Wendy CoulsonCONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Wendy Coulson
Tesha Green, a former welfare recipeint and a prospective social worker; Katy Harriger, an associate professor of politics; Reverand Ginny Britt, the directorof Crisis Control Ministy; Dan Beerman, the director of social work of Forsyth County Department of Social Services; and John Wood, the Reynolds professor of economics, discuss the welfare issue at a panel discussion titled "Welfare: Whose Responsibility" Monday at 7pm in Carswell Hall
Welfare and welfare reform have been hot topics in the national political arena lately, and with the current budget crisis, the issue is more relevant than ever.
Five concerned Winston-Salem area citizens addressed a small audience at 7 p.m. Monday night in Carswell Hall about the obligations that society has to its poor.
The Philomathesian Society and the Huffman Lecture Council sponsored the discussion titled "Welfare: Whose Responsibility?" Each panelist made a short presentation which was then followed by an extended period of questions from members of the audience.
Among the panelists were two faculty members: John Wood, a Reynolds professor of economics and Katy Harriger, an associate professor of politics. The other members of the panel have daily interaction with the welfare situation within Forsyth County.
Rev. Ginny Britt, the director of the privately funded Crisis Control Ministry, concentrated her presentation on the religious necessity of aiding the poor, regardless of their use of the aid. She stressed the moral imperatives of helping those less advantaged, sighting scripture to back up her arguments.
"If we could get half the income of Winston-Salem going to the poor, there's nothing we couldn't do," Britt said.
Wood used a similar argument to show the historical imperatives of helping the poor. He read from writings dating back to Elizabethan England that mandated care for the poor to support his argument. Speaking in a humorous and sometimes anecdotal fashion, Wood talked about the "workhouse mentality," an idea that forces work upon the disadvantaged regardless of their social condition.
"Not only is the workhouse inhuman, but it is terribly inefficient, in the past as it is today," Wood said. He later linked some government programs with the same impotence in aiding the poor, proposing that a more suitable approach to aid could be larger, less regulated block grants.
The third professional member of the panel, Dan Beerman, the director of social work service of Forsyth County Department of Social Services, agreed with some of Wood's proposals for improved aid to the impoverished, but felt weary of the inability of any system to aeve ideal consensus.
"It is impossible to find anything absolutely pure in a democratic system," Beerman said, "but we are moving towards a one-size-fits-all mentality, which is bad due to the complexity of the problem."
This idea of complexity was stressed by all the panelists, but was demonstrated best by the presentation of the fourth panelist, Tesha Green. A former recipient of welfare's most common form of aid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Green managed to find steady employment as a welfare case worker.Green, a mother of one, is now finishing her last semester at Winston-Salem State University.
Although Green said she was sure from her own experiences within the welfare system that there are great constraints put on a family by the lack of money available, she contends that there are larger problems for welfare participants: "For me the biggest help was the day-care help, because without it you aren't able to work. People don't realize how difficult it can be."
But all panelists agreed that misconceptions are clearly a part of the myth surrounding the welfare rhetoric.
"We are regularly manipulated and deceived about the issue. . . by political leaders that beat around the welfare `strawman,' which is really `strawwomen and strawchildren," Beerman said.