Roots
In early 1966, delegates from poor peoples’ organizations all over the country met in Syracuse, New York and Chicago, Illinois to discuss the need for unity among grassroots organizations for the poor in the United States. Around this same time, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, both of the Columbia University School of Social Work, were circulating a draft of an article called "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" that later appeared in The Nation. The article discussed the idea that the widespread distribution of information about welfare benefits eligibility could dramatically increase welfare rolls, thus creating a bureaucratic and fiscal crisis. In turn, this would lead to the replacement of public assistance programs that currently existed with a guaranteed annual income for all people. Cloward and Piven were more concerned with reaching community groups with this work than with academia, and the article helped to serve a link between the two.
Read more about this topic: National Welfare Rights Organization
Famous quotes containing the word roots:
“If the national security is involved, anything goes. There are no rules. There are people so lacking in roots about what is proper and what is improper that they don’t know there’s anything wrong in breaking into the headquarters of the opposition party.”
—Helen Gahagan Douglas (1900–1980)
“He who sins easily, sins less. The very power
Renders less vigorous the roots of evil.”
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“The roots of the grass strain,
Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits—he is waiting—
And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!”
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