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Arkansas ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) reports that it geared up early and quickly in 1996 when the lower house of the legislature cranked out a welfare reform implementation bill with a vote of 92 to 4. Public assistance recipients packed Senate committee hearings, disrupted deliberations that they believed were ignoring the reality of poor people in Arkansas, and eventually were dragged from hearing rooms by the police. Angry, high volume group meetings with the lieutenant governor and then the governor won a commitment to request waivers from food stamp cutoffs in 18 counties with high unemployment. According to ACORN organizer Mitch Klein, this first round of activity also won expansion of child care and transportation resources for the coming welfare-to-work transition.

Despite repeated demonstrations that won a commitment from the director of DHS, welfare centers are still refusing to post recipient rights. Caseworkers, for example, are routinely not informing people of their rights to child care and transportation assistance. Organizers and members have not only been kicked out of waiting areas but also from public sidewalks in front of welfare centers. A suit against the DHS director is pending.

Undaunted, ACORN members are keeping up the pressure on "the welfare" in other venues:

• Last Halloween, a busload of activists in costume toured five welfare intake centers to highlight the trick played on them by welfare administrators who went back on their commitment for negotiations; negotiations have reopened, albeit shakily.

• Leaders returned from a national Jobs with Justice meeting fired up for the December 10 national action. A joint recipient-union action pulled out 175 people who presented the much visited director of DHS with their demands and shouted him down when he tried to stonewall; highly negative editorials followed, but ACORN's relationship with organized labor in the state solidified.

• At Christmas, the minister and sympathetic members of a Little Rock Presbyterian Church were persuaded to install a sign next to their traditional creche scene that read: If Joseph and Mary went to DHS, they would have to wait for 60 days.

The Arkansas ACORN has collected authorization cards from 1,500 people and held 17 intake meetings to integrate card signers into the campaign and into ACORN. Members of the ACORN Welfare Rights Union hold a monthly group meeting to plan strategy and prepare for actions. A newly printed welfare rights handbook has recently been sent to every member.

For 1998, Arkansas ACORN is developing a campaign in which hundreds of welfare recipients will demand to have their personal responsibility contracts voided because the state has not lived up to its part of the bargain. While clearly primarily an "in the streets" effort, any legal progress made will have national, replicable implications.


Prepared by John Beam for the Workfare Organizing Support Center, a Welfare Law Center project.

-- from the March 2nd 1998 issue of Welfare News