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Fight Back! Defends Welfare Rights with Strength from Community Ties

Founded as a direct response to the federal welfare repeal bill of last August, Fight Back! has tapped a rich source of strength in the community ties that link Vermont's low-income neighbors to one another. In just a short time, the group has formed alliances among activists, welfare recipients, and progressive organizations, and has forged ahead to fight for the needs of low-income people in their own local area.

As the President was preparing to sign the Personal Responsibility Act in 1996, a group of women in Burlington was coming together to discuss outlets for their concern over the soon-to-be-overlooked needs of Vermont's welfare recipients. They decided to form an action group, calling it Fight Back!, and a year later, the group has about 20 members, some of them recipients of ANFC (Vermont's equivalent to TANF under a federal waiver), and some local progressive activists concerned about these issues. All members of the group live in the same area of the state, and all of them are below median income level, though that is not an official requirement of membership. The group has also worked closely with The Women's Union, a Vermont organization that focuses on legislation affecting welfare recipients, but Fight Back! is primarily an action group.

Ideas and strategies come freely from all members of the group, as Fight Back! prides itself on non-hierarchical operations. Meetings are held once a week, all members are free to attend, and decisions are made by consensus, with a facilitator and a note taker keeping things on track with the agenda. The volunteer steering committee ensures that decisions are reached by true consensus and are in accord with Fight Back!'s mission statement.

While Fight Back! has found allies in state government hard to come by, they have been lucky to have allies in their local community, and the group benefits from a strong network among neighbors in the Burlington area. This network has allowed them to make substantial progress in identifying and pursuing goals for the group despite the relatively unstructured meeting and decision-making formats: people keep one another informed about new developments, policies, and events, and the group's members are always able to stay up to date on important local issues.

Fight Back! has held a diverse series of actions over the past year, from holding a protest outside of a store in Burlington mall whose employees had treated minority customers with bigoted hostility, to taking part in a press conference with another ally, Legal Aid, announcing a lawsuit against the state. The lawsuit arose from an issue of great concern to Vermont recipients, the practice of taking vendor payments out of people's monthly checks and sending them directly to landlords, rather than allowing recipients to decide for themselves how best to spend their scarce dollars.

The group has also worked with Legal Aid to train lay advocates who can accompany recipients to fair hearings on benefit reductions, an important issue since despite high success rates at hearings, many recipients are afraid to challenge the often intimidating actions of caseworkers, fearing they will just be picked on and lose even more benefits. Additionally, Fight Back! has pushed on its own for more child care spending and for waivers of work requirements for recipients who cannot find quality child care. The need for affordable, quality child care is another major issue in Vermont, where parents of 13-year-old kids face 40 hour/week work requirements while reputable, quality child care providers are few in number and often too expensive, despite an unenforced promise in Vermont's federal welfare waiver that all recipients would get "quality" child care.

The group has also made the most of Internet access, given free to low-income groups by Burlington's community technology center, which maintains public computers with grants and private donations. Fight Back! was able to coordinate with the Kensington Welfare Rights Organization on the details of a march, download information on federal and state welfare legislation, and find data on the health dangers of woodchips and sawdust, the latter employed in their fight to remedy the health hazards from a woodchip-burning plant built in a low-income area. That battle resulted in air conditioning provided free to the plant's neighbors.

Fight Back! plans to continue to focus on welfare recipients' rights, demanding decent treatment of people doing workfare and insisting that caseworker discretion not result in the denial of funds essential for work clothes, transportation, or child care. Above all, whether facing indifferent legislators or dismissive bureaucrats, the members of Fight Back! will continue to work alongside their neighbors as they defend the rights of their community.

Prepared by Center legal intern Brendan Lynch.

-- from the November 2nd 1997 issue of Welfare News