Funding and TANF Block Grant Structure
Welfare caseloads are down and more welfare recipients are employed, but there is important work yet to be done through welfare reform. States and American Indian Tribes administering TANF programs need adequate funding and flexibility to implement appropriate programs for the next phase of welfare reform. Key future efforts include serving the needs of families still on welfare--many of whom have multiple barriers to employment--and those who are working, but earning low wages and still not making ends meet. States and TANF Tribes must also be able to respond to economic slowdown like the one that has already begun. We support the following Congressional actions:

1. Maintain TANF Block Grant funding at least at its current level so that states and TANF Tribes can refocus funding to assist families with multiple barriers to employment and self-reliance; to promote job retention, job advancement, and increased earnings; and to promote work supports such as child care and transportation.
2. Renew and enhance supplemental grants to states in order to address any inequities in state block grant allotments. Federal funding for these grants should be in addition to the amount currently provided to states.
3. Provide mechanisms to assist states and TANF Tribes in the event of economic downturn, e.g., increase the amount in the Contingency Fund or provide for a block grant increase to individual states and TANF Tribes to be triggered by increases in the unemployment rate and allow states to maintain realistic "Rainy Day Funds."
4. Maintain State Maintenance of Effort (MOE) at its current level.
5. Restore Title XX--Social Services Block Grant--funding and transferability.
6. Revise rules for supportive programs so that service delivery can be coordinated and aligned, e.g., Food Stamps, Child Welfare, housing programs, transportation, workforce development, child support, child care, vocational rehabilitation, and Medicaid.
7. Maintain the TANF Block Grant structure.
8. Simplify federal regulations.
9. Avoid "set-asides" or further restrictions on the use of TANF funds.
10. Provide adequate flexibility within TANF statute to serve the needs of a wide variety of persons on welfare, transitioning off welfare, or at risk of becoming dependent on cash assistance. Policies should authorize states and TANF Tribes to provide any types of services and activities that they consider effective in furthering self-sufficiency.

1. Create a policy mechanism that allows TANF parents who will always need some financial support to be exempt from time limits. These individuals should not be included in any restrictions on numbers of exemptions to time limits, such as the current 20 percent of average annual caseload provision, that may be established or retained during TANF Reauthorization.
2. Offer states and TANF Tribes demos to create and test programs to assist parents with multiple barriers to employment and self-sufficiency.
3. Encourage states and TANF Tribes to experiment with programs that create jobs for TANF parents in special circumstances, including those that place TANF parents unable to find private sector jobs into public sector employment.
4. Strengthen requirements for initial assessment.
5. Offer states and TANF Tribes demos or incentives to develop and implement strategies to coordinate services and resources to TANF families with multiple barriers.
6. Ensure that states and TANF Tribes have adequate resources to develop and implement processes that identify hidden family disabilities and other barriers (including in families that have been sanctioned), track families who have difficulty navigating the "work-first" TANF environment, and develop processes that link the most disadvantaged families with appropriate, expert services.

1. Add "to provide supports and assistance to the working poor" as a purpose of the TANF Program.
2. Allow states and TANF Tribes to modify pathways in areas lacking supportive resources such as mental health, substance abuse, and domestic violence treatment; child care; transportation; and job training.
3. Enhance mechanisms that make work pay, e.g., raise the minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit, and expand Medicaid to cover working families in the absence of employer-provided health care benefits.

1. End the reward for caseload reduction without regard to whether families have entered employment and instead, institute results-oriented state and TANF Tribe performance measures that measure poverty reduction, sustained employment, earnings growth, and higher wages. These should apply to both families receiving TANF and for a broader group of low-income families who have left TANF assistance or never enrolled. One example of this type of action would be to make assisting families to obtain jobs with above-poverty wages a performance measure.
2. Provide performance bonus money to states and TANF Tribes that make the greatest progress in reducing child and family poverty.
3. Use TANF Performance Bonus money to reward states and TANF Tribes that help former welfare parents get better jobs.
4. Allow educational or training programs likely to increase earning power and requiring substantial time commitment to count as a work activity without also requiring work.
5. Give states and TANF Tribes incentives to experiment with public sector job creation programs.
6. Replace the current participation rate system with one that requires participation by all TANF parents in one or more of a broad range of allowable activities appropriate to the individual parent/family. (Utah experimented successfully--93 to 98 percent of all families participated in activities--with this system from 1993 to 1997 in its Single Parent Employment Demonstration Program.)
7. If the device of participation rates is continued, significantly broaden the list of countable activities so that individuals engaged in activities in their individualized employment plan are counted in participation rate calculations.
8. Allow states and TANF Tribes to define "work activity."
9. Allow states and TANF Tribes greater flexibility to place persons in training and education programs in addition to "work-first" job search programs, especially in areas with higher unemployment and for sub-populations that traditionally have suffered higher than average unemployment rates.
10. Increase the use of job training as "work preparation."
11. Provide funding to states and TANF Tribes to research the impacts and outcomes of welfare reform.
12. Provide funding to states and TANF Tribes for research that will provide specific information on child well-being in TANF and post-TANF families.

1. Add a TANF purpose with an express goal of reducing child and family poverty and promoting child and family economic well-being, and making it clear that the goal of promoting work includes supporting employment retention and workforce advancement for needy families. This could be accomplished by passage of H.R. 2166/S. 1027, both entitled "Child Poverty Reduction Act."
2. Expand education and training use for working, former welfare parents to help them with job advancement and earnings increase.
3. Provide grants to states to experiment with and evaluate job retention and advancement programs for low-wage workers.
4. Encourage firms or regional alliances to provide private sector training and job mobility opportunities that help less-skilled workers increase wages over time.
5. Provide incentives to states and TANF Tribes to launch demonstration programs that place TANF parents unable to find private sectors jobs (particularly in times of economic slowdown) into public sector employment.
6. Increase the maximum amount that families can receive from the federal EITC and phase out the credit at a slower rate.
7. Include education, job creation, and economic development components in legislation related to Welfare Reform Reauthorization.

• Eliminate time limits altogether and rely instead--for meeting goals of ensuring recipients participate in activities that will lead to work--on state and tribal systems with sanctions for non-participation.

1. Require that states and TANF Tribes stop the TANF time clock for families with earned income, e.g., when a parent is working at least 25 hours per week. Not only will this better fulfill the intent of Congress that welfare families work, but it will eliminate the Catch-22 created by income disregards, a mechanism designed to help working families transition off welfare, but which simultaneously encourages them to run out their lifetime allotment of months on assistance.
2. Eliminate the "lifetime" aspect of time-limits and, instead, give states and TANF Tribes encouragement and the flexibility to respond to a family's continuing or recurring need for assistance, e.g., in cases where parents have personal barriers to self-sufficiency or the state or local economy is depressed.
3. Ensure that states and TANF Tribes are able to acknowledge circumstances in areas where resource shortages for families with barriers exist, e.g. tie the "tick of the welfare time clock" to receipt of appropriate interventions in rural areas and on Indian Reservations.
4. Allow states and TANF Tribes to broaden the range of allowable activities to help address the needs of families who have been sanctioned and longer-term recipients.
5. Create a policy mechanism that allows TANF parents who, because of their particular barriers, will always need some financial support to be exempt from time limits. These individuals should not be included in any restrictions on number of exemptions to time limits, such as the current 20 percent of average annual caseload provision, that may be established or retained during TANF Reauthorization.
6. Ensure that states and TANF Tribes guard due process in imposing time limits.
7. Ensure that research, including longitudinal research, is done on outcomes for families whose cases were closed due to  time-limits.

• Eliminate the 20 percent exemption rule and, instead, base exemptions on identifiable barriers to work that either TANF families or the administering institution have been unable to address within the state or federal time limit.

1. Encourage states and TANF Tribes to allow exemptions to time limits to families with disabled members.
2. Specify that exemptions to time limits for domestic violence shall fall outside of any percentage of caseload-driven exemption policy.
3. Encourage states and TANF Tribes to allow exemptions from time limits for families with infants.
4. Ensure that whatever exemption policies may be put in place can realistically fulfill the intended function even in times of economic slowdown.
5. Revise provisions relating to TANF exemptions so that cash assistance recipients who comply with all program requirements are not dropped from assistance because of the lack of available jobs in their communities. Statistical unemployment measures to be used should be selected so that they are as representative as possible of local conditions actually confronted by TANF job seekers within a geographical range they can reasonably be expected to find and retain work.

1. Ensure that research is done on outcomes for families suffering terminations due to sanctions .
2. Ensure that states and TANF Tribes guard due process in imposing sanctions.
3. Require all states and TANF Tribes to have and employ a thorough, documented conciliation process prior to sanctioning, as well as a follow-up process to ensure child well-being.

1. Exert deliberate and aggressive efforts to create after-school and community programs that provide supervision and mentoring for pre-adolescent and adolescent children.
2. Ensure that policies do not discourage non-custodial parents from co-residing or in other ways spending time with and providing financial support to their children.
3. Focus on the provision of a collection of diverse programs to address the equally diverse needs of children of different ages and in different family circumstances, not on one specific program that will purport to benefit all children in welfare families.

Utah has a long history of considering how to help welfare families become self-reliant. The Utah Reauthorization Project (UREAP) is a broad-based effort to educate state and national decision-makers and the public about needed refinements to the current welfare system, to muster congressional support for common ground solutions that will help stabilize vulnerable families, and to enhance efforts to address poverty in our state and nation.

UREAP has as its vision of the next phase of welfare reform strengthening our nation by building families' and individuals' economic and social well-being. We seek to be involved in realizing this vision as Congress considers the 2002 Reauthorization of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Program, as well as related measures in the intervening months and beyond.  It is appropriate at this time to consider what has been learned since 1996 and look ahead to new, common ground public policy options that provide opportunities to go beyond reducing caseloads and promoting low-wage work. This will require refinements to the law so that welfare reform effectively provides eligible families and individuals with the services they need and assists all vulnerable people to become as self-reliant as possible.

UREAP therefore, will support and encourage provisions which:

1. set a clear and consistent goal to reduce poverty.
2. meet temporary and emergency needs.
3. facilitate job advancement and increased earnings through training or skill-development for those who can move toward self-reliance.
4. sustain basic needs and dignity for those families and individuals who are not able to achieve self-reliance.
5. afford families and individuals with the opportunities and resources they need to address their barriers to achieving economic independence before they leave the welfare system.
6. support the efforts of families and individuals to move forward.
7. make work pay.
8. provide necessary supports to families and individuals as they transition from welfare to work.
9. emphasize the care and well-being of children, as they are the majority of welfare recipients.
10. include appropriate flexibility and encouragement to allow states, localities, and Indian Tribes to run programs that are responsive to special populations and circumstances.
11. provide increased or at least present levels of funding to support necessary programs and services to effect positive outcomes for families and individuals.
12. finance welfare reform without resulting in harm to other vulnerable groups.

Active Re-Entry, Price, (Southeastern Utah)
Box Elder Family Support Center, Brigham City, (Box Elder County)
Bringing Hope to Single Moms Foundation, Logan, (Cache and Box Elder Counties)
Community Action Services, Provo, (Utah, Wasatch, and summit Counties)
Disabled Rights Action Coalition (DRAC), Salt Lake City, (Salt Lake County)
Family Support and Children's Justice Center of Carbon and Emery Counties, Price
International Rescue Committee, Salt Lake City, (statewide)
JEDI for Women, Salt Lake City, (statewide)
Mental Health Association in Utah, Salt Lake City, (statewide)
Options for Independence, Logan, (Northern Utah)
Peace and Justice Commission, Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake, Salt Lake City, (statewide)
People Helping People, Salt Lake City, (Salt Lake County)
Salt Lake Community Action Program (SLCAP), Salt Lake City, (Salt Lake and Tooele Counties)
Tri-County Independent Living Center, Ogden, (Weber, Davis, and Morgan Counties)
United Way Executive Directors Association (UWEDA), Salt Lake City, (Salt Lake County)
Utah Children, Salt Lake City, (statewide)
Utah Community Action Program Association (UCAPA), (statewide)
Utah Issues, Salt Lake City, (statewide)
Utahns Against Hunger, Salt Lake City, (statewide)
Valley Mental Health, Salt Lake City, (Salt Lake and Tooele Counties)
Walsh & Weathers Research and Policy Studies, Fruitland
Your Community Connection, Ogden, (Weber County)

Membership list updated on 9/18/01