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:
“The Plains are not forgiving. Anything that is shallow—the easy optimism of a homesteader; the false hope that denies geography, climate, history; the tree whose roots don’t reach ground water—will dry up and blow away.”
—Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)
“If church prelates, past or present, had even an inkling of physiology they’d realise that what they term this inner ugliness creates and nourishes the hearing ear, the seeing eye, the active mind, and energetic body of man and woman, in the same way that dirt and dung at the roots give the plant its delicate leaves and the full-blown rose.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)
“The roots of the grass strain,
Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits—he is waiting—
And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)