Community activists were not the only voices calling for the amelioration of poverty; in Alameda County in the mid-1960s, the recipients of public assistance were beginning to organize and call for change themselves.
Berkeley and Oakland featured two of the earliest chapters of what would become a national force for change, the Welfare Rights Organization. Elly Harawitz, a UC Berkeley social work graduate and her husband Howard, a freelance photographer and frequent contributor to The Flatlands, organized the Berkeley chapter of the WRO in 1964. Soon, they became affiliated with former Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) member George Wiley’s Washington, D.C.-based Poverty Rights Action Center, which allied with existing civil rights groups to press for increases to inadequate public welfare programs.
Recipients of public assistance were often slandered as work-shy burdens on the public coffers, and the Alameda County welfare department was infamous among recipients for its callousness and non-responsiveness to their concerns. Like public housing residents, their options in the face of officials’ indifference were to risk the loss of benefits by speaking out or to stay silent. With the help of The Flatlands and affiliated groups, they were able to protest and have their voices heard, gradually overcoming the apathy of officials toward adequate welfare funding and winning increased benefits.