Culture Poverty & Welfare
July 1st, 1997 1 Minute Read Report by William Eimicke, Steven A. Cohen

What's Working? Lessons from the Front Lines of Welfare Reform

With enactment of welfare reform in 1996, our nation made a major shift in its philosophy about assisting those in poverty. Some view the experiment with optimism, an opportunity to break from the failed welfare bureaucracy and dependency of the past. Others fear the collapse of the safety net, envisioning street scenes from Calcutta appearing in New York and Los Angeles. In fact, welfare reform experiments have been taking place in America’s “laboratories of democracy” for well over a decade and the preliminary results are encouraging.

Among the many state and county welfare reform experiments with documented track records, three efforts in particular stand out as examples of what works and what doesn’t: The GAIN program in Riverside, California; the W2 program in Wisconsin; and the Indianapolis Independence Initiative in Indiana.

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