The Downtown Welfare Advocacy Center (DWAC) was formed in New York City in 1974, mainly by a group of single mothers dependent on public entitlements. Often frustrated, confused, and occasionally victimized by the Human Services bureaucracy, these women initially began meeting as an informal support group, combating the social and emotional isolation of single parenthood coupled with poverty. As these early meetings turned toward consciousness raising--as common experiences of life on welfare were shared and analyzed--the participants quickly became politicized and turned their attention to planning and organizing. Highly influential in this transformation was the presence and leadership of Anita Hoffman, wife of then-fugitive Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, who found herself a welfare mother in New York after her husband went underground.

The political and organizational roots of the Center are in two movements of the 1960s. Emerging from the civil rights struggle, the poor people's, or welfare rights, movement flourished and rapidly declined in the latter years of the decade. Composed of numerous independent regional recipient groups, loosely affiliated under the umbrella of George Wiley's National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), the movement sought its ultimate goal of a guaranteed adequate income through demonstrations, lobbying for incremental reform of welfare laws, and attempts to destigmatize the acceptance, and acceptors, of public assistance. Although the movement was represented nationwide, it was concentrated in northern urban centers, especially New York. There were more WRO and NWRO members in the state of New York than any other, and Brooklyn alone had more members than any other United States city. DWAC reprised this organizing success when forming its own guaranteed-income membership arm in 1979, the Redistribute America Movement (RAM). One resource behind RAM's growth to five thousand members--again, with New York and Brooklyn leading the nation in recipient activism--was the recruitment and training manuals created by welfare rights advocates ten years earlier. As had been true ten years earlier, membership was overwhelmingly black.

The second primary influence on DWAC's organizational strategies and goals was the resurgence of women's involvement in political struggles through the women's movement. A main focus of DWAC's presentation of the economic and public assistance problems of New York and the United States was the increasing "feminization of poverty," the disproportionate representation of single women and their dependents on welfare rolls. Nearly 90% of recipients are such single parent, female-headed households; almost 95% of DWAC's leaders, staff and RAM members were women. DWAC inherited concepts from the women's movement, and transformed them to reflect the perspective and needs of poor women; the maxim "Every mother is a working mother," became "Every welfare mother is a poor working mother."

Initially, DWAC volunteers conducted a limited telephone and walk-in advocacy operation, while visiting welfare centers to offer advice and recruit volunteers. At the same time, Anita Hoffman sought and acquired seed money. By 1976, they had merged with the People's Information Center, a community switchboard with which they shared offices. Theresa Funiciello, an employee of the PIC, replaced Hoffman as director. Funiciello's grant-writing ability allowed DWAC to expand and improve its advocacy work while her charismatic leadership drew more volunteers and supporters. (In general, DWAC's record of intervention in welfare cut-offs, hearings and foul-ups was successful at a rate of approximately 90%.) The organization began combining its advocacy operation with an explicitly activist role. (The two roles were never totally separate; welfare center take-overs were a weapon in DWAC's advocacy arsenal.)

Although DWAC had previously participated in activist coalitions, and in a limited number of its own demonstrations, it was with the founding of Redistribute America Movement in 1979 that the group's career as a protest organization really began. Formed after an extensive training and planning period, assisted by representatives of ACORN and the Center for Third World Organizing, RAM devoted itself to providing opportunities and leadership experience to its low-income members at the same time as it worked both to change the public representation of welfare issues and to increase and expand welfare grants themselves. The purpose in forming RAM is evident in its career, and in the writings of a member of DWAC's board of directors, Richard Cloward, writing with Frances Fox Piven. Cloward and Piven argued that economically disadvantaged peoples are also politically weak, not having the resources to influence political events. In such circumstances, the politics of disruption are a more appropriate tactic than lobbying and conventional activism, which are of limited effectiveness and beyond the resources of an organization of poor people. RAM pursued this goal by creative, almost relentless demonstrations that juxtaposed the survival problems of their constituency with the lifestyles and political fortunes of the affluent. The point was to mobilize public opinion away from welfare bashing and toward compassion for the poor and distrust of the enormous sums of government money corporations, developers, and individuals receive in the forms of tax abatements and exclusionary deductions. At the same time, RAM borrowed a tactic of the NWRO and attempted to create a crisis within the state and city welfare bureaucracy by curtailing routine welfare-roll cutbacks--arguing correctly that the process was based on budgetary needs and not on sufficient case-by-case reasoning. Also, RAM tried to exploit special entitlements, flooding welfare centers with emergency and clothing grant requests that cited inflation as the catastrophe justifying the claims.

Resource constraints limited the organizational and operational success of RAM--beyond expenses, foundations were wary, and corporations antagonistic, towards the funding of uppity welfare mothers--as did the greater power of their opposition. Yet while overall goals, especially the attainment of a guaranteed adequate income, were unreached, specific struggles leading to these goals were. Tax abatements and rollbacks for corporations and the wealthy were not reversed, but the major Commodore Hotel abatement was defeated. Welfare grants were not raised to the poverty line, but were kept intact in the Two-Party Rent Check campaign, and were impressively raised 15% in 1981, the year of President Reagan's social spending cuts.

DWAC/RAM began to weaken as an organization in late 1982 and 1983. Although advocacy operations were anemically maintained through 1984, and storefront operations perhaps as late as early 1985, the operation had basically run its course. Various factors led to this decline: the straining of philanthropic purses in a recession presided over by a conservative government; exhaustion of staff, most of whom had stopped being welfare mothers themselves as the organization flourished, in the face of running DWAC by day and RAM in the evenings; and the difficulty of maintaining membership and volunteer involvement of an economically and politically marginalized constituency. Before the final break-up, many of DWAC/RAM's leaders had gone on to other advocacy and organizing work.