Rad Geek People's Daily

The folks at Insanity House, an advocacy group for single-parent and non-traditional families, has developed the Raise the Nation Foundation, a non-profit foundation helping single parent women continue their education or re-pay education expenses.

One of the most damnable things about the 1996 welfare deform package is that it gives major economic incentives to states to convert their welfare program into a government-sponsored temp agency for shitty, dead-end labor–with no particular provisions for giving single mothers (by far the largest group of TANF recipients) the time and resources to go to University or vocational schools so that they can better provide for themselves and their families in the long term. The paradigm has been either to run women’s entire lives through do-gooder government bureaucratic busybodies, or else Right-wing "reformers" who prefer to use the government bureaucratic busybodies to drive poor women into more dead-end low-wage "jobs" and ensure that they remain perpetually available to capital.

We need groups like Raise the Nation which provide grassroots mutual aid and support for women in economic need to take charge of their own education and economic well-being. Thank goodness for them.

For further reading:

• GT 5/19/2002 Government and the Pink-Collar Ghetto
• GT 5/26/2001 The Historical Failures of State-funded Religious Charities
• GT 5/15/2001 A First-Hand Look into Living in Poverty