Clients Suffering

by Richard Bermack

Dec. 2001

Kathy (not her real name) works part time doing catering jobs and secretarial work for a temp agency. She has two kids. Her husband just left her after 13 years of marriage without paying last month’s rent, and now this month’s is due. She is trying to get some emergency assistance to keep from getting evicted. She has just found out that the applications she filled out in another office were not transferred to the new office, and she will have to return once again with bank statements, income verification, birth certificates, and social security cards for herself and the kids, and other documentation.

“The worker at the other office told me all I would have to do is give them my file number, and I wouldn’t have to bring everything back in,” says Kathy. “My landlord is trying to be decent. I have been borrowing money from friends. She knows I’m someone who works, and I have no trouble finding jobs. I have trouble right now because I’m ready to crack under all this pressure, but she will work with me. If she doesn’t, I have no idea what to do. I don’t want to get evicted. We live in Alameda and my kids go to a good school. I don’t want them to have to change schools.”

Prior to CalWORKS there was a unit that handled emergency requests like Kathy’s. “Now we are so overwhelmed we can no longer do emergencies,” one worker stated. “You have people coming in saying, ‘I’m going to be evicted and I need my money or I’ll be homeless.’ And they don’t have a stitch of necessary documentation. After all, they don’t know what they’ll need until they get here. And they may not even have the documentation at home. ‘But I’m a human being living in Alameda County. I need help,’ they say. But there is nothing we can do without documentation. We try our best.”