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Suffolk Welfare Warriors: A New Group Fights for Economic Justice

Suffolk Welfare Warriors, with over 200 members, is "a union of single mothers who receive government child support, known as welfare" based in Suffolk County, New York. Its activities include both education, training, and support of its members and other poor individuals as well as protest activities round local, state, and national welfare issues. Membership is limited to those who currently participate in public assistance programs or are former participants, but the group also welcomes other allies and supporters. Board members must be current or former participants, with current participants making up 60% of the Board. The group's activities include: 1) education and outreach to the general public and to poor people; 2) training and leadership development to enable poor people to advocate for themselves before the government agencies and institutions that purport to serve them; and 3) work to narrow the political differences between poor people and the political institutions that purport to serve them. The group meets informally in homes and church basements and raises funds through car washes and garage sales.

Suffolk Welfare Warriors traces its roots to its organizer, Therese Scofield's, discovery in 1991 of a college option in the JOBS program. Scofield battled the welfare bureaucracy to enroll in Suffolk Community College where she met a large group of other welfare mothers. They became a support group for one another and soon realized that their individual problems dealing with various welfare offices were part of a consistent set of systemic problems. This group, which became the JOBS Network Club, taught one another how to become more effective advocates for themselves by documenting their experiences with the welfare office and by using welfare law which Scofield had discovered in her paralegal studies in fair hearing advocacy.

After meeting members of the Wisconsin Welfare Warriors, the group realized it could be a force on its own and became the Suffolk Welfare Warriors. It began a concerted effort of public speaking by current and former welfare program participants before church, synagogue, and civic groups and of bringing the testimony of poor mothers to public hearings and meetings with public officials. An early significant advocacy effort centered around the county's elimination without notice of child care for 60 college students. The sudden child care crisis forced mothers to drop out of school and resulted in a suicide. When the group realized that the county's action violated the law, they had people request for fair hearings and persuaded the local legal services program to do on-campus client intake. A successful lawsuit followed.

The group moved on to include demonstrations among its strategies. Foundation funding enabled it to print flyers and rent vans for demonstration and lobbying trips to Albany and Washington, D.C. Because of fears of welfare department intimidation of those who engage in demonstration activities, the group uses the Mourning Mothers in Black technique, adopted from the Wisconsin Welfare Warriors. Demonstrators dress in black and with veils over their faces to mask their identity. Group members have confronted local welfare workers to seek relief for an individual's mistreatment by the local welfare office and have protested at welfare hearings when they felt that welfare participants were not allowed fair time for testimony. Last August Scofield participated in a Clinton Birthday Protest against the President's decision to sign the welfare bill in New York City. She ran unsuccessfully last November as a Democratic candidate for State Assembly, but has since renounced her Democratic Party affiliation in protest over the State Assembly's recent passage of a harmful Democratic bill.

A newly released video, Welfare Warriors, produced by Vision Quest Productions, documents the group's activities. Suffolk Welfare Warriors encourages its members to take advantage of Internet access through the county library system. Public library cardholders can open an e-mail account and use the library's computers to access the Internet. Group members are beginning to use e-mail to communicate with one another. Scofield also reports that she has used the Welfare Law Center's Directory of Low Income Organizations, to contact groups in other states to learn about welfare developments and to use information from those contacts in the group's advocacy.

-- from the May 1997 issue of Welfare News