Social-Service Needs Spike as Advocates Eye Looming Battle to Renew Welfare Overhaul

As the country continues to grapple with a tough economy, more people are showing up on the doorsteps of social-service charities that serve the poor. And, increasingly, say officials at these groups, they are serving people who were once—but are no longer—supported by America’s welfare safety net.

For example, Catholic Charities USA does a “snapshot survey” of its clients each quarter. “Since 1996, we’ve seen a double-digit percent increase each year in former welfare recipients who need our help,” says Candy Hill, senior vice president for social policy and government affairs of the organization, in Alexandria, Va., which oversees 1,400 local service groups nationwide.

In the past 12 months, Catholic Charities has seen an overall increase of 80 percent in the numbers of people who need emergency aid, Ms. Hill adds.

“We’re seeing more people who can’t work, many of whom are the type of people who were once helped by welfare, as opposed to earlier in the recession, when we saw more working families,” she says.

At a time when other safety-net programs—such as food stamps and unemployment insurance—are seeing their enrollments swell, welfare rolls are actually remaining flat or shrinking. And this situation, say some charity leaders and advocates for the poor, is creating an unsustainable burden on nonprofit social services.

“We’re having a hard enough time getting states to pay us what they owe us on our contracts,” says Ms. Hill. “Without government doing what it should to help the poor, we’ll get further and further behind.”

Falling Behind

A program that has made cash payments mainly to single mothers since the Great Depression, the federal welfare program (now called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families—TANF) no longer keeps pace with need, say those who advocate for poor people. Many families that could have received benefits before the welfare system was overhauled in 1996 are now ineligible, and many more are discouraged by their states from applying.

Welfare, retooled to become a program that requires recipients to seek work, no longer fulfills its traditional function as a reliable bottom-line backup for the poor, advocates say.

Congress is scheduled to review welfare policies this year or next, as the federal welfare law comes up for renewal. Nonprofit advocates for the poor, and many of the charities that serve the neediest Americans, are pushing for changes to strengthen what they say is a fraying safety net. But they will probably not get much foundation support for those battles, say some observers, as many grant makers have lost their will to join the battle in the years since the last renewal of the policy.

Fewer Recipients

In hard economic times, low-income Americans are making use of the tools available to them to survive, such as food stamps, which have seen jumps in enrollment in the recession.

But welfare is “not an entitlement program that people can tap when they need it anymore, while food stamps is,” because that aid is simpler to obtain, says Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, an advocacy group in Washington that deals with poverty.

Unlike the rolls of food-stamp recipients, the total number of eligible families who receive welfare—about 1.7 million—has remained steady nationally in recent years and has been reduced in some regions even as layoffs swelled the ranks of the unemployed.

And states haven’t taken advantage of extra money made available by the federal government to reach more needy people in last year’s federal stimulus package, according to a report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, in Baltimore.

In order to accept the money, states would have to add $1 from their coffers for every $4 they get from the federal government—a stretch for states because of the budget troubles a majority of them are battling.

Mothers and Children

The welfare program, which by law must be renewed every five years, was last renewed in 2005. In February the White House announced that it would prefer to hold off on debating welfare policy until 2011. It has encouraged Congress to tweak welfare rules, while submitting a request in the 2011 federal budget for an additional $3-billion for the program.

While some advocates and leaders of social-service charities say that federal welfare rules need to be reworked to deal with the realities of the recession, the current welfare law has its fans.

Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, says that welfare has helped nearly three-quarters of poor single mothers find jobs.

“It’s a lot better for them,” says Mr. Haskins—who, as a Republican Congressional committee staff member, helped draft the 1996 welfare-overhaul legislation. “We have evidence that shows that, for 55, 60 percent who work more consistently, they’re better off. They feel a lot better about themselves, and their children think more of them.”

He adds that men have borne the brunt of lost jobs in the past two years, an observation underscored by national unemployment statistics.

“The recession hasn’t hit women as hard as other groups,” says Mr. Haskins. “I’d bet there are still quite a few women out there finding jobs.”

A study by another Washington think tank, the Urban Institute, found that many of those women are struggling. More than 50 percent of women who left welfare for jobs, as the program strongly encourages, live below the poverty line. Very few of them receive benefits. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for single mothers is about 20 percent higher than the national average of 9.7 percent.

More Than Welfare

Mr. Haskins concedes that welfare, while succeeding in getting more women into the world of work, has not done enough for those people who simply cannot work because of mental or physical disabilities, addiction, and emotional problems.

“For the foreseeable future, we’re going to have women who aren’t capable of working who have kids. The problem is that welfare, as it is presently constructed, will never pay them. It should be easier for them to get on the rolls. As long as they are meeting the work requirements by looking for jobs, they should be able to get the benefits,” he says.

While political debate on overhauling welfare is likely to be heated, veterans of previous welfare-renewal battles say they have yet to see the same ardor among their colleagues this time around.

“We’re much less intense and engaged compared to where we were in 1998 or 1999,” says Michael Laracy, director of policy reform and advocacy at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. “For one thing, there’s an appreciation among us that [welfare] is only one component of the safety net for low-income people.”

Also, many grant makers have broadened their focus to include other federal poverty programs. “Over the years, we’ve come to realize that we needed an infrastructure of groups that could respond to a wide range of legislation, including food stamps, tax credits for the poor, and work-support programs,” says Benita D. Melton, a program officer at the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, in Flint, Mich.

Another big grant maker, the Ford Foundation, in New York, announced in December an $80-million effort to help shore up low-income working families. But that effort will not include any support specifically for welfare-policy advocacy, said Joseph Voeller, senior communications officer at Ford, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle.

Some advocacy groups and the foundations are less likely than in the past to throw a lot of money and energy at the issue now that the law is up for renewal, says Mr. Laracy.

“A lot of us felt like we got burned last time,” he says. “There’s some TANF fatigue out there.”

America’s Safety Net: a Snapshot

• 1.7 million households receive welfare.
• 16 million households receive food stamps.
• The number of households receiving food stamps from June 2008 to June 2009 grew by 3 million.
• Welfare now supports 22 percent of the nation’s impoverished children, compared with 62 percent in 1995.