LA County Eligibility Workers Celebrate Past and Focus on Future at Summit

Above: Brothers Ulysses and Javier McCuistion are LA County Eligibility Workers

More than 60 Eligibility Workers volunteered their Saturday mornings to come together on November 7 for the first EW Summit. They celebrated their 40-year history of helping families, children and the elderly and looked ahead to the future. “We have to know where we come from to know where we’re going,”
said Eligibility Worker Martin Hernandez.
Eligibility Workers are serving more clients than ever during the economic crisis. And they are facing a threat of privatization, which has failed in other states but was proposed by Gov. Schwarzenegger this year.

Community Support Comes Through

Eligibility Workers and Eligibility Supervisors from across LA County talked about how to make services better for people who are struggling in the recession. They heard from community supporters, state welfare leaders and a representative from County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas’s office.
“So many eligibility workers don’t know about the big entities that support us as a workforce. We’re not by ourselves here,”
said Susan Landar, an Eligibility Supervisor who has worked for the County for 38 years.
Nancy Berlin of the California Partnership, which supports safety-net programs, said that social service workers and their clients have a lot in common. “As the folks who work with low-income people every day, and as the people who need these services, we have the solutions,”
she said. “When we all work together we can do really great things.”
Frank Mecca, director of the County Welfare Directors Association, said his group opposed privatization and a statewide computer proposal that would block access to services. “County-based administration works, so why are we trying to fix it?”
Eligibility Workers also learned about the power of their political voice in expanding services and opposing privatization.
“We have the opportunity to help people. A lot of us see it as part of our job, but it needs to go past that. Because we know what the regulations are, we should be the ones to push our politicians,” said Alan Beltran, Eligibility Worker in the Cudahy district.

“The EW Summit was very informative,”
said Bernadette Pedraza of Belvedere DPSS. “Things that needed to be said were said and heard. Most importantly it gives us a voice and a sense of solidarity. We need to put our words into action, making sure that we continue to work towards our goals and advocate for more participation from EWs.”