In the time immediately before I turned to welfare, I was reeling between low-end labor jobs. I would combine that with regular work. Most of the time I didn't have health care for me or my son. I would deliver the paper in the early morning hours, then go to my regular job. I had health care when he was an infant for a year through my job but then my son's father found out where I worked and came and harassed me, threatened co-workers, smashed up computers, and chased me from my job and home. So by the time I got on welfare, I was pretty angry because I felt the police hadn't done their job to protect us and life hadn't turned out as I'd thought.

The experience of applying for welfare was harrowing at best because growing up white, middle class, suburban you think welfare recipients are "the others"-you tended to think that welfare recipients were drug addicts, lazy bums, and so on. So I was really surprised to see sixty people sitting in the waiting room, mostly white, which was both disconcerting and comforting. But I would still say that the first six months on welfare, I still felt "apart" from the rest of the welfare recipients because I felt this thing was only temporary. I was very encouraged when I found out about the college option under the JOBS program at the time. The things that held me up were lack of child care and transportation. I didn't know how I would handle those costs. It was at that point that I had my eyes opened. I met dozens of other women who were exactly like me, let down by the police and courts, domestic violence victims, most of us had given up our homes and run. We started to talk and realized that we all had the same problems accessing support services and benefits.

One of the most important things college did for me was restore my self-esteem because I was so used to being looked down upon my welfare case workers, landlords, supermarket checkout clerks. But after a year in college, I was called by the college and was offered to be put into the honors program. I found out that I was capable, that I could still learn and in fact excel, that there were actually things that interested and excited me. This despite the fact that I was actually evicted my first semester in school because of a mistake by welfare.
The two things that got me off welfare were an education and childcare benefits. I was able to graduate from Suffolk Community College with an Associates Degree in business. At graduation I held up a pink pillow that had written on it "thank you Campus Kids (the day care center), profs, library and computer labs"-I thought it was really important to make that connection because at the time the county was pulling welfare recipients out of college and I wanted to make sure that people knew that to be "self sufficient" you needed the whole package of assistance.

I started working for law firms but still not making any where near a living wage. I was pretty disenchanted by that and began working as coordinator of Suffolk Welfare Warriors which allowed me to organize and meet other welfare recipients. However, I wasn't able to save up for my son who was beginning middle school so I started my own business but that didn't get me to where I wanted to be so I got a sales job and lucked out and for the first time in my life I began earning a living wage and full health care for myself and my son.

I continue to live as if I'm still in debt so that I can save enough towards my son's college. But it still took a while. I got off welfare in 1995 but I still didn't get out of debt until 2001.
I'm pretty horrified by the 1996 welfare changes; outraged and a little bit depressed by it. I witnessed the beginnings of it at the time I graduated because they were taking people out of school. When you block people from the schooling and training that people need to break out of poverty, watching people a year or two behind being thrown out of school, was heart breaking. It defies logic and really upset me. We have gone from making some advances in the past on family support policies but now it's more like putting your finger in the wall plugging up more and more holes. It's much more difficult to be poor today then ever before.

The economy is now in recession. The welfare changes in 1996 will truly be tested. Two key things we have to do now for welfare reform: create affordable rental housing and enacting a universal living wage. Unless we do something about these two problems, we won't see and end to hunger or poverty.