"Resilient Voices From The Front" is our response to the current assault on welfare recipients. Social action writers from California State University Monterey Bay collaborated with narrators at Monterey Peninsula College 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.

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. 1 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.

Education is the most significant route we have out of poverty. Yet welfare reform has actually closed off opportunities for training and education, according to economist Heidi Hartmann, founder of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, D.C. 2 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." 3