Please, help me
- Posted by e2 on 03.12.09
- Tags Family Changes, Modern Family
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Nationwide welfare reforms have altered the nature of assistance available to families struggling during economic hard times. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is focused on welfare-to-work initiatives designed to move families from poverty to self-sufficiency.
Maintaining such employment-centered aid in a period of economic recession and rising unemployment may prove to be very challenging. Compounding the challenge, many jobs available to TANF participants are low-wage, low-skilled positions — those often cut during a downturn. TANF and the Virginia Initiative for Employment not Welfare Program (VIEW), have reduced the number of individuals receiving public cash assistance by nearly 60 percent since 1995.
This steady decline was interrupted by the relatively mild 2001 recession – caseloads increased by 10 percent before declining to pre-recession levels. Since then, caseloads have remained relatively constant despite steady increases in total population. In 2008, the first year of the recession, TANF caseloads increased by 8 percent.
Based on this early rise in caseloads, and on the percentage increase in TANF cases during the 2001 recession (10 percent), we can expect TANF cases in this recession to increase by more than 10 percent, and for that increase to persist for several years beyond the start of the recovery.
