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116 books match the query 'Social Services & Welfare' and 7 start with h

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Habits of Compassion

Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York's Welfare System, 1830-1920

Maureen Fitzgerald

University of Illinois Press, 2006

The Irish-Catholic Sisters accomplished tremendously successful work in founding charitable organizations in New York City from the Irish famine through the early twentieth century. Maureen Fitzgerald argues that their championing of the rights of the poor—especially poor women—resulted in an explosion of state-supported services and programs.

Parting from Protestant belief in meager and means-tested aid, Irish Catholic nuns argued for an approach based on compassion for the poor. Fitzgerald positions the nuns' activism as resistance to Protestantism's cultural hegemony. As she shows, Roman Catholic nuns offered strong and unequivocal moral leadership in condemning those who punished the poor for their poverty and unmarried women for sexual transgression. Fitzgerald also delves into the nuns' own communities, from the class-based hierarchies within the convents to the political power they wielded within the city. That power, amplified by an alliance with the local Irish Catholic political machine, allowed the women to expand public charities in the city on an unprecedented scale.

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Happiness in the Nordic World

Christian Bjørnskov

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

Denmark is consistently among the countries with the happiest and most satisfied populations, and it regularly places at the very top with the rest of the Nordic countries in international surveys. Why do the Nordic countries as a whole constitute the happiest region in the world?

Many experts attribute the region's high levels of happiness to factors such as greater relative national wealth and well-functioning institutions. Yet, a number of other countries in Europe and parts of Asia share those qualities and rank far lower in life satisfaction. Others credit the region's high levels of happiness to its welfare state model, but these have changed considerably over time—and Iceland does not share this feature.

Instead, economist Christian Bjørnskov argues that the most important factor to come out of international comparisons is the importance of social trust—the ability to trust other people one does not know personally. The populations in three of the five countries are also characterized by a very strong sense of personal freedom. These two key factors contribute to a fuller and richer life. Bjørnskov ends by discussing to what extent these factors can be exported to other parts of the world.

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Health Care at Risk

A Critique of the Consumer-Driven Movement

Timothy Stoltzfus Jost

Duke University Press, 2007

In Health Care at Risk Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, a leading expert in health law, weighs in on consumer-driven health care (CDHC), which many policymakers and analysts are promoting as the answer to the severe access, cost, and quality problems afflicting the American health care system. The idea behind CDHC is simple: consumers should be encouraged to save for medical care with health savings accounts, rely on these accounts to cover routine medical expenses, and turn to insurance only to cover catastrophic medical events. Advocates of consumer-driven health care believe that if consumers are spending their own money on medical care, they will purchase only services with real value to them. Jost contends that supporters of CDHC rely on oversimplified ideas about health care, health care systems, economics, and human nature.

In this concise, straightforward analysis, Jost challenges the historical and theoretical assumptions on which the consumer-driven health care movement is based and reexamines the empirical evidence that it claims as support. He traces the histories of both private health insurance in the United States and the CDHC movement. The idea animating the drive for consumer-driven health care is that the fundamental problem with the American health care system is what economists call “moral hazard,” the risk that consumers overuse services for which they do not bear the cost. Jost reveals moral hazard as an inadequate explanation of the complex problems plaguing the American health care system, and he points to troubling legal and ethical issues raised by CDHC. He describes how other countries have achieved universal access to high-quality health care at lower cost, without relying extensively on cost sharing, and he concludes with a proposal for how the United States might do the same, incorporating aspects of CDHC while recognizing its limitations.

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Healthcare Reform and Poverty in Latin America

Edited by Peter Lloyd-Sherlock

University of London Press, 2000

Most Latin American countries are now attempting the radical reform of their healthcare financing and delivery systems. In many cases, these reforms complement and contribute to broader neo-liberal orthodoxies of economic and social reform. Key strategies include decentralising hospital administration and the promotion of private health insurance. However, experiences across the region are quite diverse, and countries such as Cuba persist with a system of healthcare based on very different principles. This book identifies key problems facing healthcare systems in the region and evaluates the reforms that have been implemented to date. It pays particular attention to problems of implementation and the impact that changes to health policy are having on poor and vulnerable groups.

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Home Safe Home

Housing Solutions for Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence

Botein, Hilary

Rutgers University Press, 2016

Housing matters for everyone, as it provides shelter, security, privacy, and stability. For survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), housing takes on an additional meaning; it is the key to establishing a new life, free from abuse. IPV survivors often face such inadequate housing options, however, that they must make excruciating choices between cycling through temporary shelters, becoming homeless, or returning to their abusers.

Home Safe Home offers a multifaceted analysis that accounts for both IPV survivors’ needs and the practical challenges involved in providing them with adequate permanent housing. Incorporating the varied perspectives of the numerous housing providers, activists, policymakers, and researchers who have a stake in these issues, the book also lets IPV survivors have their say, expressing their views on what housing and services can best meet their short and long-term goals. Researchers Hilary Botein and Andrea Hetling not only examine the federal and state policies and funding programs determining housing for IPV survivors, but also provide detailed case studies that put a human face on these policy issues.

As it traces how housing options and support mechanisms for IPV survivors have evolved over time, Home Safe Home also offers innovative suggestions for how policymakers and advocates might work together to better meet the needs of this vulnerable population.

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Homeless Mothers

Face to Face with Women and Poverty

Deborah R. Connolly

University of Minnesota Press, 2001

A first-person look at the challenges and cultural perceptions confronting homeless women. Homeless Mothers follows the lives of mothers on the margins and asks where they fit in the increasingly black-and-white model of motherhood set up by society. Their voices, so rarely heard and so often ignored, resonate throughout this book. Both an anthropologist in the field and a social worker on the job, Deborah R. Connolly is ideally placed to draw out these women's life stories. Using their own words, by turns eloquent and awkward, poignant and harsh, she maps the perilous territory between the promise of childhood and the hard reality of motherhood on the street. What emerges is a glimpse of the cultural, class, gender, and economic challenges these women experience, a glimpse as real for us as the headlines and stereotypes that so often displace homeless mothers and consign them to silence. "Connolly explores in rich detail the day-to-day experiences of women who use family shelters. Homeless Mothers is an insider's view on poverty and homelessness from the standpoint of mothers, families, and the social service providers who work with them. Connolly uses ethnographic methods and skills worthy of a good fiction writer to portray the daily lives, struggles, and intricate negotiations of homeless mothers." --Housing Studies Deborah R. Connolly is an advocate for the homeless and a senior research associate at Edgewood Center for Children and Families in San Francisco. She recently taught cultural anthropology at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

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How It Works

Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia

Robert P. Fairbanks II

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Of the some sixty thousand vacant properties in Philadelphia, half of them are abandoned row houses. Taken as a whole, these derelict homes symbolize the city’s plight in the wake of industrial decline. But a closer look reveals a remarkable new phenomenon—street-level entrepreneurs repurposing hundreds of these empty houses as facilities for recovering addicts and alcoholics. How It Works is a compelling study of this recovery house movement and its place in the new urban order wrought by welfare reform.

To find out what life is like in these recovery houses, Robert P. Fairbanks II goes inside one particular home in the Kensington neighborhood. Operating without a license and unregulated by any government office, the recovery house provides food, shelter, company, and a bracing self-help philosophy to addicts in an area saturated with drugs and devastated by poverty. From this starkly vivid close-up, Fairbanks widens his lens to reveal the intricate relationships the recovery houses have forged with public welfare, the formal drug treatment sector, criminal justice institutions, and the local government.

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