BACKSTORY 56.3 Trump’s Budget Bill Meet ACORN’s BRAVO
Written by SP Editor
Backstory – BRAVO!
Trump’s Budget Bill Meet ACORN’s BRAVO
Sixty years ago, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) was founded in June 1966 when Dr. George A. Wiley mobilized small groups of welfare mothers and supporters to a march in Columbus, Ohio to protest cuts in welfare payments. It almost seems quaint to write those words now, decades later, because cuts in welfare payments are now national and commonplace. But, three years later, not long after being at a three-year anniversary of the organization at a rally on the Boston Commons where Wiley spoke along with Dr. Benjamin Spock, I was recruited that summer to expand the operations of the Massachusetts Welfare Rights Organization into Springfield. NWRO was the largest organization of poor people in the United States. They were militant, effective, and winning. I grabbed the chance to help them organize.
Now with Trump’s bad budget bill the war on the poor has, yet again, ratcheted up to a whole new level. New bureaucratic procedures and recertification “paper cuts” coupled with expanded and onerous work requirements of 80-hours per month for lower income, working families and recipients are the tradeoffs for continued and expanding perks for the rich. More than 5 million SNAP food stamp recipients have already been pushed off the rolls at such a devastating pace that the Congressional Budget Office hadn’t expected the bill would produce until 2030. In January, the budget rules mandate procedures that are expected to reduce the Medicaid rolls by 14 million recipients.
NWRO met the challenge in Ohio and many other states in its brief history. The challenge to Trump’s budget bill has to be met now as well. ACORN is seeking to respond by launching a new affiliate, BRAVO – Benefit Recipients Access and Volunteer Organization. BRAVO/ACORN has organizers on the ground now in Little Rock and Philadelphia and by the time you read “Backstory” will also be in Cleveland, Baltimore, New Orleans, Houston, and maybe other cities as well.
Part of what has driven the pushouts of SNAP recipients is the bill’s provision that if states have an “error” rate of under or overpayments greater than 6%, states will pay penalties of 10% or more of the cost of the program. In their efforts to meet these new requirements Arizona has shed 55% of their SNAP recipients, 11 other states have eliminated 15% or more, and the last USDA report indicated more than half of the states had pushed out more than 10%. A state official in Arizona admitted that most of those now off the program were rightfully eligible, a story repeated throughout the country. States are acting to disqualify first, determine later, in order to avoid the penalties since they are now required to recertify all recipients twice a year, rather than annually.
That’s their problem. We have several organizing handles we believe can meet this assault.
One way the work requirement can be satisfied is through volunteer – community service. BRAVO is reaching out to eligible recipients at food stamp offices, unemployment centers, and throughout lower income communities to assist recipients to meet the requirement by enrolling them as volunteers with either BRAVO or the BRAVO coalition of agencies and nonprofits we are enlisting who are willing and able to supervise such volunteers and certify their hours.
BRAVO/ACORN will directly train its own direct volunteers to organize, advocate, and assist other recipients to retain or access the benefits to which they are eligible. These BRAVO volunteers will be involved in outreach and education in the constituency communities. They will also be in the centers advising and assisting recipients to apply, as well as filing and representing them in appeals to recover benefits they have lost. They will be behind card tables in stalls in front of grocery stores, community centers, hospitals, and clinics. They will be anywhere they can meet and talk to recipients.
In MWRO, all of our local groups had grievance committees composed of welfare recipients. They knew the manual back to front, like jailhouse lawyers. As an organizer, my job was building new groups. Any problem in a welfare office was handled by recipient members. In the first year of Obamacare, ACORN affiliates and Local 100 acted as “navigators” in a similar way. We recruited constituency organizers in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, and enrolled 20,000 in the first year of the program. We know recipients can be trained to effectively recruit, advocate and assist SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries. ACORN’s tech team is creating internally educated bots that will include state manuals and federal regulations, so that BRAVO volunteers will have the facts at their fingertips in this fight.
BRAVO/ACORN “volunteers,” working with our organizers, will also organize BRAVO local groups to demand change in these programs and restoration of benefits through direct action and advocacy. We don’t pretend that if recipients were organized that they could have stopped passage of the budget bill, but we do believe if recipients had been organized, they could have prevented some of the more draconian aspects and premeditated state denial of benefits to eligible families and individuals. We believe if they are organized now, they can be effective in pushing back some of the worst elements of these programs by putting human faces to the issue and their bodies and voices forward to the state.
We are hoping to gain experience in the fieldwork in these target cities that can be used as a model for anyone everywhere in the country. Our tech team is looking to develop websites that will store and monitor volunteer workplans and the hours worked by individual volunteers that are signed and certified, so that they can withstand any scrutiny and investigation by states seeking to disqualify recipient volunteers. For the budget bill to work, they have to eliminate eligible poor, so we understand that work will be in opposition to these policies.
We can’t pretend to prevent all of these millions of eligible recipients from being denied and evicted from the program. We are hoping to begin building the resistance to the war against the poor from the grassroots with these working lower income families and individuals. We are also setting up these systems so that anyone in the country who wants to duplicate our efforts in their communities will be supported by BRAVO/ACORN to do so.
When I got the chance to become an organizer with NWRO, after a year of frustration in trying to organize resistance to the Vietnam War, I put my boots on, dropped out of college, hitchhiked to Springfield, then six months later was head organizer in Boston, founded ACORN six months after that, and never looked back. Now, decades later, I’m joining with our organizers to put my boots on again and to organize benefit recipients to demand their rights and fight the terrible injustice that would make their families hungrier and sicker.
Join us!
Wade Rathke is the Chief Organizer of ACORN International, Founder and Chief Organizer of ACORN (1970-2008), and Founder and Chief Organizer of Local 100, United Labor Unions (ULU).