Soaring child hunger and poverty. Lines out the door at food pantries and homeless shelters. Single moms tossed out of college in droves.

If these sound like the horror stories of a bygone recession--or perhaps the forebodings of a George W. Bush administration--think again. According to a series of reports and personal testimonies at a gathering of welfare experts in Washington, life is getting even harder for America's poor, as the booming economy has failed to make up for the devastating effects of welfare reform.

"Welfare as we know it is dead and gone," said Valora Washington, executive director of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, in her introductory remarks to the National Welfare Monitoring and Advocacy Partnership's 2000 summit on September 16. "But poverty is very much alive."

The summit, sponsored by the Unitarian group and involving advocates and members

Down and out in Beverly Hills. RAC/NEWSMAKERS

of social service agencies nationwide, was designed to combat one of the most frustrating aspects of the aftermath of the 1996 welfare law: As Congress cut the welfare rolls in half and shifted responsibility for this program from the federal government to innumerable state and local agencies, no one has kept track of the whereabouts of those who have left. They have become America's "disappeared," vanishing from the official statistics (state and city agencies rarely attempt to survey the poor once they're no longer receiving benefits) and from the sight of lawmakers as well.

National think tanks, such as the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, have tried to track those who have been cut off from welfare, but their careful statistical studies tend to be years in the making and often lose sight of the individuals behind the numbers.

In response, the National Welfare Monitoring and Advocacy Partnership engaged in a year-long study on the well-being of America's poor. The data, garnered from 5,000 interviews with clients of social service agencies in 16 states, lump together current and former welfare recipients with other people seeking social services. These were not random samples, and thus the results say less about the specific results of welfare reform than the persistence of poverty.

The survey paints a bleak picture: 65 percent were unemployed, 46 percent homeless, and 28 percent had been unable to buy food at some point during the previous six months. Those who had found jobs were not much better off: Most had found only part-time work, wages averaged just $7.20 an hour, and two-thirds received no health insurance from their employers. Of the 58 percent of respondents who had received welfare at some point, one in three had lost benefits either because of sanctions or time limits. And of those currently receiving welfare, 40 percent had difficulty paying their monthly bills, and 30 percent had become homeless or had problems paying rent.

Bob Erlenbusch, director of the Los Angeles Coalition To End Hunger and Homelessness and coordinator of the study, has seen similar evidence in his own daily work in L.A. "Within six to nine months of welfare reform, there was this explosion of women and children out on the streets," he says, noting that women and children have risen from about one-third of the national homeless population to 40 percent since welfare reform went into effect.

The growing deprivation shown in the surveys is the flip side of the much-lauded reports of falling welfare rolls. While state governments point to the reduced demand for services as a sign of a successful policy, advocates for the poor say it's just the opposite: Women are either being sanctioned off the rolls for missing a step in Byzantine work rules--thus losing not just welfare payments, but other benefits as well--or promoted into jobs that pay enough to disqualify them from government benefits, but not enough for them to afford their own benefits.

Cassandra Garrison, a former welfare recipient who now works for the Oregon Food Bank, has seen this phenomenon firsthand. Oregon has the one of the lowest food-stamp rolls in the nation; it also ranks No. 1 in hunger, according to the USDA. In surveying her agency's clients, Garrison says she found that many of those who had joined the work force were earning incomes that "were just enough that they weren't eligible anymore, but not enough to feed their families."

Two days before the Washington conference, Garrison and 35 other women from 13 states gathered on Capitol Hill for the official kickoff of Welfare Made a Difference, a campaign designed to remind policy-makers that for millions of women, the now-defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children program once served as a means of escaping poverty. Accompanied by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-California), a one-time welfare recipient herself, they told stories of how welfare provided them with a vital safety net.

The speakers, some of whom escaped poverty by getting a college degree, were especially galled at the stubborn resistance to allowing poor women to get an education. Federal law caps post-secondary studies while on welfare to 12 months, and even in states with more lenient limits, recipients are often pushed into low-wage vocational tracks or minimal "job training." Sandra Chapin recalled her first semester of community college in Oakland: "I was called in by my welfare worker and told that I had to drop out of college, because sociology and journalism weren't likely to lead to employment." She was finally able to stay in school, but only through the efforts of an organization founded by local student welfare moms.

With Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) up for reauthorization by Congress in 2002, Garrison and her fellow activists hope to convince legislators to abandon the "work first" philosophy that has ruled welfare reform for so long. Instead, they are calling for a policy that promotes education and training for jobs that will lift women out of poverty, not just push them into the nearest available minimum-wage work. At the very least, they hope to change the system whereby states are given federal cash bonuses for cutting caseloads, and replace it with one that gives incentives for increasing services and reducing poverty--a plan that might encourage states to start spending the $8 billion in TANF surpluses now sitting idle in state treasuries.

But in a world where politicians fight to take credit for putting an end to welfare, trying to point out that poverty is worsening is an uphill battle. Cheering falling welfare rolls is "like applauding the designers and crew of the Titanic for those few hundred who survived their swim in the frigid North Atlantic," Washington says. "We're glad that some folks lived, but there's got to be a better way."