For the fourth year in a row, the state government can’t balance its budget without cutting spending, raising revenues, or a combination of both. To avoid raising taxes, the governor has proposed cuts in health and welfare spending—charging fees to some families on Medi-Cal, limiting the time that former welfare families can get subsidized child care, reducing the size of CalWORKs checks, and more (see the govenors budget).

The impacts on families add up. “The cuts are across the board in health and welfare, but cuts to different programs are impacting the same families,” says Alecia Sanchez, senior policy advocate at the Children’s Advocacy Institute.

To explain the issues, we turned to people whose lives are affected by these programs.

Grettel Mata:

“Our kids have done nothing to deserve this”

Grettel Mata works three days a week as a child care coordinator for a homeless prenatal program. Formerly homeless herself, Mata knows what the women in her office are going through.

She recalls living in a shelter with her two boys after leaving an abusive marriage.

“I didn’t want to go on welfare,” she says. “It’s the hardest thing as a single mom. [But] if you don’t have a job you can’t get day care. If you get a job, the waiting list for day care can be three to six months. What job will wait for you three to six months?”

On the proposed budget cuts, she says, “I think the impact is that we will have more homeless people. More abuse of kids. When you are stressed, you tend to vent on kids.”

Proposals for Medi-Cal fees, she says, are unrealistic: “A lot of clients won’t pay premiums. They would take the four dollars [proposed as a premium] and buy food.”

“Our priorities as a nation are confused right now,” she adds. “Our schools don’t have enough resources. Kids are getting into drugs because their parents have to work full-time to provide. Our kids have done nothing to deserve this.”

Money spent on kids, Mata says, pays off for everyone. “My kids will grow up and go to college and give back to you.”

Yolanda James:

“The kids go through turmoil”

As a former welfare recipient and the single mother of three children, Yolanda James empathizes with the people she meets in Los Angeles county’s welfare offices. James, an outreach worker for the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, says, “seeing the total stress and difficult stuff they experience, I know that their kids go through the turmoil too.”

In many families, she says, “Moms can’t make ends meet. They are living in cars, doubling up in houses.” She has seen families crowding over a dozen people into a two-bedroom apartment.

Now James educates people about their rights and helps them navigate the maze of agencies to get help. She’s indignant about this year’s proposed state budget. “We are balancing the budget on the backs of poor people and women,” she says. “You have so many options for making this budget, (for example) millionaires who don’t pay their taxes.”

Lenny Goldberg, at the California Tax Reform Association, agrees. “There are many billions of dollars of lost tax revenues. If we could recover a fraction of them we could go long way towards alleviating the impact of the budget on children and the poor.”

“Laurel”:

“You’re supposed to have a family”

Orphaned at age 10, Laurel entered the foster care system in Stanislaus County. She recalls that “it wasn’t bad to be in a foster home,” but her foster mother had a really big family and sometimes she felt lonely and rootless.

It wasn’t until Laurel was older that she could identify her feelings and understand that “you’re supposed to have a family.”

Fortunately for Laurel, she met two social workers who made a huge difference in her life—Patty O’Reilly and Justin Palmer. Funded by a grant from the Stuart and Walter S. Johnson Foundations, the social workers were able to dedicate time and resources to tracking down members of Laurel’s family.

To date, Palmer has located Laurel’s brother, her mother’s ex-husband, her great-grandmother in Arkansas, two aunts and several cousins. Later this year, O’Reilly will go to Arkansas with Laurel to visit them.

Laurel wishes that “every teen who doesn’t have a family member gets connected with someone who will mean a lot to them.” But cash-strapped social service agencies are barely able to provide even basic services, with few resources to help families stay together or reunite, according to a report called Stretched Thin, released last year by California Budget Project.

Natasha Brown:

“A lot of people rely on this!”

Natasha Brown is a single parent with two children, a boy age 5 and a girl age 2.

She has completed her vocational degree and works full-time as a receptionist for a printing company.

While Brown is at work, her children are in child care provided through CalWORKS, California’s welfare-to-work program. Brown says she couldn’t make it if the state stopped paying for child care: “I just don’t make enough money to pay for half, let alone all!”

Brown expresses shock at the governor’s proposal to limit child care for former CalWORKs families. “A lot of low-income people rely on this program to be self-sufficient,” she points out.

Patricia & Lynn Newman:

“Somebody who has the child’s good in mind”

When Lynn and Patricia Newman saw the great need for foster parents in the late 1980s, they decided to expand their house in Wilton to accommodate more children. Already the parents of adopted twin girls, they thought, “Maybe we could touch the lives of more kids.”

Today, they are well into their second decade of working with medically fragile children—children who were exposed to drugs in utero, children who fail to thrive, kids with cancer. It’s hard work, physically and emotionally. There are many sleepless nights holding crying children; there’s grief when a child dies.

But Patricia Newman considers it a privilege to “have different little lives go through ours.” One wall in their home is covered with pictures of foster children who have lived with them. And, she says, “I do what I do because I believe in this,” so kids can have “somebody who has the child’s good in mind.”

But according to the California Research Bureau, the number of foster families has decreased in the last ten years. Budgets stretched thin mean low foster care payments and few support services. With the reduced oversight and low stipends, Lynn Newman, a social worker himself, fears that good foster parents are leaving the system and others aren’t being properly monitored.

As a foster parent, he says, he began noticing shortages about eight years ago: “You don’t get the direct contact you used to, with the social worker coming out to the house to see how the child is doing, spending time counseling. You put in for things that you need for the kids and there’s resistance from the social workers to provide things like transportation.”

Attorney Melanie Snider, who works with foster families in Sacramento County agrees. “Foster parents need more support, not less,” she says. “Cutting the budget for any of the programs that affect foster parents hurts foster kids directly.”

Ursula Guevara:

“You can’t support a family on minimum wage”

When Ursula Guevara was a child, she says, she thought women on welfare were “sitting on their butts, eating bonbons, and watching TV.” She laughs ruefully. Now 24 and the mother of a toddler, Guevara says, “Women on welfare are the hardest-working women in the world. They go to work, they go to school, then they come home and take care of their kids.”

Busy as Guevara is, she considers herself lucky, thanks to the support of her family, her church community, and people at CalWORKS. Her minister helped arrange a scholarship; a CalWORKs staffer runs a bi-weekly support group for moms at Pasadena City College, where Guevara is studying to be a paralegal.

Guevara expresses frustration that women on welfare “have to fight hard to go to school” and are often pushed into minimum wage jobs. “It’s sad that we have bureaucrats up in Sacramento who have no inkling what real life is like,” she says. “A one bedroom apartment in L.A. costs $900 a month. You can’t make it here on $6.75 an hour. You can’t support a family on minimum wage.”

After she finishes school, Guevara points out, she is going to work and pay taxes for the rest of her life. “These taxes are going to be much more than the welfare I get for five years.”