Welfare to Well‐Being Framework for Research, Education, and Outreach

The proposed framework is intended to serve as a model for understanding the comprehensiveness of welfare assistance policies that contribute to the economic well-being of individuals and families. The framework uses a systems approach to move thinking from a narrow focus on welfare assistance as welfare for the few to well-being of the many. Such an approach provides a new way to understand policies and language related to welfare reform. With the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA, P.L. 104-193), a major social and economic policy shift occurred. The law, changing sixty-one years of history, affected eighty other laws and 175 parts of still others. [1] It was so complex that citizens, agency personnel, educators, policy makers, and public assistance recipients struggled to grasp the intricacies. The need for education and research arose out of this significant change. Considerable research and policy education is being done by family and consumer economists to assist professionals, citizens, assistance recipients, and policy makers in understanding what happened with the policy changes and in measuring the outcomes for families and communities in the context of the changing policy arena. To date, no framework, based on a family economic well-being perspective, exists for the emerging education and research. A framework for understanding the 1996 welfare reform legislation, with its emphasis on personal responsibility, work opportunity, and self-sufficiency, is needed for research, education, and outreach. Such a framework places the time frame, types of assistance, levels of family economic functioning, and sources of support into a long-term picture of family well-being. The proposed framework is presented as a starting point for understanding the aspects of welfare in relation to the economic well-being of individuals and families. BACKGROUND OF WELFARE ASSISTANCE To understand the need for a framework and to understand components of the framework, information about welfare assistance is required. The following section briefly reviews the legislation. For a more complete understanding, additional reading is advised. Legislation Income assistance is commonly called welfare. Programs for food, housing, health, child welfare, and supplemented income assistance came under the rubric of welfare. In addition, the 1960s War on Poverty added opportunities for gainful employment and state determination of programs (Braun, Craig, Bauer, Peck 1996; Orrick 1995). By the 1990s, states were granted waivers to experiment with other supports and an emphasis on work and job training. From a historical perspective, there have been few changes in public assistance or welfare as significant as that which arose out of welfare reform following the 1994 congressional elections. Income assistance or Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which grew out of the great depression, was started with the Social Security Act of 1935. Over the years, the initial legislation changed with the passage of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) in 1973, with subsidies for training and childcare, and with the addition of the Earned Income Tax Credit in 1975 for the working poor. However, the first major shift in welfare assistance occurred with the passage of the PRWORA Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-193). The law replaced the AFDC entitlement program for individuals with a fixed block grant to states to provide Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) (Braun, Craig, Henton, Knipp, and Naddaff 1995). Dependency--Welfare Assistance Replacing AFDC with TANF reflected an intent to shift people from dependency on entitlements, assistance given if eligible, to self-sufficiency and personal responsibility. Once dependency was a general-purpose term for all social relations with subordination. More recently, its use was given an economic meaning tied to relying on financial support from charity or welfare. …