National Welfare Rights Organization

Around this same time, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, both of the Columbia University School of Social Work, were circulating a draft of an article called "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" that later appeared in The Nation.

In turn, this would lead to the replacement of public assistance programs that currently existed with a guaranteed annual income for all people.

Cloward and Piven were more concerned with reaching community groups with this work than with academia, and the article helped to serve a link between the two.

[3] In May 1966, George Wiley, a nationally recognized chemist, the second African American on the faculty of Syracuse University, and former associate director for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and two of his associates from CORE set up the Poverty Rights Action Center (PRAC) in a two-story row house in Washington, D.C.[4] The PRAC was intended to become a permanent headquarters for coordinating efforts of present poor people's organizations.

The PRAC office was officially named the headquarters for a welfare rights movement at a December 1966 meeting of the NCC.

The organization held demonstrations that included a sit-in at the United States Senate Committee on Finance hearing room.

This nod from King later helped to promote the NWRO's first meeting between its leadership and the United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, held in the summer of 1968.

Funding from this and several other large grants from foundations helped to finance a major expansion of the NWRO staff, including the addition of field organizers.

[10] The NWRO won much access to government officials during the first Nixon administration due to membership rolls growing larger and a bigger presence in the media.

The movement has relied much more on simultaneous demonstrations based on common ideas and themes from local affiliates across the United States.

NWRO publications, such as its newspaper The Welfare Fighter, document accounts of the accomplishments and activities that local affiliates participated in.

[2] Tillmon's 1972 essay, "Welfare Is a Woman's Issue," which was published in Ms., emphasized women's right to adequate income, regardless of whether they worked in a factory or at home raising children.

The group was allowed to decide on its own program, make its own decisions, organize itself, and raise money by itself, while the NWRO remained a resource for them.