What public assistance did they receive?

Please select one of the four characters: Valentina, Abigail, Teresa and her son, and Iyoka and Louis, featured in Take It From Me, and describe their struggles with poverty. Discuss interplay of both risk and protective factors in their poverty. What public assistance did they receive? Was the help sufficient in meeting their needs? If one of the characters was your client, what steps would you take to help them? What services could they benefit from?
Watch Take it From Me: Life After Welfare (video 75min)
welfare reform working? This troubling documentary shares the story of four women struggling against enormous odds to raise themselves out of poverty. It provides an in-depth look at the street-level impact of the Personal Responsibility Act, just as the Act’s five-year limit on public assistance first goes into effect.
The film gives people a detailed idea of what welfare recipients are up against trying to make the transition from welfare to work. Ihoka Rivera, her husband and their daughter went on welfare years ago when their home burned down. Now they have lost the support that had been helping Ihoka pursue an education. Abby Perez, a single mother of two whose homelessness landed her children in foster care, is in despair over her inability to afford housing on minimum wage. Teresa Diehl contends with mental illness while struggling to hold down steady work. Valentina Ruiz, a tough survivor of drug addiction and welfare dependence, feels like a winner now that she has found work as a cleaning person.
Take It from Me shows that welfare reform has hardened political and social attitudes towards the poor and made the system increasingly less responsive to individual needs and circumstances.
(Source: Film Info. Filmakers Library. An imprint of Alexander Street Press).