Sometimes I am amazed at my friends and what they are doing..what they think.
A friend of mine stated that she was working on her thesis. This I did not know. Then to find out what her thesis was about I was quite moved.
My girlfriend suggested we make a film to document this.
Again, I was moved.
And my girlfriend is correct, they are stories that need to be told.
We are all now working towards this project, which I feel is a necessity.
Our hope is to document these people, their stories of reality..we are interested in connecting real people to legislation, showing how something as abstract as a bill can truly affect - in a negative or positive way - the individual. We believe that the statistics do not truly reflect what is happening with people involved in the welfare-to-work program, and in broader terms, we do not believe that statistics or percentages ever are truly accurate or representative of anything, and need to be questioned.


This is the thesis for which or project is based upon:

"In 1996, Legislative Act H.R. 3734, also known as The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, made unprecedented changes to the policy of the United States towards the poor. The act came under the umbrella of welfare reform and promised to transform the welfare system that had been in place since the New Deal. With this legislation, the federally guaranteed safety net for the poor was eliminated and replaced with mandatory work and lifestyle requirements for those whose receive federal assistance. Perhaps most dramatically, the legislation imposed a 5-year life time limit on the amount of assistance an individual can receive. As anticipated, this legislation has had a tremendous impact on welfare policy in the United States. Since implementation, caseloads have declined an astonishing amount, dropping from 5.5 million families in 1994 to 2.2 million in June 2000. (Sawhill, 2001) The staggering decline in caseloads has surprised advocates of this bill and many are applauding welfare reform as a great success. (Primus, 2001) However, the falling caseload has also ignited the voices of critics who are skeptical of the statistics and who seek to explore the facts that lay hidden beneath the numbers.

My purpose is to explore the world beyond the numbers and political rhetoric. I will explore the local implementation of this legislation and illustrate the impact this measure has had on the public servants who administer Welfare-to-Work Programs, as well as the effect this legislation has had on women and children in the United States who rely on public assistance for their financial solvency. My goal is to investigate the experiences of those that are most affected by this legislation and document the day-to-day differences that have resulted. I will explore how the policy has been implemented in San Francisco and the various ways people have adapted and learned to live within the framework of this new policy. I hope to obtain a sense of how this has changed the day-to-day work activities of service providers, as well as illustrate some of the experiences those transitioning off public assistance have encountered. (Brauner & Loprest, 1999) I hope to discover and document the individual triumphs, failures and successes they encounter on the road to economic self-sufficiency."

Thanks to Jocelyn for her hard work on this thesis.

Now we begin the hard work of bringing this issue into the public eye.