Vivyan Adair, the Elihu Root Peace Fund Associate Professor of Women's Studies, contibuted an op-ed to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (3/13/07) titled "Education Key to Getting Past Welfare."
In it she wrote, "As a former welfare recipient who escaped poverty through higher education (North Seattle Community College and the University of Washington) and as a researcher and educator, I argue that if the goal of welfare reform was to move poor single mothers toward self-sufficiency, the program has failed. I attribute this lack of success in large measure to welfare reform's focus on low-wage work and marriage at the expense of support for recipients who could otherwise both earn and learn their way out of poverty." Adair founded the ACCESS Project at Hamilton, which assists low-income parents in obtaining a higher education.
