Voter Voices: welfare recipients
Chris Roberts,10/4/96

This week we've heard from state officials, welfare advocates and legislators on the impact of the welfare reform bill in Minnesota. The people who will be affected most are the ones who had the smallest role in designing the new system....the welfare recipients themselves. Minnesota Public Radio's Chris Roberts spoke with two women on welfare who are worried the changes won't amount to reform at all, and who both plan to carry their concerns to the voting booth.

It's midmorning and the traffic is heavy at the University of Minnesota's Coffman Union. 36-year-old Margaret Hutchison is settling down for one of the few breaks she'll have during a grueling day which began at five am and will end somewhere around eleven at night. Hutchison, who's divorced and receives no child support, says every day is like this one when you're a full-time mother of three on welfare who also goes to school full-time and works part-time as a tutor. She's studying to be a civil engineer. She says it's taken her three years to learn how to live on what she considers a puny monthly welfare payment without cheating, and now the whole system is being done away with. I asked her about some of the changes which will occur, including the no-more-than-two-consecutive-years-on-welfare rule, the no-more-than-five-years-total rule, steep reductions in food stamps, and the work requirements. Hutchison says she wonders how people will survive.

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Hutchison has a year and a half left on her civil engineering degree. Her assistance will probably run out next year. If she has to she says she'll live on the college loans she's applied for but she says no welfare changes will stop her from graduating.

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When her children are at school, 34-year-old Renee Ellerman relies on the radio to keep her company. Not that she isn't busy herself as a mother in pursuit of a computer science degree at Metro State University. Ellerman's been an AFDC recipient off and on for six years, after a nasty divorce in which her husband vowed to see her in the bread line before he would give her any child support. Waitressing from sun up to sun down she says, couldn't keep her family afloat. she's somewhat ambivalent about welfare reform because she understands what lawmakers are trying to do.

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Renee Ellerman has a year and a half remaining on her computer science degree. For Minnesota Public Radio, this is chris roberts.