneficiaries who commit minor infractions. Full sanctions deprive TANF families of 100% of their benefits, leaving these families without resources to support themselves. This in turn has lead to a significant reduction in the overall number of families receiving aid of any kind: in 1995, 84% of eligible families participated in the program; in 2005, that number had dropped to just 40%.

You'd think that this discrepancy between need and actual awards would raise a red flag among the powers that be. But with state budgets under extreme stress, it seems that government officials are turning a blind eye to the impact of these inflexible policies on families in their states if it means reducing the "welfare rolls."

As Congress looks at extending TANF subsidies through September of 2011, Legal Momentum is urging policymakers to correct the application of sanctions, to ensure that they become both "fair and rare." Families in crisis deserve to be treated with as much humanity as anyone else; it's Congress's job to make sure that TANF starts to treat its beneficiaries not as numbers, but as actual human beings.

Women & Welfare: Revisiting Reform in the Wake of Economic Crisis

While there’s been plenty of talk throughout this global economic crisis about the fate of the newly jobless, newly poor, middle class, stories about how the tanking of the economy has affected those who were already poor in the “best of times” have been few and far between. In this week’s issue of The Nation, however, Katha Pollitt asks some long overdue questions about the current plight of Americans who entered this recession in poverty -- particularly the women among them.

Framing her piece around "welfare mothers," and the impact that the passage of 1996's Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (or PRWORA) has had on their lives, Pollitt notes that despite the tendency of pundits and analysts to label these welfare reforms a “success,” in fact, even in the economically prosperous 1990s, the families most affected by said reforms remained solidly poor. PRWORA may have pushed poor women off the welfare rolls and forced them to find jobs (which conservatives cast as a return to the great American ethic of “hard work”) -- but those jobs tended to pay them much less than it actually took to survive, usually earning them salaries well below the annual poverty line. (Hard to see the “success” in all that.)

So how are these women and families managing nearly 15 years after the passage of the PRWORA and in the worst economic climate in recent memory? The hidden truth may be that they aren’t managing at all; they’re simply subsisting. Homeless shelters have seen the impact: according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, from July to November 2008 the number of families entering New York City homeless shelters increased 40 percent over the same period in 2007. And as Pollitt points out, while the use of food stamps nationwide has also risen 40% over the last 2 years, there’s been little jump in welfare rates over the same period -- meaning, most likely, that the process for accessing the latter type of aid has become so complicated as to “weed out” those who most need it. It’s therefore safe to assume, according to one of Pollitt’s sources, that most of these women and families are now living in a state of “constant suffering and inequality,” vulnerable not just to poverty itself, but to all of its attendant, ugly bedfellows, including increased rates of domestic violence.

There are, of course, solutions to be had to problems of this nature, and, among other things, they involve crafting and pushing for the adoption of policies that put the needs and experiences of women and families at their center -- just as Ms. Foundation grantees the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative and the Georgia Citizen’s Coalition on Hunger do every day.

With TANF (Temporary Aid for Needy Families – a provision of PRWORA that replaced AFDC) up for recertification this year, Congress now has an opportunity to, in the words of grantee Legal Momentum, finally “make [welfare programs] responsive to the mothers and children [they are] intended to serve.” To do that, though, they’ll need to start listening to the women living on the front lines of extended poverty and including their perspectives in the decision-making process -- an approach that’s clearly long overdue.

Susan Wefald

Executive Vice President & COO