A New Vision for Welfare Reform

May-June 1994

WASHINGTON, D.C.—On May 19, the Center for Public Justice will release the first public draft of "A New Vision for Welfare Reform." The occasion is its national conference on Public Justice and Welfare Reform, at the Crystal City Sheraton Hotel, May 19-20. The purpose is to challenge public officials, religious leaders, social service practitioners, and academic specialists to look at the issues of poverty and welfare in a new light.

"This first public draft is designed to invite comments and criticisms," according to Stanley Carlson-Thies, the project's director. "After the project's leadership team has had an opportunity to digest responses from conferees and then from others around the country over the next 6-9 months, we will publish a final, revised version."

The "New Vision" essay is about 50 pages long. The final version may be closer to 75 or 100 pages. In addition to the team effort going into the draft essay, more than two dozen people are contributing individual essays that will be considered for inclusion in a larger book that will be published at the end of the project.

According to "A New Vision for Welfare Reform," the current poverty-and-welfare crisis "belongs neither to poor people alone nor to failed public policies alone but to many institutions and individuals together, at the same time, in a global and not merely a national context. In fact, what Americans and people of many other nations now face is a widespread 'responsibility crisis' with deep moral and religious roots."

The draft essay begins by taking a critical look at American political culture, which is implicated in the all-too-evident poverty-and-welfare conundrum. Against the backdrop of that critical analysis, the authors articulate a vision of human identity and purpose that opens the way to a "different kind of thinking about government's responsibility in relation to the diverse range of other human responsibilities."

From the vantage point of that "new vision," the essay tries to show "why the poverty crisis cannot be assessed narrowly as an income crisis of poor people and why citizens should not expect the solution to come chiefly from the assistance programs of federal and state governments." Even at the governmental level, the problem is not solely, in the design and size of the welfare programs, but "with the way governments act in relation to the rest of society. It has to do with the way people use governments and expect them to act."

The essay concludes with a series of recommendations about how government policies should change in order to establish justice and to call citizens and social institutions to their own responsibilities. Governments should act to uphold good order in society, to respond to true emergencies, and to fight injustice with fundamental reforms.