Recent welfare histories highlighting reformers, bureaucrats, and recipients of aid have added immeasurably to our understanding of welfare policy formation, but have ignored the extent to which the parameters of change were set by public opinion. Public opinion, informed by cultural values, constrained state action in ways that have been little explored. Examining the periodicals and newspapers of the mainstream, union, and African American presses as well as film, oral histories and autobiographies, I find differences by class and race, but also widespread and repetitive expressions of concerns shared by both races and by both the middle and lower middle classes. These included a strict standard of neediness, impatience with long-term aid, and a hierarchy of worthiness that privileged the previously middle-class over the working poor and families over unattached adults. In the broadest generalization, the story of is one of discontent. Ambivalence and discontent were present in the Progressive era with the inception of mothers' pensions and continued in the 1920s as social work professionalized and public and private aid increased. Discontent continued in the 1930s as public aid took on a complex and bureaucratized structure and as unprecedented need forced difficult decisions regarding worthiness and need. Throughout these changes the middle classes both created and reacted to the changing structure of welfare as they accepted or rejected programs based on a rough consensus of what constituted worthiness, need, and effective response. Many remained convinced that programs did not aid the right people sufficiently and aided the wrong people too much. Increasingly they felt estranged from those who ran the programs, the social welfare professionals. Assumptions, based in class, proved more powerful than idealogies such as gender (or maternal) solidarity and their stigma on poor adults equally as powerful as racial assumptions would come to be.

<p> The purpose of this project was to write a grant proposal to fund a comprehensive mental health program for undocumented youth and young adults who qualified for DACA, and are residents of the City of Long Beach, and adjacent cities. Through receiving these direct services, the undocumented youth and young adults will gain skills to increase their overall well-being. </p><p> A literature review was conducted on the history of immigration in the United States, and policy as it relates to undocumented youth. Research was also conducted on evidence-based practices, with a focus on effectiveness in treating depression, anxiety, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). After conducting research for potential funding sources, the grant writer concluded that the California Wellness Foundation was the best potential funder. </p><p> The actual submission of the grant proposal is not a requirement for the completion of this thesis.</p><p>

A case study in the politics of social provision, this dissertation uncovers the origins of a legal dispute between directors of a charitable trust and its female beneficiaries during the Progressive Era. In 1919 the poor women of Brattleboro, Vermont, legatees of the Thomas Thompson Trust, sued the Boston-based charity for mismanagement and demanded increased benefits and a role in monitoring trust allocations. An examination of charity case records, legal testimony, and local resources reveals the roots of their collective action in the experience of getting help. At a time when reformers were reconstructing charity to accommodate the shift from a moral to scientific approach to poverty, the case reveals the gender and class relations that shaped social policy. Highlighting the perspective of charity clients, the study shows how both providers and the needy constructed charity policy. Over the course of two decades, interaction among charity administrators, middle-class women, visiting nurses and poor, mostly native-born white women resulted in a medical definition of female poverty. Increased access to medical care and health education led beneficiaries to fashion a definition of female worthiness that combined recognition of their wage-earning with protection and support for ill health and old age. The shift from a moral to physical explanation of female poverty strengthened poor women's claims to direct relief while it encouraged charity administrators to develop health programs and to cultivate public support. Despite an alliance with civic leaders seeking local control over charitable funds, poor women failed to attain legal recognition of their claims, but they nonetheless modified trust policy. The redefinition of female poverty as a medical problem bolstered women's sense of entitlement and expanded health services for the poor and working-class community. Improved access to health experts, however, did little to resolve poor women's economic difficulties and helped undermine their sense of self-sufficiency as they adapted to middle-class assumptions about female weakness and invalidity.