Mayor Bloomberg’s New Poverty Policy Should Include Charity AND Empowerment

Maureen Lane

Mayor Bloomberg’s New Poverty Policy Should Include Charity AND Empowerment

WNYC’s Beth Fertig reported on a new pilot program to fight poverty in NYC that is being launched. Mayor Bloomberg raised $53 million from private funds to be able to distribute conditional cash to 2500 poor families. Community organizations and charities are submitting names of eligible people and those chosen to participate would for example get $25 for their kid’s good school attendance, $100 for going to doctor’s appointments and a few other categories.

In the radio interview Linda Gibbs, NYC Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services notes how difficult living in poverty is for families and suggests the money is helpful to poor parents and their children. She says, “It can be really tough to do the right thing when you’re living in a poor household in a poor community and every day a choice of one right thing compromises another right thing. And the family members that I talk to, I think, actually felt more respected and acknowledged for the difficulty of their situation rather than insulted.”

Gibbs point hits home to low-income and poor women and families and yet her words seem at odds with policy.

Here at Hunter College it is back to school for everyone. Parents who are raising young children and going to school at the same time started the crushing schedule of getting their children to school and themselves to class and work prepared and on time. Most of the women I work with are receiving welfare and going to college. They talk about getting up at 5 am to get themselves dressed before waking their children and supervising their dressing, breakfast and trip to school. It is extraordinary effort that allows them to accomplish their tasks and without any cash to spare. The welfare cash benefit for a family of 3 is $291 a month. All transportation, clothes and school supplies come from that cash allotment. It is shamefully inadequate.

Today, Roxanna Henry Welfare Rights Initiative’s (WRI) Legal Advocacy Organizer is testifying at a public hearing on the adequacy of the public assistance grant in New York State conducted by the Assembly Committee on Social Services.

WRI and other organizations of the Empire State Economic Security Campaign are calling for the state to raise the welfare grant. Mayor Bloomberg’s private funds can be helpful to a small group of families but policy changes on the state and city level can have a whopping positive affect on all poor families.

What Bloomberg is doing is charity that has the ability to help empower by making choices easier but lasting empowerment comes from policies that aid people receiving welfare to get family sustaining jobs. However, just increasing the grants alone is not adequate and the Bloomberg administration needs to stop harassing people in welfare out of going to class. Mayor Bloomberg’s current welfare policy insists that people need to take dead-end workfare jobs instead of getting training and education. Preventing access to the skills that get good jobs is disempowering and bad policy.

Charity vs. Empowerment is a false choice. We need and have both and government needs to pick up its end.

NYC would do well to get out in front of the welfare grant increase and speak to the Governor and get it done.

In addition, Gibbs' acknowledgment about poor families with children being strained to accomplish everything they need to accomplish speaks right to the heart of government lagging in policy. As Deputy Mayor, Gibbs can work to direct HRA to adhere to the federal welfare guidelines which require 20 hours of workfare for families with children under the age of six whereas in NYC families with young children must perform 35 . 20 is the federal law and in NYC it should be our law.

The poverty discussion and projects coming from Mayor Bloomberg’s office are encouraging and we look forward to his team hitting the solution mark closer and closer to the problem.

Comments

Good Post! Mr. Bloomberg's reward system is a social psych experiment, not social policy.

I think the Bloomberg bribe-the-poor-and-they'll-improve experiment is ill conceived. It remains to be seen whether, in experimental terms, it will be carried out well. The premise, as I understand it, is that lower income people's behavior needs to be altered: they don't bring their children to the doctor, they don't go to parent-teacher conferences etc. (So far as I know, this premise itself has not been shown to be true.) If it is true, the experimental cure is to positively reinforce people by paying them for "good behaviors." A matched set of 2,500 controls will not get the cash. Outcome studies will provide journal fodder for generations.

I think you are exactly right that a key problem facing public assistance recipients is that they don't get anywhere near enough money to manage. How did the spring effort to raise the basic grant fair? Did the Spitzer Administration, the legislature support it? The Economic Security Campaign website you linked to reads as though it has not been updated in a while.

In Thursday's NY Times, Ray Rivera reports on an interesting study by the Urban Justice Center on how otherwise eligble food stamp recipients lose benefits. (PDF of the 21 page report here). As I read it -- people lose food stamps in the recertification process because it's designed to force customers out of the system. This, therefore, is an example of harmfully disrespectful treatment that the system hands out.

Well said, Ms. Lane. Bloomberg, like America's robber-barons of the nineteenth century, is willing to indulge himself in a perogative of the rich - charity, with his name prominenly attached. This is not what he was elected for - we expect public policy that serves the public. The people of NYC deserve, and are due, better leadership. All of us will benefit from policies that empower poor people -- thru training and education -- to become more productive.

How dare Bloomberg require longer work hours than the federal standard! He dares becuse we don't raise our voices to demand fairness for the very people in our city that need help to get up and out of poverty. If we are a civilized society (and not every man for himself) we are all diminished by inadequate policies to aid the working but still poor among us. - it goes without saying that they will have to work much harder and endure more depravation to make ends meet but without the help of enlightened pubic policy and training or education they face overwhelming odds.

Daniel and Diana,

Thank you for your comments. They accent the core issues and the audacity of the mayor's adminsitration in requiring 15 hours more workfare than the federal standard.

I will be reporting on wri's negotiation with the city and state on the hours standard and updates on the assembly grant hearings in upcoming blogs.