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Conference to focus on welfare
Recession’s effect on ‘safety net’ of interest
Saturday, July 11, 2009
By Sara Foss (Contact)
Gazette Reporter

ALBANY — Next week experts on welfare, poverty and government support programs will gather in Albany for a conference sponsored by the National Association for Welfare Research and Statistics.
The conference is an annual event, but this year’s will be different.
In addition to the usual talks assessing efforts to alleviate poverty, participants will discuss the recession and whether the federal stimulus package is softening its impact on the poor and low-income people.
“This is a more extraordinary year,” said Thomas Gais, co-director of the Rockefeller Institute.
This is the first time the conference, which is co-sponsored by the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance and the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, will be held in New York. It will run from July 12-15 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.
Gais said experts are interested in learning whether the “safety net” — government subsidies such as unemployment insurance and public assistance — is holding up during the recession, and whether the federal government’s expansion of programs that aid the needy has been effective.
The stimulus package, which is officially called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, contains billions of dollars for homelessness prevention, education programs for poor children and other programs. “It’s an interesting scattershot approach,” Gais said. “The government is putting a lot of money into a lot of different programs.”
Gais said there isn’t a lot of research on the effectiveness of the stimulus package or the state of the various safety nets. He said state welfare rolls are starting to go up, but that they’re not going up “all that much,” partly because the eligibility requirements have gotten stricter.
Gais said the welfare system was tested during the recession of 2001, but that states had more money then, and could draw upon their reserves when demand increased. But now “those surpluses are not nearly as high.” As a result, welfare grants are getting smaller and covering fewer people.
welfare to work
The Hunger Action Network of New York State recently released a report assessing how successful the state has been at moving people from welfare to work and economic independence.
“Unfortunately, New York has done a poor job with its welfare to work efforts, as has been documented in study after study, including by government agencies,” the group says in its executive summary. “Like many states, New York’s elected officials have sought to evaluate success primarily by looking at the reduction in welfare caseloads rather than in the reduction in poverty. Individuals who have left welfare for work in New York have not escaped poverty due to low wages and limited hours and benefits.”
Mark Dunlea, executive director of Hunger Action, said that very few people leave welfare for living-wage jobs and that the state needs to invest in programs that provide welfare recipients with post-employment job training so that they can find better jobs than the low-wage work they often end up in.............>>>>...........>>>>..........http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2009/jul/11/0711_welfaremeet/