Alabama's Department of Human Resources is dedicated to providing safety net
services to Alabama citizens in need of them. Families and children in need can
find a wide range of services through the Department's service bureaus. There is
an office to serve each of the state's sixty seven counties. The services offered
through the Department are focused on the state's poor and families that are
dysfunctional or shattered.
Within the Department there are about twenty divisions. The department employs
about six hundred social workers; their service subdivisions include:
- Child Support Enforcement
- Child Care Services Adoption Foster Care
- Food Assistance Division
- Family Financial
Assistance Program
- Consolidated Child and Family Services Plan/Title IV-B
- Adult Protective Services
- Equal Employment and Civil Rights
Administrative Divisions include:
- Field Administration
- Quality Control
- Program Integrity
- Personnel
- Center for Communication
- Legal
- Management and Fiscal Analysis
- Administrative Hearings
- Contracts and Grants
The state's biggest social support service is the food assistance program, which
had almost 250,000 recipients at the end of 2005. The number of recipients for
some sort of child support was nearly as high. Presumably this figure includes a
number of the child support services within the Department of Human Resources,
which include subsidized day care, the federal consolidated program under Title
IV, the family financial assistance program and other services provided through
contracting non-profits.
The Alabama Department of Human Resources was hit hard by the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina. Nearly sixty thousand households applied for disaster-related
food stamp support. The state allocated funds for cash payments to families who
had evacuated to Alabama from Louisiana and Mississippi and could not return
home. Applications for funding support approached ten thousand.
Alabama itself had ten counties declared disaster areas.
Alabama has incorporated a job development program into its Family Assistance
Program. All parents that are enrolled are required to participate in the JOBS
program. Participation is defined as working in either a subsidized or
unsubsidized job; enrollment in an on-the-job training program; job search; job
readiness classes; and vocational training.
This welfare-to-work concept helps ease chronically unemployed people back into
the job market. It provides assistance with the barriers to employment, such as
child care; job training; job application classes; and other methods helping the
family move into the mainstream. The Department takes an active role in dealing
with Alabama's underclass.
In February of 2006, they announced a grant program for their enrolled families in
the Family Assistance Program that will subsidize heating bills. The state
subsidizes child care for 27,000 children through contracted agencies and in
November of 2005 found the funding to add an additional 2,000 children to the
program.
Alabama's welfare-to-work program has been so sufficiently successful in placing
job trainees that the federal Health and Human Services Department has awarded
them with additional grants for the program in 200, 2003, 2004 and 2005. The
state operates twelve Family Service Centers around Alabama that provide walk-in
counseling and support, in order to pull needy families into the services that
the state has developed to help them.
