There are few people in the nation who have a better understanding of welfare policies in the U.S. and their effect on poor Americans than Kaaryn Gustafson.

Highly educated and unswerving, Gustafson has been a formidable advocate for people on welfare, constantly challenging government policies that criminalize or diminish welfare recipients. Using her impressive legal and research skills and her remarkable media savvy, Gustafson has challenged the practice of fingerprinting welfare applicants, mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients and rules that require women on welfare to disclose their sexual histories. She is diligent in ensuring that the U.S. government respects the rights and dignity of poor people on welfare, even as welfare recipients appear to lose popular support nationwide.

"Welfare is an important but neglected policy area," Gustafson points out. " Women on welfare are some of the most demonized members of society. It’s an area that even progressives avoid, perhaps because it is such a tangle of the multiple issues of gender, race and class. It is that very complexity that draws me to the work."

Faced with that complexity, Gustafson has devised a multidimensional strategy of advocacy, organizing, and public education to humanize welfare policy and protect and empower people on welfare.

In 2002, Gustafson joined Women of Color Resource Center as a New Voices Fellow. The Center is a non-profit education, community action, and resource center working on social justice issues that affect women of color. As director of the center's Economic Justice and Human Rights Program, Gustafson has focused on, among other things, addressing welfare legislation’s exclusionary impact on women of color, immigrant families, children born into families receiving welfare benefits, and women convicted of drug felonies.

Her accomplishments as a New Voices Fellow cannot be overstated. A prolific and compelling writer, she has secured press coverage on key issues of welfare reform, including articles in The San Francisco Examiner and the Oakland Tribune. Her writings on the subject have been distributed by The Progressive Media Project and Knight Ridder newspapers. She is the author of a working paper entitled “Crime, Poverty, and Punishment: The Intermingling of Welfare and Crime Control,” which explores the links between current welfare policy and criminal justice policies.

Gustafson recently organized “From Welfare to Weddings,” a street theatre event that generated local print, radio, and television coverage, and she helped design a collaborative with the National Radio Project that trains (and pays) low income women of color to produce radio documentaries. Through this program, a group of Oakland women are learning radio documentary production and developing important stories about how women in poverty are stigmatized in society. The first documentary was distributed in February 2004 to 160 radio stations in North America and South Africa.

She also helped establish working groups on welfare time limits, language access barriers, welfare overpayments and fraud. She has assembled welfare rights materials in seven languages for use by community groups and individuals in California.

She credits New Voices for providing an environment that helps her continue her challenging work. "New Voices has not only provided terrific financial support," she states, "but has offered me a community of amazing fellows. I find myself working with some of them on a regular basis; turning to others for their vast knowledge of certain issues; and sharing ideas and struggles with many others."

Gustafson has developed a program area at WCRC that she hopes will remain vital. Upon leaving WCRC, she will become Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Both she and her host organization will continue to work on welfare, a policy area that has been historically misunderstood and misrepresented. "It is time," she wrote in a 2002 op-ed for the Progressive Media Project, "to target the real threats to our society and children—poverty and violence—not poor working mothers on welfare."

A native of Michigan, Gustafson is a working mother. She currently holds a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude in Sociology from Harvard College; a law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley and has just earned a PhD from the Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program at UC Berkeley, her degree to be conferred in May 2004. Her dissertation is titled “The Morality and Rationality of Welfare.”

Her work on welfare is driven not only by concern for welfare recipients, but for society as a whole. "As law professor Mari Matsuda suggests," she explains, "I am always 'looking to the bottom,' measuring the well-being of society by the well-being of those who have the least and starting there with my efforts at social change."