ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s, New York City's Downtown Welfare Advocacy Center (DWAC), founded in 1975, boasted six thousand members and eleven fulltime staff. With church and foundation funding, DWAC helped poor women negotiate the welfare bureaucracy, lobbied the city and state for more generous welfare grants, and demonstrated against restrictive welfare policies through its Redistribute America Movement (RAM), which tried to build a broad movement among the poor and working classes. This narrative describes the group's activities during 1982.
