Kendall Worth: Community Services transformation is getting back up
Kendall Worth hears that the welfare transformation project at Community Services is starting up again, and people in his community have lots of questions.
Annual Review
Kendall Worth: When on Income Assistance you just can’t win
Kendall Worth gives us an update on a young woman he wrote about earlier. Thankfully the harassment by a fellow tenant has stopped, but she lost some of her income assistance benefits. If we had a guaranteed basic income none of this would have happened, writes Kendall.
Kendall Worth: No end to annual reviews, Minister Kelly Regan says
Kendall Worth reports that Community Services has no plans to stop the annual reviews for people on social assistance. Many recipients feel that the practice is punitive and humiliating, and too often results in cuts.
Kendall Worth: Consider bringing an advocate to your annual review
Kendall Worth on annual reviews, the stress, the humiliation, and the importance of staying calm, cool and collected. Bring a friend or an advocate, he says.
Letter – Poverty activists to Community Services bureaucrats: Could we speak with your manager, please
The Benefits Reform Action Group sent a letter to the Community Services Standing Committee, explaining why it is no longer interested in meetings with bureaucrats that go nowhere.
Why talk when nobody listens? Benefit Reform Action Group halts discussions with Community Services
The annual review for people on social assistance is intrusive, stressful, and often unnecessary. But when BRAG complained to the Standing Committee it turned into a lengthy exchange of letters. Enough of that, says BRAG. Here is the story, as told by Kendall Worth.
Lives on welfare: Three stories about annual reviews and a disrespectful caseworker
Kendall Worth sits down for coffee with three Income Assistance clients who are terrified of their annual review, mostly because they feel their caseworker is needlessly adversarial and disrespectful. Why have an annual review when you know your disability isn’t going to go away, Kendall wonders.
All that’s wrong with the much-feared Annual Review, and how to begin to fix it
Poverty advocate and social assistance recipient Kendall Worth just went through his Annual Review. Here Kendall suggests some of the changes that would make it a much better process, based on trust rather than suspicion, clients’ needs rather than saving money.