No Calm Before the Storm: Low-Income Latina Immigrant and Citizen Mothers Before and After COVID-19

Government pandemic provisions occurred alongside a safety net that excludes or dissuades Latina mothers from participation. These families are also disproportionately exposed to punitive immigration policies and rhetoric that may shape their views on such provisions and, in turn, influence their post-pandemic well-being. To understand these complexities, we draw on interviews before and after COVID-19 with thirty-eight Latina immigrant and citizen mothers, most of whom are undocumented (N = 29). We find that pre-pandemic distrust of public institutions and the safety net was common, increased after COVID-19, and negatively affected undocumented respondents' post-pandemic circumstances relative to that of citizen mothers. Findings suggest that safety net expansion on its own will not offset pandemic effects for these families without addressing exclusion from public benefits and alienation from and distrust of government.

Report from the Field the Power of First Voice Advocacy: Rallying Lived Expertise to Support Equitable Transitions to Adulthood for Youth in Care in Canada

This report describes a national lived experience advocacy movement support equitable transitions to adulthood for youth in care in Canada. The emergence of the National Council at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic is presented, as well as the ongoing progress and achievements in advocacy and best practice efforts at the national and local jurisdiction levels. This article, by three members of the National Council, is the first to provide an account of the process associated with national lived experience advocacy mobilization by and for youth in care.

The influence of educational vendor programs on welfare recipients and its impact on long-term employment

The devastating effects of the Novel Coronavirus and the impact that stay-at-home orders and mask mandates have placed on businesses have caused countries to plummet into economic recession. State quarantine measures and the fear of contracting the virus have led to structural change, resulting in more people enlisting on welfare rolls. The significance of this issue is the continual problem of helping individuals on welfare secure and maintain long-term employment. The purpose of this study was to understand clearly where the problem lies that contributes to the inability of large volumes of welfare recipients to maintain long-term employment. This study provided insight into why substantial amounts of recipients are inhibited in securing long-term employment after completing welfare educational programs. The major contribution of this work is filling the gaps in the literature by illuminating new revelations to understand why individuals completing welfare programs are unsuccessful in maintaining long-term employment. Utilizing a narrative inquiry research design of six participants from two northern New Jersey career technical schools, the researcher examined four welfare vendor instructors and two educational administrators on their varied experiences and classroom methodologies. From the rich text data given by each instructor, the researcher was able to gain insights from the coded responses of each respondent. The researcher utilized artifacts (i.e., syllabi, job requirements, lesson plans, record of training, and the student handbook) to identify trends in institutional practices. Finally, a thematic analysis of all coded data yielded three overarching themes: (1) pedagogy and limited teaching strategies;(2) efficacy of soft skills readiness, which was broken down further into the sub-themes of (a) andragogical instructional deployment, and (b) soft skills: conversations versus course within the curriculum;and (3) instructor readiness and the drawbacks of accelerated learning. The researcher observed snapshots of classroom methodological patterns of instruction that may have contributed to welfare recipients' inability to maintain long-term employment. Holistically, this study examined the effectiveness of welfare educational vendor programs and classroom methodologies that impact long-term employment outcomes. The concluding chapter provides recommendations for improvements to help welfare recipients obtain long-term employment. This study provided opportunities to mitigate existing conditions that hinder individuals from maintaining long-term employability. In addition, the saliency of this study contributes to improving classroom instructional methodologies that can help individuals maintain long-term employment outcomes, particularly by giving students the ability to obtain self-sufficiency in supporting their families within distressed communities in northern New Jersey. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Social Security, Exponential Inequalities, and Covid-19: How Welfare Reform in the UK Left Larger Families Exposed to the Scarring Effects of the Pandemic

Covid-19 has put social security systems under immense pressure. Governments saw demand for social security rise dramatically whilst attempting to support those whose employment had temporarily stopped once severe economic restrictions were put in place. Drawing on a range of evidence (including original interviews), this chapter focuses on the experience of larger families (households with three or more children) during the pandemic as a way of illuminating how these pandemic-induced policy responses often failed to reach those groups who have been subject to austerity measures over the previous decade. We explore this in three ways. First, we unpack how the government's response to Covid-19 left larger families in a precarious position. Secondly, we situate the experience of larger families in the context of a wider set of reforms to social security-such as the benefit cap, the two-child limit, and the benefits freeze-which have already pushed even more larger families into poverty over the last decade. The final section of the chapter draws out how these policy decisions exacerbate inequalities between groups, while alluding to implications for protected characteristics as enshrined in the Equality Act 2010. This analysis not only illuminates how the pandemic has increased gender and ethnic inequalities but also suggests that the degree to which the pandemic was inequality-generating is rooted in policy decisions made before the pandemic even began. Avoiding exponential inequalities in response to future crises requires that policies-and the discourses which surround them-are sensitive to the potential for other kinds of societal shock. © The several contributors 2022. All rights reserved.

Families' Job Characteristics and Economic Self-Sufficiency: Differences by Income, Race-Ethnicity, and Nativity

Policy debates about whether wages and benefits from work provide enough resources to achieve economic self-sufficiency rely on data for workers, not working families. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find that almost two-thirds of families working full time earn enough to cover a basic family budget, but that less than a quarter of low-income families do. A typical low-income full-time working family with wages below a family budget would need to earn about $11.00 more per hour to cover expenses. This wage gap is larger for black, Hispanic, and immigrant families. Receipt of employer-provided benefits varies—health insurance is more prevalent than pension plans—and both are less available to low-income families, and black, Hispanic, and immigrant working families. Findings suggest that without policies to decrease wage inequality and increase parents' access to jobs with higher wages and benefits, child opportunity gaps by income, race-ethnicity, and nativity will likely persist.

Examining SNAP and TANF caseload trends, responsiveness, and policies during the COVID‐19 pandemic

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cases increased by 3.3 million between March and June 2020, their largest quarterly increase ever. During the pandemic, many states adopted a wide set of policies and procedures to facilitate program enrollment, retention, and eligibility. I track these policies and create a pandemic policy index measuring state generosity. States that adopted more generous policies experienced larger TANF and SNAP caseload growth, especially eligibility policies such as exempting TANF work requirements or SNAP P-EBT availability. Analyzing the caseload relationship to labor markets, caseloads were less responsive to unemployment rate changes during the pandemic relative to the pre-pandemic period.

Introduction: 20years of welfare reform in China (2000–2020): Challenges from developmentalism to COVID‐19

China as a welfare system is not yet well understood in social policy circles, despite being a well‐studied case in public administration and political science. Would this party‐state care to commit for its citizens' welfare? For many, associating the idea of a welfare state with China is still something to be frowned upon. Most available literature, especially in the English language, describes social policies in China as residual, unequally distributed, strongly dependent on local finances, prone to social dumping—especially for rural residents and migrant workers—paternalistic, disregarding social needs and so on. Yet, we believe that the social dumping practices of the 1980s and 1990s are now a thing of the past. As the government has taken a decidedly pro‐welfare stance since the 2000s, it could be more reasonable to identify different historical phases through which the welfare system took shape in China. We identify and discuss three stages in particular: the ‘iron rice bowl’ phase of socialist China (1949–1978), the welfare shedding resulting from China's opening up to the market (1979–2002), and the ‘social policy era’ characterised by major welfare expansion (2002–2020).

Coronavirus' exposure of food, place and community resilience: a Welsh local authority perspective

Purpose Coronavirus has accentuated the cracks within the fragile UK food system. Empty shelves and empty stomachs, the damaging consequences of coronavirus have led to an unprecedented increase in food insecurity and food access. The purpose of this paper is to provide in-depth insight into varied and innovative rural localised responses to food access during the pandemic. Design/methodology/approach This study draws on multiple perspectives of those working to combat food insecurity, inequality and inaccessibility in Gwynedd, exploring food access initiatives and their responses to the pandemic, innovative food distribution collaborations and the role of maintaining already fragile rural communities. Findings This study concludes that the need for transformative place-making to build stronger, more resilient communities has never been more pressing, with support from public sector funding to help alleviate some of the hardships and pressure with the rise in poverty and austerity, coronavirus imposed or not. Originality/value This study focuses on a single local authority area in North Wales, Gwynedd, an area where little food research has been published to date. The coronavirus pandemic also places the timely research within the scope of food access and distribution during hardship. This study discusses the impacts exposed by the pandemic and lessons that can be drawn and reflected on for future benefit.

Analysing the Impacts of Financial Expenditure of Prefectures on Methods of Suicide Completion in Japan

Recently, several studies reported that the governmental financial expenditures play important roles in the prevention of increasing suicide mortalities;however, the specific regional policies, designed dependent on regional cultural, economic, education and welfare backgrounds, affect suicide mortality by a specific suicidal means. Therefore, the present study determined the impacts of the regional governmental expenditure of six major divisions, “public health”, “public works”, “police”, “ambulance/fire services”, “welfare” and “education” on suicide mortalities by five major suicidal means, “hanging”, “poisoning”, “charcoal burning”, “jumping” and “throwing”, across the 47 prefectures in Japan during 2009–2018 using fixed-effect analysis of hierarchal linear regression with robust standard error. The expenditures of “ambulance/fire services” and “education” indicated the negative relation to suicide mortalities by wide-spectrum suicidal means, whereas expenditures of “public works” did not affect suicide mortalities. In the education subdivisions, expenditure of “kindergarten” and “elementary school” indicated the impacts of reduction of suicide mortalities, whereas the expenditures of “special school” for individuals with disabilities unexpectedly contribute to increasing suicide mortalities by poisoning, charcoal burning and throwing of females. Regarding subdivisions of welfare, expenditure of “child welfare” and “social welfare” contributed to a reduction in suicide mortalities, but expenditure of “elderly welfare” surprisingly contributed to increasing suicide mortalities. Furthermore, expenditures of welfare subdivision abolished the negative impacts of the expenditures of educational subdivisions, kindergarten and elementary school, but the positive impact of expenditure of special school on female suicide mortalities was not affected. These results suggest that most Japanese people are struggling to care for children even in the situation of an increasing elderly population with a decreasing birthrate. Therefore, it is important to enhance the investment welfare policy for the future to improve the childcare environment. The results demonstrated by this study suggest that the scientifically evidence-based redistributions of welfare expenditure in regional government, at least partially, provide improvement of Japanese society and welfare systems, under the continuous severe Japanese social concerns associated with increasing elderly population with a decreasing birthrate.

Mediating the claim? How ‘local ecosystems of support’ shape the operation and experience of UK social security

Local state and third sector actors routinely provide support to help people navigate their right to social security and mediate their chequered relationship to it. COVID-19 has not only underlined the significance of these actors in the claims-making process, but also just how vulnerable those working within ‘local ecosystems of support’ are to external shocks and their own internal pressures. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with organisations providing support to benefit claimants and those financially struggling during COVID-19, this paper examines the increasingly situated nature of the claims-making process across four local areas in the United Kingdom. We do so to consider what bearing ‘local ecosystems of support’ have on income adequacy, access and universality across social security systems. Our analysis demonstrates how local state and third sector actors risk amplifying inequalities that at best disadvantage, and at worst altogether exclude, particular social groups from adequate (financial) assistance. Rather than conceiving of social security as a unitary collection of social transfers, we argue that its operation needs to be understood as much more fragmented and contingent. Practitioners exhibit considerable professional autonomy and moral agency in their discretionary practice, arbitrating between competing organisational priorities, local disinvestment, and changing community needs. Our findings offer broader lessons for understanding the contemporary governance of social security across welfare states seeking to responsibilise low-income households through the modernisation of public services, localism, and welfare reforms. © 2022 The Authors. Social Policy & Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Guest editorial

The contributors are particularly attentive to the social and structural dimensions of suicide and self-harm. Since Emile Durkheim’s Le suicide (1897), we know that suicide transcends the individual and reflects broad structural divisions and inequalities in society at a given historical period. In the UK, for instance, there was an increase of 96% in the in the number of children and young people referred to mental health services between April and June 2021 compared with the same period in 2019 (RCP, 2021). According to one study, the highest rise in prevalence of self-harm over the past ten years is among young women aged 16–24 years (Mayor, 2019).