<p>A critical anti-racist feminist analysis is used to examine the City of Toronto's current approach to gender equity and to consider how the City can move forward based on the discussion of Toronto's issues and challenges and other cities' successes. Written from the perspective of one member of a 14-member City of Toronto women's advisory committee, it examines the City's approach to diversity in general and gender equity in particular. The analysis finds serious flaws in the City's current approach, related to a lack of gender equity structures and mechanisms, a lack of interest in, and resources allocated to, such structures and mechanisms, and a lack of civic engagement of women, which forms a part of the City's overall democratic deficit. Structures and mechanisms implemented in other cities in order to promote gender equity are explored in order to provide the City with successful possibilities to consider. A proposed six-stage model categorizes various levels of commitment that cities have demonstrated towards achieving gender equity. This model allows cities, such as Toronto, to assess their individual progress on gender equity relative to other cities and to better understand the need to increase their efforts. Lastly, recommendations to the City of Toronto to enhance its gender equity approach are discussed. Despite the limitations of this study, the author believes it was highly necessary to document and disseminate the issues related to the City of Toronto's approach to gender equity in order to open up productive dialogue between the City and the community and to motivate effective, equity-enhancing change in a timely manner.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

The effects of neoliberal practices on social policy decisions continues to favor a form of privatization in which corporatized marketplace practices are the guide for social institutional operations. One effect of this has been an increase of marketplace organizations as operators of social services programs, including welfare-to-work programs. These organizations adhere to the prevailing trends in business community for profit making, while ostensibly following the principles of welfare-to-work regulations for service delivery. However, the practices introduced by pursuing profit can conflict with the recognizing all the goals of workfare as outlined in the federal policy of TANF or the Temporary Aid for Needy Families. Under these regulations, providers are charged with assisting welfare recipients receiving cash support in addressing personal barriers to economic stability and in gaining employment intended to provide a catalyst to economic stability. This research examines a corporate social services provider, the practices instituted by its leaders, and the effects that those practices have on the staff of the welfare-to-work center and their clients. Specifically, this examines how the links between profit making and the statistical performance assessments of state funding agencies influenced an operational model, analogous to the manufacturing center for cheap labor. The emphasis on quick workforce attachment strategies exceeded the state's performance measures and allowed the maximization of profit; however, this research determines that these strategies denied workfare clients the services that they and the state expected them to receive. / Anthropology

Master of Science

No / General practices in the UK are increasingly hosting welfare advice services on their premises to address patients' social and economic needs. In this paper, the authors present the outcomes of a service providing welfare advice across 30 general practices in inner-city Bradford. A retrospective study of all patients referred for advice during the initial 24 months of the project was conducted. The following information was collected: patient demographics, source of referrals, advice issues raised and income generated through benefit claims. The advice workers saw 2484 patients dealing with over 4000 welfare advice issues. Demand for the service varied widely across practices, reflecting practice list size and engagement with the service by practice staff. The main source of referrals was general practitioners (28%), and disability-related welfare benefits constituted the largest category of advice issues. Sixty-nine per cent of patients seen for advice were of south Asian ethnic origin. The advice workers raised £2 389 255 in welfare benefit claims for patients, primarily through disability-related benefits. Approximately one in four patients referred for advice benefited financially. It is concluded that the service is an excellent strategy by which primary care organisations address the social, economic and environmental influences on the health of their population.

published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

1999 Dozier Award Winner / Welfare reform, in its attempts to order the lives of women on cash assistance, uses time as a means of controlling women. Single mothers living in poverty experience, perceive and use time in ways that the state welfare bureaucracy fails to recognize and/or refuses to work with. Poverty is anchored in a historical and cyclical dynamic based on low valuations of people's time, structured by race, class and gender. This essay shows how specific temporal sequences, orderings and flows are implicated in the etiology of poverty, forming cumulative feedback loops that challenge the linear trajectory of the welfare-to-work model. It argues that the welfare state bureaucracy practices a powerful politics of time, consisting in the imposition of forms of order and rigid temporal structures on the highly contingent and unpredictable lives of the poor. These temporal devices of control, rather than facilitating women's efforts to move from dependence to self-reliance, only exacerbate their struggles to manage the vagaries and irregularities of time in their lives. Time thus constitutes a locus of struggle in the welfare relationship, between women on welfare and the welfare agency.

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