Welfare Programs Los Angeles

A weather-beaten picnic table serves as conference center, dining area, bar and bed for the homeless. Rubin Dean Robinson, for one, sits at the table most days. He keeps the business cards of social service workers handy, shares his disgust about living conditions, cooks on the nearby grill, and welcomes a cupful of beer when one of his homeless friends arrives with a 40-ounce bottle. Robinson lives at the Hansen Dam Recreation Area.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles raised $42.7 million for local and worldwide social service projects in 1997, officials said Thursday. About one-third of the money will go to 15 Los Angeles-area organizations serving children and families, patients with AIDS, people with Alzheimer's and other serious diseases, and victims of domestic abuse, said John Fishel, the group's executive vice president.

The line of people inside the tidy welfare office in Exposition Park is no different from the line of vendors who sit outside. Inside, the poor and desolate wait for a check from the government. Outside, half a dozen vendors who line the front walkway with booths of trinkets and candies wait eagerly to take a piece of that check.

On the first day of his second term in office Tuesday, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan promised a series of fresh starts: a crusty turnaround artist to manage the city's troubled Department of Water and Power; health care for hundreds of thousands of uninsured children; and economic renewal for two depressed spots, the Figueroa corridor and the abandoned General Motors plant in Panorama City.

Four hundred welfare recipients gathered under one roof in Los Angeles on Saturday to express mounting fears that welfare reforms will force them out of their homes and condemn them to roam the streets. Current efforts to cut off benefits for able-bodied mothers of minor children, aimed at forcing them to get jobs, would be fine--if there were enough jobs that enabled them to afford child care, said one speaker after another.

Alarmed that the ongoing overhaul of the welfare system will make it impossible for thousands of impoverished families to remain in subsidized public housing complexes, the city of Los Angeles will embark on what federal officials say is the nation's most ambitious effort ever to prompt long-standing public housing residents to find jobs.

This is the face of the future of welfare: Margarita Partida is a 25-year-old single parent of three children who lives in subsidized housing in North Hollywood and earns $7.50 an hour providing child care. Her income, without paying rent, is more than she made while on welfare. Or this: Maria Romo, 22, who also has three kids and lives a few miles away from Partida in North Hills, earns $6 an hour as a medical assistant.

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan on Tuesday asked all city department heads to assess the effects that the recently signed federal welfare reform legislation will probably have on the city and its residents. "I am concerned about the impacts of welfare reform on children in low-income families, legal immigrants, seniors and the disabled who live in our city," Riordan said in a memo to the city's top officials.

Bundled in a purple jacket, a plaid scarf secured around her neck, 36-year-old Lynne stands on a corner across from the Northridge Fashion Center, holding a plea scripted neatly on cardboard: "Family in Need, Please Help." By 6 p.m. she has received snide comments and a bag of Doritos. What she wants is money--money she claims she will use to keep the Department of Water and Power from shutting off her service.

In a bungalow on the far end of campus at the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, 17 Latino women are involved in an intense discussion on the best ways to communicate with and discipline their children. Later, in the same room, a group of young black and Latino youths takes part in a weekly discussion on how to offer gang members alternatives to hanging out on the streets.