This report, along with its supplemental volumes, assesses the welfare system and its successes and failures, describes the frustrations felt by the poor in the United States, and proposes a basic change in public assistance policy. America's state and federal governments spend more than $150 billion a year on programs to alleviate poverty, yet…

This report provides an overview of the current welfare system. The number and size of federal public assistance programs have increased during the past 25 years, with particular growth in noncash benefit programs, which now constitute about three-quarters of all means-tested assistance. From mid-1983 to mid-1984, more than 52.5 million Americans…

Objectives of this project were to identify and catalog all existing reports on contracted evaluation studies by the Community Action Program (CAP) evaluation branch and the various program offices; to analyze a sample of contracted evaluation studies in terms of their adequacy as research projects; to assess a sample of CAP inhouse evaluations;…

This volume relates the origins of Volunteers in Service To America (VISTA), its problems and achievements. Originating in President Kennedy's proposal for a national service corps (1963), VISTA reached concrete form with the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. While white middle class youth constitute the bulk of the volunteers, the organization…

Data from a stratified random sample of full-year 1967-1968 and summer 1968 Head Start programs were re-analyzed to compare centers operated by local educational agencies (LEA) and community action agencies (CAA). The analyses indicated that CAA-operated programs were more likely to report parent participation in decision making and as paid staff,…

A large-scale evaluation was conducted of Jobs-First GAIN, a strongly employment-focused mandatory welfare-to-work program. Its main features were an unusually intensive program orientation; high quality job clubs; job development activities; strong encouragement to take entry-level jobs and combine work and welfare in the short-term; and…

In 2005, an estimated 48 million children aged 0-18 years--12 percent of all children in sub-Saharan Africa--were orphans, and that number is expected to rise to 53 million by 2010. One quarter of all orphans are orphaned because of AIDS, and about 2.6 million children are currently infected with HIV. Untreated, most children born with HIV will…

The 900 Schools Programme, adopted in March 1990, was designed to improve the quality of education in Chile's most impoverished public primary schools through "positive discrimination," the channeling of additional resources to the 969 schools that initially took part in the project. The 900 Schools Programme has sought to: (1) improve…

An evaluation was conducted of the effectiveness of the 12 LULAC [League of United Latin American Citizens] National Education Service Centers, Inc. (LNESC), which assist Hispanic and other educationally deprived students in pursuing post-secondary education. The evaluation focused on three LNESC objectives: (1) to increase the number of persons…

A 1965 summer training program for 90 VISTA volunteers at Monte Vista, Colorado, is described and evaluated in this report. The program was designed to prepare VISTA trainees to work in poverty areas by providing individual helping services and by planning and organizing community action. The trainees lived and worked in Monte Vista, a small…

Authored by a political scientist, the study focuses on the impact of two alternative policies, "political strategy" and "service strategy," designed to deal with the problem of poverty in American society. The central concern is the effect of the policies on the poor. The service strategy assumes that the poor differ from the…

This case study of New Haven's Residential Youth Center (RYC) dramatizes the need for an alliance between social activists and the clinician in the arena of community action. A neighborhood-based, self-helf center oriented for "hard-core" inner-city youths, the RYC was funded in 1966 as an experimental and demonstration program by U.S.…

Dealing with an analysis and evaluation of community action programs (provided for by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964) in Appalachia, this report presents 3 conditions for program success: (1) adequate community action leadership at the local level; (2) power holders at the community, county, or "local" level who are sympathetic, or…

The present report is a follow up study of disabled public assistance clients in four States. It attempts to evaluate the effects of cooperative efforts--between personnel of Vocational Rehabilitation and the Division of Family Services--to intervene in the poverty/dependence cycle of selected disabled welfare applicants and/or recipients. Between…

This report evaluates the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) of the Extension Service of the Department of Agriculture. About 184,000 low-income families participated in the program prior to October 1969. A national sample of 10,500 showed that family incomes were very low--less than 2,700 dollars, of which more than a third was…