Abstract
Research has highlighted that social ties help poor people to survive, but has also shown that nonkin ties often only last a short time. In this article, I argue that organizations that serve the needs of poor people can help to create more sustainable supportive ties among them. Drawing on participant observation and ethnographic interviews with twenty-five members of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU) in Philadelphia—an organization of, by, and for poor people—I found that supportive ties among members of KWRU can last years or even decades. I show how this organization enabled poor people to create and maintain supportive ties. KWRU provided people living in desperate poverty space for frequent interaction, connection, and cooperation. The organization supported a sense of kinship among members, and group leaders often helped to mend rifts between members. While KWRU is distinctive, other organizations that serve the needs of poor people could use this model to be more responsive to the needs of those in poverty.
Social scientists have long documented the importance and utility of social ties (Domínguez and Watkins 2003; Edin and Lein 1997; Granovetter 1973, 1974/1995; Mazelis 2015, 2017; Seccombe 1999; Stack 1974). A range of studies indicate that the poor in particular rely on such ties to further employment opportunities (Newman 1999; Smith 2005, 2007) and as a means of survival (Edin and Lein 1996, 1997; Harknett 2006; Hansen 2004; Nelson 2000). Since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, commonly known as welfare reform, the U.S. public safety net has become increasingly threadbare. Social service organizations provide support to poor people (Domínguez and Watkins 2003), but they cannot meet all needs. As a result, private safety nets of social ties—typically kin ties—have become ever more crucial for the poor (Edin and Lein 1997; Harknett 2006; Mazelis 2017; Stack 1974). Those without kin to depend on sometimes develop fleeting ties with new acquaintances that can further the instability of their lives (Desmond 2012). This article argues that an organization that serves the needs of poor people can create conditions in which they can build highly supportive ties with nonkin that last for the long term and provide deep support for those in dire need.
This article focuses on the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU), a grassroots anti-poverty organization in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In KWRU, people who were poor enough that most had experienced homelessness built sustainable ties through membership in this distinctive organization of, by, and for poor people. I use the term “sustainable ties” for these nonkin ties because they lasted at least a year and sometimes lasted decades. The term suggests greater durability than “disposable ties” (Desmond 2012); disposable ties dissolve in weeks or months, despite strong sentiment and mutual support. This article focuses on the research question: How did this distinctive organization enable poor people to develop and maintain supportive nonkin social ties?
Since its founding by poor women in 1991, KWRU has drawn membership from throughout Philadelphia. Dedicated to raising awareness of the perspectives and experiences of poor people, it has held regular demonstrations making a case for poverty alleviation and destigmatization over the years. Its ultimate goal is to end poverty nationwide, but it has supported members’ day-to-day survival as well: distributing free food, providing temporary housing, and addressing other urgent issues. I found that in lieu of membership dues, it expected members to participate in rallies, volunteer at the office, and help other members however they could. As this article describes, the sustainable ties it has created and maintained have provided deep and broad support to extremely poor members. The resilience of sustainable ties gives such ties particular power in the lives of people with few advantages.
Background
Supportive social ties among poor people
Research on social support among poor people has demonstrated that social networks provide significant benefits (Domínguez and Watkins 2003; Edin and Lein 1997; Mazelis 2015, 2017; Mazelis and Mykyta 2011; Newman 1999; Stack 1974). Carol Stack documented “a cooperative lifestyle built upon exchange and reciprocity” among kin and fictive kin that provided deep support (1974, 125). Stack’s study participants relied on the social networks she described, as well as the social support they provided, to cope with the daily challenges of poverty (see also Edin and Lein 1997; Seccombe 1999).
The literature shows that kin and fictive kin provide different kinds of assistance, ranging from free meals to child care to financial support to employment referrals. Sharing benefits from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; commonly called food stamps) is common in part because in some jurisdictions recipients may receive their stamps at different times of the month, and some may be running short just as others have received them (see, for example, Henly, Danziger, and Offer 2005). As Kristen Harknett noted, “social networks play an important role in providing financial and in-kind support to poor families” (2006, 174; see also Domínguez and Watkins 2003; Edin and Lein 1996, 1997). Margaret Nelson showed that shared economic circumstances support such networks, stating that “the assurance that those who live in similar circumstances will understand, and be sympathetic about, one’s circumstances,” fuels supportive ties even more than kinship terminology does (2005, 69; see also Nelson 2000). At the same time, the networks to which poor people have access tend to have meager resources, so immense need may quickly drain those resources (Edin 2001).
When traditional social ties are lacking
The work demonstrating social support among the poor is compelling, yet researchers have found that support is not universally available in poor communities (Levine 2013; Offer 2012a, 2012b; Putnam 2000; Roschelle 1997; Sampson 2012; Small 2009b; Smith 2007; Stack 1974). Many researchers have documented the limits of kin networks for the poor, who must seek employment referrals, material assistance, or emotional help elsewhere, due to kin’s reluctance or inability to help (Desmond 2012; Harknett 2006; Henly 2002; Henly, Danziger, and Offer 2005; McDonald and Armstrong 2001; Offer 2010, 2012b; Smith 2005, 2007). Harknett (2006) demonstrated, using a large survey dataset, that those without support from family were less likely to be employed, earned less money, and had greater dependence on public assistance. As Shira Offer stated: “The most vulnerable and disadvantaged mothers, those in greatest need for support, are the least likely to have it available from their networks” (2012a, 120; see also Offer 2010).
The difficulties of the poor do not somehow dissipate when there are no kin available to provide assistance. As Matthew Desmond stated, getting by without kin support is “next to impossible” for the poor (2012, 1298). The “brittle and fleeting” “disposable” ties he documented between recently evicted individuals helped poor people to move forward from one day to the next. But they contrasted sharply with the ones Stack documented because their short duration “bred instability and fostered misgivings” (pp. 1296–97). Conflict frequently destroyed the ties that Desmond’s participants had relied upon.
Deindustrialization and the increase of concentrated poverty have left those in poor neighborhoods with few social ties, which exacerbates high levels of unemployment and poverty (Portes 1998; Putnam 2000; Wilson 1987). The spatial concentration of poverty has created disadvantaged environments that became progressively isolated socially and economically (Anderson 1990; Massey and Denton 1993; Offer 2012a; Wilson 1987, 2001). In structurally isolated neighborhoods, poor people also isolate themselves from peers while trying to become upwardly mobile (Mazelis 2017; Portes 1998), an aspiration they are unlikely to realize (see, for example, Fader 2013). In addition, a strongly held individualistic ideology, general distrust of others, perceptions that other poor people are dangerous, pervasive poverty stigma, and fear of obligations to others also lead poor people to prefer to avoid social ties (Mazelis 2017).
Mutual support and strong ties require trust, and trust can be in short supply in poor communities (Fader 2013; Furstenberg 2001; Levine 2013; Seccombe 1999; Smith 2007). Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas described trust among their poor study participants as “astonishingly low,” noting that most had no close friends, and many distrusted close kin (2005, 34). As Levine stated, “The desperation that powerlessness creates means that everyone must be out for him- or herself at times” (2013, 40–41).
The role of organizations in social ties
Neighborhood institutions can provide a mechanism for tie creation, brokering both social ties to occasion friendship and organizational ties to help clients gather resources (Small 2009b; see also Marwell 2007; Marwell and McQuarrie 2013; Offer 2010, 2012a; Small and Allard 2013; Watkins-Hayes 2013). Mario Luis Small documented that organizations can foster trust between people, and thereby “perform much of the ‘work’ required to sustain strong friendships” (2009b, 87). In Small’s research, childcare centers “generate multiple opportunities and inducements for parents to interact” (2009b, 51). The childcare centers he studied create a focus in the purest sense, a separate point of attention that orients the actions of the parties. And therein lies the advantage and disadvantage of this type of relation: a place to interact and institutionally set times for the parties to do so sustains the relationship without requiring much effort from the parties to maintain it (2009b, 106).
Small identified the importance of repeated interaction through such practices as monthly parents’ association meetings and school trips. Respondents supported one another through information relevant to parenting and through occasional child care assistance. Some of these people became friends and stayed in touch as their children aged out of the childcare centers, and some considered each other family; whether the ties would last more than a few years was beyond the scope of the study. Other studies of ties formed through organizations do not address duration either (Marwell 2007; Marwell and McQuarrie 2013; Watkins-Hayes 2013).
Small asserted that people trust each other more as they encounter each other more; he also said that “centers represent a kind of safe space” in which to build trust (2009b, 184). Other studies have also shown that organizations can help to facilitate trust and foster relationships among members or clients (Marwell 2007; Marwell and McQuarrie 2013; Small 2009b; Watkins-Hayes 2013). Small’s research did not focus on poor people, but Desmond wrote that for poor people, institutions that serve those with urgent needs were often sites of disposable tie formation, including “welfare offices, food pantries, job centers, Alcoholics Anonymous clubs, methadone clinics, even the waiting areas of eviction court” (2012, 1313). Similarly, AIDS service organizations (Watkins-Hayes 2013) and community-based organizations (Marwell 2007) have supported deep and meaningful ties among poor people. While tie formation among poor people likely resembles tie building among any other group in many respects, these environments and the emotional and financial vulnerability of the people in them may put pressure on ties—a pressure not present when wealthier people build ties. Greater dependence on them for basic needs may also strain ties, especially among people with few resources (Edin 2001).
While it is possible that organizations offer mechanisms to support the maintenance of ties in the face of stressors that might lead to their dissolution, the literature has focused on tie formation rather than maintenance. Desmond’s (2012) research suggests that such maintenance could be vital, given the disruption and increased instability he attributed to the dissolution of ties between poor people.
Methods
I conducted participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with fifty low-income individuals in Philadelphia, including twenty-five interviews with members of KWRU, selected nonrandomly (see below). At the time of the research, KWRU could offer temporary shelter in Takeover Houses and Human Rights Houses—the former being an extra-legal response to lack of housing, using abandoned buildings; and the latter being homes they rented with foundation funding. Members sometimes received cash assistance from welfare and housing vouchers from the city because of KWRU protests. Sometimes referred to as “Section 8,” the official name of the housing voucher program is the Housing Choice Voucher Program. It is a federal program administered at the local level that pays approved rental amounts above 30 percent of a family’s income. Under the time limits on cash assistance created by welfare reform, KWRU members were living on a patched-together system of various forms of aid, including SNAP, medical assistance or low-cost clinic care, occasional grants to pay utility bills, and food banks.
During my research, there was no official count of membership or formal procedure involved in becoming a KWRU member. Generally, members had gotten help from the group, came to a protest, or volunteered to help out at the office and kept coming back, thereby maintaining the connection over time. There also was no formal process for designating leaders; people willing to take on more responsibility and spend more of their time on organizational activities became leaders. They typically led member meetings and chants at protests. Members referred new individuals to them for questions, and they often served as informal spokespersons to the press.
In late 2003 when my research with KWRU began, members and activists had a busy daily schedule, and the office on North 5th Street was often abuzz with activity, providing practical assistance to members and walk-ins and planning protests. Interviews concluded in mid-2006, but I reconnected with the group in 2012. By that time, many of the activists had reoriented much of their energy to political and national concerns, investing time and resources in the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC), an umbrella organization encompassing dozens of groups and spearheaded by KWRU leaders, with which the group had effectively merged. As of 2019, PPEHRC continues to maintain a local office where they assist people who call or walk in needing assistance, although they now lack foundation funding to provide Human Rights Houses.
During my research, I spent a few days each week at the KWRU office over a period of several months, meeting people, building trust and rapport, and requesting interviews. No one turned me down. Most involved members came to know me by face and name; they began referring me to other members. All interviews took place in locations of participants’ choosing: fifteen in participants’ homes, one on the telephone due to the participant’s health limitations, five participants at the KWRU office, one at my office, and three organization leaders I interviewed on the go—at restaurants, in their cars, or other locations. For eleven participants, we finished our conversations in one visit. Nine interviews took two visits each, and five interviews we completed in three or more visits. Interviews ranged from two to seven hours. All names used are pseudonyms chosen by participants, and oral consent was obtained from all participants. I audio recorded all interviews with participant permission.
Questions centered on participants’ life histories, including occupational, educational, and welfare experience; their views on welfare and on work; their opinions about what should be done about poverty; their self-images and experiences with stigma; their perceptions of both the working and the nonworking poor and how they think other poor people see these groups; what they think other poor people’s views on welfare and poverty are; what kind of help they receive; what kind of help they give to others; and their experiences in KWRU. The existence of ties and sustainable ties emerged from the data in an inductive coding process relying on grounded theory.
The qualitative research this study used was well-suited to the research questions, due to the focus on the feelings, meanings, and experiences of participants (Berg and Lune 2012; Strauss and Corbin 1998). As Small stated, “The strengths of qualitative work come from understanding how and why, not understanding how many. . .” (2008, 170; emphasis in original). Rather than aiming to present a representative account of social ties among the poor, this study describes the range of experiences among members of an antipoverty organization.
At the time of interview, participants ranged in age from 21 to 59 years old; 23 were women and 2 were men; 9 were African American, 8 were white, and 8 were Latina. The majority of participants were women due to the larger research project’s aims. 1 While I sought racial and ethnic balance in the study sample, in part to reflect KWRU membership, I did not select participants as a means to achieve representativeness. Rather, I recruited a varied sample to maximize variability across the range of potential participants and responses. The study provides theoretical insights but not generalizable findings (see Small 2008 and 2009a for relevant discussions). In-depth interviews, which allowed themes to emerge inductively, also yielded theoretical saturation (Small 2009a): each participant provided insights, and participant observation and interviews revealed the range of different experiences, eventually producing only affirmation of previously recorded information. Therefore, participants’ statements reported below do not represent frequencies of particular responses, as the meaning lies in the range of variability.
Findings
KWRU membership supplied crucial support for extremely poor members, both because members shared their scarce resources and because the organization helped them to find resources. Sustainable ties were a part of that crucial support, and KWRU offered physical spaces and opportunities to encourage members to form ties, providing a context in which members built trust. The organizational embeddedness of these social ties enabled not only their formation but also their strength and durability. KWRU members signaled the supportive nature of their ties through understanding them as similar to kin ties. KWRU helped members to maintain these ties, furthering their sustainability, by helping to smooth conflicts that arose and by relying on reciprocity within the group to keep people connected. Yet KWRU ties did not work for all members. In addition to the people who never came to my attention because their involvement with the organization was fleeting, I interviewed three individuals who received substantial support for a period but who were no longer significantly connected to the organization at the conclusion of the research.
Broad and deep support for those falling without a net
KWRU members’ description of their circumstances reflected the continued disintegration of the public safety net, coupled with a lack of family on whom to rely, that created an urgent need for social support. Twenty-three out of the twenty-five KWRU members who participated in this study had experienced homelessness, yet most were unable to rely on family at even the most desperate times. Only seven participants had received housing assistance from family members at any time in their adult lives, and only one was doing so at the time of the interview—Stefanie, who was paying rent to her parents and purchasing food for herself and her children, although she was poor enough to qualify for SNAP benefits. Rosa’s cousin not only did not take her and her daughter in when they were living on the streets, but asked her to pay for water if they bathed at the cousin’s house. Pauline was homeless when she came to KWRU, because, she said, her family had “turned their backs on” her. Colleen was in foster care as a child and was homeless in her teen years. Her biological parents struggled with drug addiction throughout her childhood and had not been a source of support in her adulthood either.
With no other private safety net to speak of, members often came to KWRU in times of desperate need, such as when they faced homelessness. They reported learning about KWRU in a variety of ways: from family members who were already involved, acquaintances, or neighbors; seeing a sign or a poster; walking past the office, a protest, or members distributing food to hungry people in their neighborhoods; or seeing local news coverage of the organization. Participants often held distrustful and stigmatized views of their neighborhoods and about poor people generally. Only desperation led them to overcome, reluctantly, their resistance to connecting with other poor people. Yet they built trusting, supportive relationships with others within the organization. KWRU filled a vacuum, providing a safety net for people without reliable kin ties. These ties provided support that was both broad and deep.
Most housing support came directly from the organization, including help securing a housing voucher and space in temporary KWRU housing. Other kinds of help—such as with navigating welfare programs, health care, and utilities; with money, transportation, and child care; finding information about schools and legal services; and obtaining clothes, food, furniture, and other material items—were often member-to-member. Amanda, a member of KWRU who had maintained her tie with the organization since the early 1990s, described the types of member-to-member support at KWRU, suggesting the wide range of support, which included “anything, you know, from the car breaks down every other day kind of thing to help with food, help with keeping a utility on if it’s gonna be shut off . . . every possible thing.” Members who had received help getting a housing voucher from the organization often allowed new, homeless members to stay with them temporarily; in one case a member provided housing for the adolescent niece of another member, who was homeless due to parental abuse.
Members frequently cooked for each other, and some might get their only complete and balanced meals on a given day from each other in this way. I was present when Paloma served a meal that was completely sugar-free because a member with diabetes was present—a vital form of support given he did not always have enough money for food. Sharing food was normalized in the organization; CC told me she and Shy, who she met at a KWRU house, “share everything,” including food.
KWRU was a source of peer emotional support as well. KWRU provided the warmth and caring members often lacked from friends and family members. When Becky’s son had legal trouble, members of KWRU came to court with her to support her. Amanda listed ten members of KWRU she had authorized to pick up her child at school. Three of the four people Colleen listed as those who gave her emotional support regularly are people she met through KWRU. She told me, “I view KWRU as a safe place for me . . . to be just who I am.”
KWRU members relied on each other for frequent and urgent support that addressed fundamental needs. Jessie and Cate met through KWRU. As Jessie described, she had recently brought a big trash bag full of freshly washed, wet clothes to Cate’s house. “She dries them for me, she folds them for me and puts them back in the bags and I just picked them up. So that’s the relationship that I have with [Cate].” KWRU is the social glue that facilitated Jessie and Cate’s tie, and this kind of relationship, lasting for several years, was not atypical between KWRU members. Jessie and Cate were living in extreme poverty. Like most of the other members of KWRU, they have experienced homelessness, and Jessie, like many members, had young children. Lacking a clothes dryer, as Jessie did, was not unusual. Few members had cars, although public transportation was thin in their neighborhoods. Members often could not be sure of three meals a day. The creation of social ties was a major way KWRU addressed their problems.
Creating ties: Making opportunities through shared spaces
KWRU actively sought to create opportunities for members to develop ties with one another. Walter, a group leader, told me that KWRU deliberately put people “in relation to others” so that they felt acknowledged, cared for, and “know that they’re not crying alone.” For him, a key reason to be active in KWRU was the value in “being out there and realizing that my crying is not a cry by itself. There’s other people crying too. And by putting myself in relationship to other people, I gather strength. . . . There’s no way that we can exist without each other.” This active encouragement of relationships was part of KWRU’s strategy for increasing membership, and it created a climate in which people established trusting, supportive ties with one another that lasted for years.
Walter described a straight line between building ties and KWRU’s position that poverty reflects unjust structural factors rather than personal failings. However, even for the many KWRU members I interviewed who did not fully embrace KWRU’s ideological position, the sense of shared experience had an impact and supported the building of ties. Shy emphasized the importance of shared experiences with Valerie. She met Valerie through KWRU and they lived in the same Human Rights House. She attributed their closeness to that shared experience and sense of shared struggle to survive, that they became close “because we needed each other . . . in order to survive.”
Shared time in close quarters provided the physical opportunity for members who shared housing to develop ties. Members shared food as well as SNAP benefits. Jessie told me that if she ran out of food, another KWRU member “would give me her food stamps or some of her food stamps and I would go and buy some stuff, and then when I got mine I would give them back to her.” And when Jessie had to leave early in the morning to bring her son to school, she would leave her daughters sleeping in the KWRU house, having asked Rebecca and Naomi, who were living in the same house, to keep an eye on them until she got back. Volunteering in the office, walking picket lines outside the Office of Emergency Shelter and Services, and staging sit-ins at the mayor’s office in city hall put KWRU members in the same spaces and allowed them to talk and get to know each other. Time together occasioned conversations about shared difficulties, allowing people to see their commonalities and begin to forge bonds.
Maintaining ties through a sense of kinship
Beyond creating ties, a sense of kinship helped to maintain ties among members. Pauline noted that when KWRU helped her when she was homeless and had lost her welfare benefits, “they treated me like a family, like I was part of their little family.” Rebecca was living rent-free in a KWRU Human Rights House when she told me KWRU had “done more for us than my family has ever done.” Becky, a member for nearly 10 years, told me, “If anything goes wrong in my life, it’s KWRU. To me they have become my family.” These members’ use of kinship terms acknowledged that the help they received, in times of desperation, was deeper than people typically receive outside the context of family, and this encouraged them to treat KWRU ties as essentially permanent. For example, Jessie described Cate as like a mother to her, and said that Cate and her adult son Max “welcomed me right in like if I was family. Right off. No one else ever did that for me, not even family. . . . So for some stranger to do that to me made me feel that, you know, I have lots of love for them.” Jessie later asked Cate and Max to be her daughters’ godparents.
The language of kinship was common among those loosely designated as group leaders, including James, Walter, and Paloma, who modeled this understanding for others. James said he saw members “as like my brothers and sisters all the way around the board.” Walter met a homeless youth through his work with KWRU, and ended up taking him into his home; he came to see this young man as his son. While this kind of all-but-legal adoption was unusual, having a group leader take this step probably had an impact throughout the organization, demonstrating to members the value of close ties in KWRU. Paloma set a tone that other members frequently echoed when she said: “They’re family. Hell, fuck friends. You can choose your friends; you can’t choose your family. They’re family.”
Paloma’s statement pointed out a difference between the ties members built in KWRU and the nonkin ties other researchers have found: they did not rely in the same way on a sense of personal compatibility and mutual affinity. While participants chose to be members of the organization, they came looking for help in times of desperation, not for personal connection, and they did not choose one another specifically. The ties they built were less likely to dissolve in the face of rifts than tenuous ties that new acquaintances form based on affinity typically are. Of course, mutual fondness strengthened ties between KWRU members who liked one another: just as in a family, personal compatibility affected the way support worked. But some members felt inexorably connected to each other by KWRU, regardless of how much they liked each other. This provided a sustainability that mutual affinity simply could not have.
Maintaining ties through healing conflict and smoothing rifts
KWRU’s role in healing conflict between members was even more distinctive and also helped to maintain ties. Cate and Paloma had a conflict over child care during my research, but both remained KWRU activists and colleagues, working together and speaking of each other with admiration and respect. When I reconnected with the organization in 2014, Cate was caring for Paloma’s children during a meeting. Similarly, CC and Shy shared resources for a period, but remained friendly even when CC pulled back from the arrangement.
When conflicts did drive members apart, KWRU served as a bridge to replacement ties because the rift with another member did not end KWRU’s support. This applied even if the conflict was between a newer or less-involved member and someone firmly enmeshed in the group. Rosa lived with Paloma for a period, but they had a falling out. Rather than ejecting Rosa from the organization, KWRU provided Rosa space in a KWRU Takeover House. Pauline and Shy had personal issues with James, but they continued to receive help from the organization. While leadership in KWRU is quite informal, Paloma or James could certainly have acted to complicate Rosa’s, Pauline’s, or Shy’s relationship to the organization. Paloma and James were generous, but more importantly, they deeply respected the KWRU norm that personal rifts should not threaten group cohesion.
KWRU leadership had identified ties between members as crucial to the organization’s effectiveness, recognizing that many poor people lack social ties. As Walter told me, “You show me a poor person, I’ll show you a person who’s isolated . . . [but] increasingly people have no other recourse but to rely on each other.” He explained, “There’s no way that we can exist without each other.” Because of this, highly involved members sometimes directly intervened in rifts, the way an elder in an extended family might. Pauline’s conflict with James, which related to his brother who was also active in the group, led KWRU’s founder to pull them aside. She said she was going away on a trip soon and, according to Pauline, “she didn’t want no problems or nothing while she was going away, so [James and I] talked. . . . We got straightened out.”
Maintaining ties through generalized reciprocity
While reciprocity’s role in the organization is beyond the scope of this article and I have explored it elsewhere (Mazelis 2015, 2017), it was KWRU’s major currency, as reciprocating to the organization for help substituted for membership dues. For the most part, members paid these dues by attending rallies and volunteering at the office. While these activities created space and opportunity for members to form relationships with one another, they were also part of a system of reciprocity that spilled over to members, creating generalized reciprocity within the organization in which members paid forward the help they received by helping other members who had not directly helped them. Members gave to the organization not only because the organization would benefit them but also because other members would aid them too, and they supported each other in part because the organization had supported them. This built trust, significantly supporting the maintenance of ties.
KWRU needed to support ties between members so that reciprocity functioned smoothly and the organization would have resources, which were in short supply as members paid no dues and KWRU had no paid staff. The organization needed to encourage ties between members so that they would help one another, because a significant amount of the support it provided was member-to-member. This led to generalized reciprocity, which rewarded members for giving to other members. CC volunteered at the office, helping other members, in the hope that when the organization received housing vouchers to distribute to members, she would get one. When Paloma cooked for other members, it was not that she believed they would cook for her in the future, nor that some other KWRU member would help her with food necessarily. She helped other members in part out of gratitude for the housing voucher she secured with KWRU’s help in the past. She also had a general expectation—frequently met—that other members would be generous with her in the future. This system of generalized reciprocity stretched extremely thin resources such that many could benefit.
Membership in KWRU provided real value through the organization and its members, through access to resources and as a resource broker. Generalized reciprocity allowed members to give help to each other more freely, trusting members of the group as a collective and removing some of the emotional complications that often accompanies reciprocity between individuals. There was a downside of this, however, as KWRU protected this generalized reciprocity by exacting consequences for members who did not fulfill reciprocity expectations, as described in the next section.
The limits of social ties through KWRU
I found that most members of KWRU felt positively about the ties they built in KWRU—about their involvement and connections with other members of the group. Paloma described the help she’d gotten through these ties as “enormous . . . from a plate of food to a house.” Thinking about this support, she said, “I think I’m fortunate, like I’m one of those rare few people who can truly say that my life hasn’t been easy, but I’ve been blessed. . . . I’ve been truly blessed.”
Yet a few members left the organization or were effectively forced out because of negative feelings about reciprocity. Rebecca and Naomi, residents of the same KWRU house, were forced out of it at the same time. I watched this situation unfold during my research; both women failed to comply with the organization’s reciprocity norms, which were key to building sustainable ties. In only requiring members to give their time, KWRU made it possible for even the desperately poor to conform to its norms. Nonetheless, even time was a thin resource for members.
Another reason Naomi and Rebecca had not fulfilled reciprocity norms is that they found doing so frustrating. Naomi told me, “as much as they want us to come [to the office], they really don’t be having anything for us to do down there.” While volunteering at the KWRU office aided in the building of social ties, I observed people with little to do there. Rebecca walked to the office to volunteer on a bitterly cold day and found it locked and empty (I also went to the office more than once for a pre-scheduled appointment and found the same thing). While I cannot say with certainty that Rebecca and Naomi were forced out because they failed to meet reciprocity obligations, it appeared so, as reciprocity was key to KWRU’s functioning. The ongoing support that Rosa, Pauline, and Shy received despite conflicts with highly involved members suggests that the organization was reluctant to expel people. Rebecca’s and Naomi’s loss of ties represent how the organization’s greatest strength—the ability to build lasting ties between people whose lives are deeply unstable—sometimes became a weakness. Yet this weakness was not pervasive. Jessie had built ties with Rebecca and Naomi, which dissolved when Rebecca and Naomi were effectively forced out. Nevertheless, Jessie retained her tie to the organization because she fully recognized its value in helping her obtain crucial resources and emotional support.
Helen did not recognize KWRU’s value in the same way that Jessie did. Unlike Rebecca and Naomi, she chose to leave. But she had sustainable ties once: she was a member of KWRU for five years, and she acknowledged that the group’s efforts prevented her from losing her heat one winter. She still spoke with affection for KWRU’s founder. However, Helen had pulled back, deciding KWRU membership was a poor investment because it was unlikely to help her achieve upward mobility. Ultimately, she said that her involvement made her: think about doing everything on my own because that’s the only way it’s gonna get done. That’s the way I feel. I even told them that . . .why would I want to work with people that’s gonna keep me down there instead of putting me up where I want to be? . . . There’s people out there that really wants to get homes and stuff, and they act like they can help ’em, but they really can’t. . . . It looks like it doesn’t go anywhere.
Yet Helen’s standard of living was among the worst I observed. She was working intermittently at one of the Philadelphia stadiums, but her work schedule was inconsistent and her income unpredictable. She was not receiving cash assistance, and she and her common-law husband had several children. Their home was literally falling apart; the sink was detached and hanging by a thread from the bathroom wall with no running water. It seemed likely that KWRU could have helped Helen improve her living conditions.
Becky’s view of KWRU and what the organization had given her contrasted with Helen’s, demonstrating the strength of what KWRU could provide and summarizing the more common view of ties built through the organization: [KWRU] became my life. They gave me everything, everything back. . . . A person feels as though you don’t know where to turn and you’re backed up against the wall and you have nothing and you have children to take care of and your health is not that great and along comes an organization that says, “Look I will teach you step by step how to get your life situated.”
Becky had already been a member for many years when I interviewed her. Her experience of long-lasting ties within the group was not unusual, and she was one of several participants who were still members of the group in 2014 when I attended a PPEHRC meeting. At that meeting, I saw several participants interacting with the same warmth and familiarity I had observed years before, some of them enjoying supportive relationships they had built in KWRU and sustained for more than 20 years. Such support does not typically come from social ties outside of family members and is evidence of the value and the exceptional distinctiveness of the sustainable ties that KWRU provides.
Discussion
KWRU bolstered and strengthened otherwise thin and fragile bonds between people who started off as strangers. Poor individuals developed ties to the group, and through the group to other individuals, and the organization strengthened a tenuous strand between them through its emphasis on kinship, healing rifts, and generalized reciprocity. This combination created social ties in which KWRU was embedded as an organization, making the ties better able to bear the heavy burdens they faced, more likely to withstand swift winds of crisis, and therefore more likely to be sustainable. KWRU fostered trusting ties between people, but it also provided a means for ties to work even before individuals knew enough to trust each other, secure in the knowledge that they would retain the tie to the organization even if the person with whom they had begun to build a tie left KWRU.
For many study participants, KWRU ties were deep, trusting, and long-lasting, which is unusual outside of kinship. While they lack the permanence of kin ties, these ties frequently lasted for years, even decades. This sustainability distinguishes them from the ties that Desmond (2012) documented and therefore protected KWRU members from many of the downsides of disposable ties. Although Desmond’s findings include housing support in the form of doubling up with new acquaintances, he noted that because the ties that prompted these exchanges of support did not last long, they were a source of instability instead of security. Disposable ties may in fact be an indispensable resource for the poor, but sustainable ties can provide many of the same benefits with fewer of the drawbacks. Like disposable ties, but unlike those Small (2009b) documented among parents who met through childcare centers, the ties discussed in this article were between very poor people who shared crucial resources.
The organizational embeddedness of these ties demonstrates that KWRU provided a means for people to trust each other. Levine found that people decided if they could trust others “based on direct interactions themselves, similar past experiences, or the experiences of others they knew” (2013, 40). Small (2009b) found that childcare centers alleviated this need by serving as a broker for ties, and KWRU provided similar support by vouching for people, but for a uniformly poor population. KWRU ties were a great source of support and stability for those members who remained a part of the organization for extended periods.
Of course, my sampling method steered me toward people with ties to others in the group, as in many cases people referred me to one another. And the organization was so unusual—a multiracial activist organization, of, by, and for poor people that provides social services but was unquestionably not a social service agency—that findings reported here are not generalizable. But the existence of sustainable ties within the organization is notable. The organization’s distinctiveness is precisely what allows us to understand how powerful its strategies were, and to speculate that if more conventional social service organizations adopted these strategies, they might be able to build sustainable ties as well, including across lines of race and ethnicity. As noted above, my participants were mostly women due to the larger research project’s aims, but the organization included many men as well. I did not find gender or race and ethnicity to be deciding factors in the creation or maintenance of ties in this study.
Social service organizations could both offer direct support and encourage ties, fostering trust among people who normally would not trust each other, and in doing so allow clients to build social ties that last for years. The first mechanism that fostered the sustainability of KWRU ties, a sense of kinship, might not be a natural part of most social service organizations without the kind of grassroots leadership that created KWRU. Yet over time and with the trust that organizations could build among clientele, a sense of kinship might arise.
The second mechanism that aided in the sustainability of ties in KWRU was smoothing conflicts and healing rifts between members. Social service organizations could smooth rifts between individuals, increasing the sustainability of ties. Past research suggests the importance and rarity of this mechanism, as no one plays this role when peers forge social ties in most circumstances, and conflict was a major reason for tie dissolution in Desmond’s research (2012). Small’s (2009b) child care centers, like KWRU, offered a bridge to replacement ties, but did not specifically soothe conflicts; Small did not describe rifts as serious as the ones between Rosa and Paloma or Pauline and James, or their consequences. Yet social service organizations might have even more authority to heal rifts than KWRU’s informal leadership had. Much as it did within KWRU, this mechanism would maintain social ties as well as help to form them.
Creating generalized reciprocity among members was the third mechanism that helped to foster sustainability of KWRU ties. Social service organizations might also be able to improve on KWRU’s approach to generalized reciprocity, such that clients like Rebecca, Naomi, and Helen would be more likely to sustain ties. By creating generalized reciprocity, much as KWRU did, organizations could eliminate some of the emotional complications of reciprocity that often characterize relationships between individuals, making it possible for clients to share as a group the benefits as well as the burdens of support. The fact that clients would be able to rely on the organization itself, instead of only on other individual clients for help, would take pressure off the ties between them so that they could invest in a relationship knowing it would strengthen their connection to the organization even if the individual tie were to dissolve. This is one of the benefits of generalized reciprocity that includes an organization: the organization offers help, and people give back to the group. The model also encourages them to give to others, expecting a return in some form from someone in the group, instead of a balanced reciprocal relationship between two individuals. KWRU members recognized that KWRU would repay the help they gave to the organization and to other members, even if the person they had helped never offered them direct assistance or left the group, or they had a conflict with another member.
The reciprocity expectation created a vulnerability in KWRU’s system, one that social service organizations might be able to address. The objections Helen, Rebecca, and Naomi expressed toward KWRU’s reciprocity norms suggest that the KWRU model might work for more people if the organization had reliable funding and could better organize and scale back its requirements of members. For example, a social service organization with a few more resources could ensure that when members came to volunteer, the office was always open and the organization ready to put them to work.
KWRU’s leaders in part framed the organization’s fostering of relationships between members as a way to build the organization and its power. But most members talked more about emotional and practical benefits. The common experience of poverty, coupled with spending time together through that shared struggle, had the profound ability to create feelings of warmth, camaraderie, and love. Helen’s case suggests that forsaking sustainable ties did not improve circumstances. Mutual experiences of suffering were a starting point, but when people lived together and began to depend on one another for practical and emotional needs, a deeper bond could develop, as it did for Cate and Jessie and for Shy and Valerie.
Dissolution of sustainable ties for Naomi, Rebecca, and Helen does not negate their existence for others or their distinctiveness from the ties other research has found. Being linked to a member who left the group did not mean losing the benefits of that social bond. The person who stayed still had a connection to the organization. Individuals could be replaced, with KWRU as the mediator and voucher for new individuals, and their embeddedness in the organization enabled ties that were strong and often very long-lasting. More often, members stayed and their shared membership helped to sustain their ties. Thus, members generally did not build ties with others who then left; rather, they knew if someone were to leave, it did not mean developing the tie had been a waste of time and energy because the group provided a sense of continuity.
Poor people have very little individually, and they tend to be very isolated. KWRU members shared many of the attributes that isolate most poor people. Their ability to build sustainable ties through KWRU shows that social isolation is not a natural and inevitable consequence of poverty in the twenty-first century; KWRU did not even need very many resources to create ties between strangers. KWRU members built an organization with wider possibilities than most people who share their circumstances can find. By providing a return on investment that offered emotional and practical benefits, they encouraged people to invest their meager resources in the organization and in one another.
KWRU/PPEHRC is a distinctive organization. At least in its current form, it serves a tiny number of poor people in America. But its ability to support sustainable ties suggests that the problems past research has identified in creating such ties among the poor are solvable, and other organizations that serve poor people might benefit by using the KWRU model. Social service agencies, for example, could provide a literal space for new friendship, as KWRU provided at its office, its rallies, and its houses. They could create generalized reciprocity and find ways to heal rifts. My findings show that such efforts would likely provide sustained practical benefits as well as meaningful emotional support.
Poor people in the United States lack many of the things that one of the richest countries in the world should be able to supply, including safe, decent, stable housing; quality affordable child care; reliable healthcare; and a living wage. The enormous benefits of sustainable supportive ties should be added to the list of what is attainable, if only we made the investment.
Footnotes
Note:
This study was made possible by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant Award, a School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship Award at the University of Pennsylvania, two Otto and Gertrude K. Pollak Summer Research Fellowships from the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and a National Science Foundation RU FAIR ADVANCE award at Rutgers University.
Notes
Joan Maya Mazelis is an associate professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University–Camden, and an affiliated scholar at Rutgers–Camden’s Center for Urban Research and Education. She is the author of Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor (NYU Press 2017).