Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Legislature agreed on a budget last month that preserved most of California Work Opportunities and Responsibility to Kids, also known as CalWorks. That was good news for the state’s poorest Californians because key services — such as subsidized employment, and mental health and substance abuse services — had been on the chopping block.
Even so, some CalWorks services were scaled back by millions of dollars, a move that has drawn criticism from anti-poverty advocates. In the fiscal 2024-2025 budget, subsidized employment service funds were reduced by 28% from an initially budgeted $134 million to $97 million, mental health and substance abuse services were cut 28% from an earlier earmarked $130 million to $93 million.
The budget allocations reflected, in part, the amount counties had recently spent on CalWorks services, not the projected level of need for subsidized employment and the other services the anti-poverty program earmarked earlier in the year.
That’s because those struggling to get by often do not know about the full range of services available to them under CalWorks, said Mary Ignatius, executive director of Parent Voices. The fact that its services are underused should not lead to the programs’ budgets getting slashed, she added.
Why is the state cutting programs that “if families knew about it they would use?” Ignatius said. CalWorks is administered by county governments, and case managers have discretion over what services they should recommend to recipients, she added. In one county, a parent might be able to secure full-time child care, but in another county, a parent in a similar situation might not even have that service recommended, she said.
Services offered by the program are “intentionally flexible to account for varied local needs and circumstances” and availability of service providers can vary county to county, said Jason Montiel, spokesperson for the California Department of Social Services. Overall, CalWorks funding for each county is based on projected caseload, Montiel said.
A Parent Voices survey of almost 300 CalWorks families published in 2022 revealed that few parents were aware of the range of services available to them through CalWorks, including transportation subsidies, infant supplies and support for people experiencing homelessness. Only 2% were aware of immigration services. Less than one in five knew about job search and unemployment resources services or substance abuse services.
Parent Voices proposes creating a checklist to help CalWorks recipients understand the services they can request from their caseworkers and to ensure caseworkers make more services available to participants in the program.
Caseworkers may be “scared they’re going to go over” the assigned budget, Ignatius said. That means caseworkers are unlikely to go “above and beyond” to inform families about different services they actually should have access to, she said.
The department overseeing CalWorks “regularly engages” with CalWorks participants, advocates and others to identify opportunities to improve the program, said Scott Murray, deputy director of public affairs and outreach programs for the California Department of Social Services. The agency was in the process of updating a program participant handbook, he added.
“The handbook is one way and it can’t be the only thing,” said Ignatius. “There needs to be multiple touchpoints and revisiting service awareness as time goes on, as needs change” for CalWorks parents, she said.
California state Sen. Caroline Menjivar is one of the lawmakers who helped protect CalWorks from what she said would have been “the most detrimental cuts to our safety net programs” this budget season. She credits advocacy organizations, like Parent Voices, with helping to preserve the program.
Andrew Cheyne, managing director of public policy at Pasadena-based nonprofit GRACE and End Child Poverty Institute, said the CalWorks win was a combined effort among parties including state lawmakers and the governor, whose administration proposed those CalWorks cuts but came around to save the program. His organization, however, put out a statement expressing disappointment that the final budget draws down on the entire safety net reserve for CalWorks over the next two fiscal years.
Oakland single mother Malen Ho is relieved to see that the program that helped her turn her life around survived deep cuts caused by this year’s budget deficit. In 2019, Ho, now 34, secured a CalWorks-subsidized clerical job at Laney College and began taking classes. CalWorks also paid her mother to take care of her children, an arrangement that she said made her two boys less prone to asthma attacks.
She had recently quit a job at Walmart when she sought help from CalWorks. “Even though I tried, and I worked so hard there, I still couldn’t handle the situation,” said Ho, who was struggling to balance her part-time cashier job with weekly trips to urgent care to address her young children’s respiratory conditions.
Her job as an administrative clerk is now funded by the federal work study program, which subsidizes part-time employment for students. She aims to complete an associate degree in sociology in a year or so and eventually become a licensed social worker and therapist. After going through all the hard times, “I want to work on helping people,” Ho said.
“CalWorks really changed my life,” added Ho, an immigrant from Cambodia. She wants the service to remain available for the low-income parents that come after her.
Parent Voices was one of the advocacy organizations that pushed back on CalWorks cuts and had parents testify at the state Capitol to protest the move. “We brought the faces” of mostly low-income Black, Latino and immigrant mothers and children who used CalWorks, and lawmakers “had to really look in the families’ eyes” and tell them they were “the solution to a budget deficit that they didn’t create,” said Ignatius.
The advocates’ efforts had a positive impact but Ignatius questions the process.
“Something’s messed up with these budget processes,” Ignatius said, if nonprofits have to spend their limited money and ask their CalWorks parents to travel for many hours to attend legislative hearings so they can testify “for 30 seconds” as to why CalWorks shouldn’t be cut.
Sacramento lawmakers shouldn’t describe budget cuts to welfare programs as “hard choices,” Ignatius said. The “‘easy choice” is to keep the welfare programs intact and to resolve the budget deficit by addressing the billions in corporate tax breaks the state gives away every year, she said.
