Lynn C. Woolsey: “My knowledge of welfare is based on experience, my experience as a single working mother with three small children…”

“My knowledge of welfare is based on experience, my experience as a single working mother with three small children needing welfare in order for my family to survive. That was 25 years ago. But even today, my face is the face of a typical welfare mother. I am white. I had three children. I was on welfare for 3 years, when my marriage broke up and left my family without child support and without health care. There are many faces on welfare families, but the thing we have in common is that we need a safety net for our children. We are a people who have worked, paid taxes, and cannot find a job that we can afford to live on. We are people who need training, who need health care, who need good child care in order to go to work. We are a people who are poor, because we are divorced or deserted or left without child support. The welfare system is broken. There is no question about it. But we will not fix it until we have jobs that pay a family wage, until we have health care, until we have a child support system and until we have a child care system for our working families. Most of all, we have to hold both parents responsible for supporting their children. It comes down to this: We either punish innocent children for being poor, or we invest in them so that they can get off of welfare once and for all like my family did.”