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Book Review: Changing Welfare Services: Case Studies of Local Welfare Reform Programs

Austin is the editor and author or coauthor of every chapter in Changing Welfare Services, which reports 24 case studies of welfare reform in the Bay Area in northern California. The writers view welfare reform as the impetus for promising programs and practices in the areas of service delivery, community partnerships, and organizational change. Yet these promising services may well have been developed without repeal of the entitlement to welfare for poor women and children. Austin and his coauthors report enviable cooperation among public welfare agencies, private nonprofit service providers, foundations, and universities. Because this is not the case in many jurisdictions, one wishes that the authors had identified the conditions that account for such salutary public or private partnerships in northern California. The first section of this book is on services that remove barriers to participation in the workforce and that encourage self-sufficiency—a goal that is often stated but not clearly defined in this book. The second section reports partnerships between community-based, nonprofit organizations and county social service agencies. The third section presents cases of agency restructuring. The reader is grateful for the guiding hand of an editor and senior author who presents each type of case study in a uniform format. Repeatedly, the volume calls attention to the low wages of former welfare recipients but does not relate them to gender inequality in pay. In contrast, a study of persons who left the welfare rolls in a county in the northeast called attention to a 22% discrepancy between the wages of female and male participants who were doing comparable, low-skill work and recommended that the county government seek additional ways of reducing discrimination in gender-based employment (Altman & Goldberg, 2003). Feminists will find another omission: None of the case studies mentions services to protect battered women and children who are put at risk by welfare reform, and none discusses whether and how the Family Violence Option has been implemented in these California counties. The programs reported in this book supply, for some clients and sometimes temporarily, important resources, such as transportation, child care, and affordable housing that are needed not only by former welfare