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<blockquote>
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<p><font size="3" face="Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, serif" color="#330033">"Resilient
Voices From The Front" is our response to the current assault
on welfare recipients. Social action writers from CSUMB collaborated
with narrators at MPC to produce stories and poems. These narratives
witness the courage and resiliency of women in community college,
women who have the best chance of getting off and staying off
welfare.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, serif" color="#330033">Studies
have shown that welfare recipients who get a college degree are
most likely to turn their economic lives around. According to
a 1998 study done by Cornell University labor economist Francine
D. Blau, women with college degrees earned 75 percent more than
women with high school diplomas. <i> <font size="2">1</font></i>
It not only makes human sense, it makes economic sense: women
with gainful jobs pay the state back many times over, in taxes,
for what little they received at a difficult time in their lives.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, serif" color="#330033">Education
is the most significant route we have out of poverty. Yet welfare
reform has actually closed off opportunties for training and education,
according to economist Heidi Hartmann, founder of the Institute
for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, D.C. <i><font size="2">2</font></i>
CalWORKS, California’s welfare reform law, allows welfare recipients
only 18-24 months in college, cuts them off before they can earn
a college degree, keeps them locked in low-paying jobs. And worse.
According to political scientist and sociologist Frances Fox Piven,
"Women, barred from welfare aid, will compete in a segment of
the labor market that is already saturated with job seekers, with
the result that low wages will be driven even lower." <font size="2"><i>3
</i></font></font></p>
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<div align="left"><font size="3" face="Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, serif" color="#330033">Welfare
reform began in California in 1998. And now, in 2000, the two-year
alarm is ringing. </font></div>
<div align="right"><font size="3" face="Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, serif" color="#330033">Frances
Payne Adler, CSUMB </font></div>
<div align="right"><font size="3" face="Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, serif" color="#330033">Carol
Lasquade, MPC</font></div>
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<ol>
<li>
<div align="left"><font size="2" face="Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, serif" color="#330033"><i>
Carol Kleiman, "Wage Gap Among Women a Matter of Degrees, Monterey
Herald, May 20, 1998. </i></font></div>
</li>
<li><i><font size="2" face="Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, serif" color="#330033">
Ruth Coniff, "The Only Game in Town," The Progressive, Madison,
WI, April 2000. </font></i></li>
<li><i><font size="2" face="Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, serif" color="#330033">
Frances Fox Piven, "Welfare and Work," in Whose Welfare, ed. Gwendolyn
Mink, Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999, p. 89. </font></i></li>
</ol>
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