The Washington, D.C., policy research group the Urban Institute convened a roundtable on July 25, 2006, to mark the 10th anniversary of welfare reform. At the event, experts with varied views acknowledged the watershed transformation of public assistance for very poor people and offered suggestions to further promote well-being for the economically vulnerable.

Read a short primer on poverty statistics from the federal government.

The Office of Family Assistance in the Administration for Children and Families (within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) administers welfare and keeps statistics.

Ron Haskins is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He helped write the 1996 welfare reform law and wrote Work Over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law (Brookings Institution Press, 2006). He believes welfare reform has worked.

John Fitzgerald is a professor of economics at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, who researches family well-being and welfare.

Ellwood is a professor of political economy and dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 1993-95 and co-chaired then-President Clinton’s Working Group on Welfare Reform, Family Support and Independence. With both academic expertise and policy […]

Oct. 26, 2009, The New York Times article about the frequency with which young runaways have to resort to the sex trade.

Results of a September 2009 study by the National Center for Children in Poverty that showed that 20 percent to 40 percent of the nation’s homeless teens and youth identified as LGBT.

An August 2011 Guttmacher report outlines increasing disparities between the rich and the poor in rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion.