COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA MOTHERâS TRUST Cajania Brown, a Black single mother from Jackson, Mississippi, receives $1,000 per month as part of a cash assistance program called the Magnolia Motherâs Trust. Undoing Welfare Reform If Congress makes the expanded Child Tax Credit permanent, simple, and universal, it could have reverberations across the entire welfare state. Cheri Honkala has been a welfare rights activist since the 1980s. Itâs been decades of frustratingly slow work, ensuring that poor mothers like herself could access the benefits they needed to survive. These days, the bulk of her time is spent occupying empty houses for people with no alternative shelter. Combined with the pandemic, there is a housing crisis in Philadelphia, where Honkala lives.