Copyright 2000 Susanne M. Alexander
The Cleveland Free Times

Welfare: Why Don't We Care?
By Susanne M. Alexander

I dipped my toe into the muddy Welfare water last summer and wrote an article about it for the Free Times based on very safe phone interviews. I dutifully made the government the bad guy, and breathed a sigh of relief when it was done. Too soon, as it turns out, since here I am deep in the topic again. This time I'm under the microscope, though, taking a look at why white middle-class Clevelanders (Americans?) don't really seem to care about any of the issues connected to Welfare.

It seems there's more questions than answers: In our middle-class world, shuffling kids off to school, running to work, grabbing groceries, just getting from one minute to the next.do we care about faceless families without food? The Welfare system in its intact state didn't much touch our lives. Does it impact us now as it dismantles itself? Or are we oblivious? How many of us cut our teeth on '60s activism, but saw no niche to make a difference with the Welfare system? Are our businesses feeling the burden in the workplace of trying to find useful work for every citizen? Do we just want to pay taxes so that someone else will take care of those potential workers who need far more coaching for success than other employees? Do I just want to keep paying my taxes and not get involved?

"It's very easy to feel that this issue doesn't affect me personally at all, other than as a taxpayer whose taxes go to support the program," said Vicki Schmotzer, 48, of Westlake. "I have no contact with them; their suffering is completely invisible to me. It's very easy for it to be an invisible problem to the white middle class." Ask Schmotzer or her husband about crime, since they've had break-ins, or issues like drugs or violence that might affect their 15-year old daughter, and they get passionate, but Welfare isn't top of their list.

I was invited to be at the Poverty Summit down at Trinity Cathedral sponsored by the Empowerment Center of Greater Cleveland, formerly the Greater Cleveland Welfare Rights Organization, on February 12th. Unfortunately, there was no good excuse at hand. I reluctantly called Dr. Goldie Roberts there. I had an attitude. If this was just going to be bellyaching with no positive action, why should I be there? I was starting to admit that I had some resistance going on with this story. Welfare and its dismantling is a huge issue. It's in every newspaper in town. How could I write anything that would make a difference? It's a story where it's very difficult to tell who is telling the truth.or maybe that's just my excuse.

I'm a white, middle class person who has never been out of money or resources. I've never even really known anyone on Welfare.I don't think. What am I afraid of? Will my activist blood cells start to march, and I'll get pulled into this issue? Are my words part of the transitioning of throwing being "my brother's keeper" back into the mess full government management of people's lives has caused?

"There's no easy answer," said Rev. Mark Koenig, who spoke at the Poverty Summit. He works at the Presbytery of the Western Reserve on issues of hunger, poverty and social justice. He also participates in InterReligious Partners in Action of Greater Cleveland (Interact Cleveland, formerly Eastside Interfaith Ministries), an organization reaching out to families in need and learning from their experiences. "Part of it happens when we come to know people living in financial poverty as our sisters and brothers. It's that spiritual sense of community. Are folks who are in need our brothers and sisters or are they not? We are such an individualistic society and probably becoming more so, if that's possible. I think one of the tasks that lies before us as we address poverty or any of the social justice issues we face, is renewing a sense of community and relatedness. People have made choices to not be related."

I connected with Sue Pearlmutter, an assistant professor at CWRU Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences and a researcher of Welfare issues for the last 15 years. She sees some small signs of hope that marginalized families are leaving cash assistance and will move over time from working poor towards middle class. She sees organizations like Interact Cleveland as critical for the process. They have teams of people from area congregations who are working with and listening to families on Welfare, providing community support and helping them expand their social support networks. "For the first time, federal legislation has encouraged communities of faith to become involved in programs for Welfare recipients and services for them," she said. "That's extremely helpful. If there is to be a change or involvement, that's the way it has to happen, in small groups of people who understand individual kinds of situations and are not making judgments based upon a whole population."

"In Cleveland's faith traditions we have a vocabulary and a history of social justice that has meaning," said Andy Lentz, program associate at Interact Cleveland. "There are tons of untapped resources sitting in those pews and in congregations and in religious meetings all throughout Cleveland that can be brought to bear on helping people escape poverty."

Interact Cleveland began piloting their mentoring program in 1997. Approximately ten volunteers have been trained, put in small teams, and matched with individuals in need. Lentz said they have determined that it's of "paramount importance" for mentors to be diverse in faith, experience, race and from both the city and the suburbs. The organization is actively recruiting mentors, believing that with first-hand knowledge they will become a large base of strong and effective advocates for people leaving the system. Discussions are currently underway to pair mentors with "graduates" from New Life Community, a four-month residency program for the homeless, the Interfaith Hospitality Network, Cleveland Works and Towards Employment.

As Pearlmutter said, making judgments is definitely something that interferes with people getting involved in these kinds of efforts. As I look at my resistance to delving into Welfare, I'm also being confronted with my own humanity on making global assumptions. I'm reminded how I felt a few years ago when faced with going to a conference along with people who were HIV positive and experiencing full-blown AIDS. I crossed my own mental barrier that weekend and learned to hug. There was emotional angst though, in giving HIV/AIDS faces, personalities, people and life. They were no longer headlines to be scanned and discarded. I remember Michael, so thin with a spirit bigger than his body.

My contact with the homeless has been a few hours of serving food at St. Herman's, a couple of afternoons helping at Transitional Housing or scheduling youth to work at the Cleveland Food Bank. My understanding of what it's like to live without transportation, adequate food, a steady job, healthcare, or resources is miniscule at best. Mothers always know what its like to worry about their children, but I never worried mine would go hungry. Would I be a different person for adding life to Welfare through faces and personalities?

I walked into the Poverty Summit prepared to be moved by people's stories. At the beginning, my internal filter had me hearing just the complaints-difficulties with following the rules, incompetent caseworkers and unfair sanctions. I noticed that I wanted to coach them in how to tell their stories, and that the one who moved me most was the woman with a story of surviving and succeeding in spite of the difficulties. I had trouble moving into empathy with the others. There was so much of the story missing. I didn't want to hear about how everyone should sue the government.

I'm not alone in struggling with what kind of attitude to hold about Welfare as a program and its recipients. "I think there is a need to provide some type of assistance for people in times of genuine need, where there is no other way for that individual or family to be supported," said Schmotzer. "It got completely out of hand where it was viewed as an entitlement in perpetuity rather than a means of emergency assistance. As a civilized society, we have to provide for people who can't care for themselves, but an able-bodied person should be expected to perform some type of service in exchange for wages. I don't like the idea of giving otherwise able-bodied people money for no particular reason. I know there's a resistance to the workfare concept, that it's all just degrading jobs. I don't believe there's such a thing as a degrading job. Any type of function has more honor than idleness."

Pearlmutter reflected on our society's views, "We have a belief in our culture that anyone who wants to work can find a job and can support him or herself. Welfare recipients fall outside of that, therefore they must not want to help themselves. People don't want to hear about the hardships and crises in the lives of some people who are poor and receive cash assistance benefits. Among many white middle class people there is a belief that this can't or won't happen to me, so I don't need to be concerned about it."

Denial is a familiar place for me, and Pearlmutter went on knocking at its door. "The middle class is shrinking," she said. "As a person who's in the middle class, I don't want to deal with that, I don't want to face it or the ramifications of it. An interest in people who are poor and people who are on Welfare, really would force me to look at my own shrinking resources. We also no longer see the Welfare system as a part of social justice or helping people. I think that many folks really do believe in the dependency theory, and we want those people who we think have become dependent to become independent. None of us wants to recognize that we also are dependent upon the federal government, the state government, our employers, etc." Ouch.

A wise journalist said to me recently that journalism is a mixture of passion and detachment, and I notice the swing between the two. I admit I was moved at the Summit by the appeal to the hearts of the community. We are only as strong as our weakest members. Care for the unemployable. The community stepping forward to act, especially faith-based organizations. There was a recognition by the end as well, that in the bigger picture, we aren't talking about Welfare, or benefits being cut off, we are really talking about re-structuring society to eliminate the extremes of both wealth and poverty. No more families under the poverty line. Ever.

"I hate to give up on white middle class people," said Rev. Koenig, with some hesitation. "My sense is that people do care. How far they go to express that caring, I'm not quite so sure of. You see things like Harvest for Hunger and Shoes for Kids--the various handout programs are pretty generously supported. I don't know that a lot of middle class folks are investing a great deal of energy in addressing systemic issues: how to rebuild the cities, how to rebuild a sense of community, how to put the soup kitchens out of business. We've done a great job of dismantling Welfare, but the real issue is ending poverty as we know it, not ending Welfare as we know it. I'm not sure how engaged anybody is that process, let alone the white middle class."

I was deep in the middle of interviewing Gerry McClamy, executive director of Karamu House Theatre one day, and we got sidetracked into talking about Welfare. She posed the question, "I wonder what the downside of taking the system apart is really going to mean?" I told her about the 650,000 children in the state living below the poverty line. "That's awful," she said. "That's who suffers is all of these children. That's your next generation, the people that you're going to have to face on the street. Some of them make it and they're okay, but others have no sense of self and how they're supposed to live."

McClamy continued, "These kids don't know about 'thank you', 'please'. They missed all the amenities of life and they're just forging through with the concept 'It's either you or it's me,' and I'm not going to live long anyway. Oh my God! I'm glad I'm not a part of it.but I really am, because I have to come out into this world every day and meet that everyday." We talked about the oneness of mankind, and all of us being cells in one body. "How does this all occur?" she wondered. "I think it's our generation that dropped the ball. We have these kids that we had to give everything to. They didn't have to work for anything. They didn't have to struggle or appreciate it. This is a continuum of that."

Pearlmutter, too, sees the needs of children as critical to be addressed going forward. She shifted out of some of the idealistic tone of our interview and switched to direct pragmatism. "One place where Welfare and poverty has implications for all of us living in Cleveland and the suburbs is in the area of education," she asserted. "We know from long-term research that poverty has severe consequences for learning and the development of children. For people who care about the educational system and the future of the community, if we don't start dealing with the impact of poverty, any of the other changes we may make in our school system and in our other community systems are not going to produce change over the long haul. However, we can bring that change about so that good people will work together toward making it happen. It has to be realized that it's poverty we have to attack."

I'm not sure how much closer I am to being connected to people on or leaving Welfare at the end of this story, but I'm out of denial and resistance mode, so I suppose that's progress. I'm joining leadership teams in my city, both faith-based and others, who are in action to address the issues of race unity, poverty, the education system and shifting how local governments and businesses address and resolve social issues. I'm open to encouraging people to join Interact Cleveland's efforts, even if I haven't signed up myself. If each of us steps forward in some way, the impact will be felt.