Covering Women's Issues – Changing Women's Lives

Monday, May 13, 2013 SIGN IN SIGN UP RSS

• HOME
• Culture & Tradition
  • Arts
  • Our History
  • Religion
  • Cultural Trends/Popular Culture
  • Traditions
  • Aging
  • Marriage/Divorce
  • Parenting
  • Lesbian and Transgender
• Media
  • 21 Leaders for the 21st Century
  • Cheers and Jeers
  • Journalist of the Month
  • Books
  • Media Stories
• Perspectives & Views
  • MomAgenda
  • SisterSpace
  • Commentary
  • Our Daily Lives
  • Uncovering Gender
• Politics & Influence
  • Campaign Trail
  • Education
  • Equality/Women’s Rights
  • International Policy/United Nations
  • Leadership
  • Military
  • Peace
  • The Nation
  • The World
  • War
  • Washington Outlook/Congress/White House
• Work & Labor
  • Business
  • Economy/Economic Policy
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Equal Pay/Fair Wage
  • Labor
  • Retirement
• Justice
  • Crime Policy/Legislation
  • Domestic Violence
  • Genital Mutilation
  • In The Courts
  • Immigration
  • Incarceration
  • Law
  • Rape
  • Prostitution and Trafficking
  • Sexual Harassment
• Health & Science
  • Health
  • Medicine
  • Reproductive Health
  • Abortion
  • Mental Health
  • HIV/AIDS
  • Athletics/Sports
  • Women in Science
  • Environment
• SERIES

Welfare recipients say a sense of isolation often comes with the predicament of needing public assistance. But there are activist leaders and support groups out there helping to battle that lonely, outcast feeling.

Graduating With Honors, Legal Scars

In 1996 Diana Spatz, now 50, graduated with honors from the University of California Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in the political economy of industrial societies.

For Spatz, once homeless and pregnant, the achievement wasn't just scholastic. It was the finish line of a hard-won legal battle for a welfare recipient's right to education.

As an undergraduate on welfare, she fought against the local agency that limited the time she could put into her studies at City College of San Francisco. A lawyer helped her write a legal brief and she handled her own appeal at a hearing with an administrative judge.

"Being pissed off took over being afraid," said Spatz, who won the case.

Afterwards she switched to the University of California Berkeley, which she attended on scholarship. There she began to organize other students on welfare who wanted to pursue their degrees while on public assistance. With the help of professor Jane Mauldon, those organizing sessions were turned into a course at the university.

Spatz then applied for and won a grant that helped turn the class into a nonprofit organization that now helps 400 parents annually through peer counseling.

LIFETIME (Low-income Families Empowerment through Higher Education) is the outcome of all that, an organization of student moms based at the University of California Berkeley who support each other in pursuing educational goals and employment. "From GEDs to Ph.D.s," reads a banner on the group's Web page.

Group's Education and Outreach

LIFETIME participants not only educate themselves on public policy, they also spend, Spatz said, hours reaching out at welfare offices and informing applicants of basic welfare policy.

A current focus is publicizing a work-requirement waiver for some survivors of domestic violence.

Spatz said 25 years ago she was pregnant, homeless and in an abusive relationship. "Any woman who is not economically sound is at risk of future abuse," she said.

Women such as Spatz have a forerunner in Johnnie Tillman Blackston. In 1996 when the rallying cry from some to "end welfare as we know it" was loudest, Blackston had been dead for a year. But she left behind a legacy of 45 years of self-help organizing.

In 1962, after becoming ill and having to apply for public assistance herself, Blackston, was having trouble getting benefits in the Watts section of Los Angeles even though she had developed diabetes, lost her job in a laundry and had six children to support.

The daughter of sharecroppers from Arkansas, she organized her neighbors on welfare to form the group Aid to Needy Children Mothers Anonymous, which would eventually become known as ANC-Mother's Anonymous. She eventually became president of the California Welfare Rights Organization.

In her essay, "Welfare As a Women's Issue," which appeared in Ms. Magazine in 1972, she wrote: "Welfare is like a traffic accident. It can happen to anybody, but especially it happens to women."

Blackston has passed on, but the leaders of groups such as LIFETIME, Welfare Warriors and Mothers on the Move are still there to help pick up the pieces.

Would you like to Comment but not sure how? Visit our help page at http://www.womensenews.org/help-making-comments-womens-enews-stories.

Anna Limontas-Salisbury is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

For more information:

Mothers On The Move:
http://www.mothersonthemove.org/

Welfare Warriors:
http://welfarewarriors.org/

LIFETIME:
http://www.geds-to-phds.org/

SUBSCRIBE DONATE

PRINT