Roseburg Social Workers and Welfare Moms Chart Course

It started in a bar 40 years ago in Roseburg, Ore., when a handful of young welfare case workers began gathering after work to drink and gripe about their job. There, they met welfare moms drinking and griping about welfare. It became a regular thing, drinking and yelling together, as well as sharing lots of laughs.
After a while the gripe sessions evolved into community meetings and late-night planning sessions. The moms talked and the renegade social workers listened. The moms needed low-cost housing and food. They needed jobs and day care and transportation. They needed a chance to finish the education they missed when they married too young. They needed a place to stay when their husbands abused them. And they needed something else. They needed respect and the self-confidence to stand up to the experts who said nothing could be done. In a little over a year, they moved from planning to doing. They started with the Confidence Clinic in 1971 and soon added daycare, a women’s shelter, the food bank, housing, Head Start and all the programs that now exist as United Community Action Network.
Source: Willman, Anna. Creating Confidence: How to Do Social Work Without Destroying People’s Souls. Roseburg, Oregon: Bravado Publishing, 2011. 27-254. Print.