ABSTRACT
Following passage of the federal welfare reform legislation in 1996, California responded with enactment of its CalWORKs program in August 1997. Counties have spent the past several years engaged in the planning and implementation of welfare reform. Members of the Bay Area Social Services Consortium (BASSC), a coalition of county social service agency directors, social work deans, and foundation executives, have sought to capture the dynamic process of change occurring in county social service agencies in the era of welfare reform. This chapter identifies the core organizational challenges faced by the BASSC directors in implementing welfare reform along with the values and strategies employed to address these challenges. The ultimate goal was to document some of the preliminary lessons learned from implementing a work in progress.
