Veronica Torres, lower right, and her family.
Name: Veronica Torres
Age: 38
Hometown: San Jose, Calif.
I was a teenage mother. That was our first time on government assistance.
It was really hard back then to get off. I could have made more money sitting at home collecting welfare than I would have working.
But my husband and I wanted to persevere and break the cycle. It took us three years and we had completely gotten off welfare and had gotten jobs. We were in the process of buying a home.
In 2001, when my son was 6-years-old, he was diagnosed with Type I diabetes. I quit my job and we fell back onto government assistance.
In 2009, when stimulus came through, there was a window of opportunity that gave me my chance to get off assistance. It was a subsidized jobs program at a food bank. They took away our cash assistance but they let us stay on food stamps.
My husband and I did not want to stay on assistance and leach off the system one moment longer than we needed to.
I'm still on the [federal] housing authority program. I pay a third of my rent. We're in a program so we can clean up our credit. The housing authority is helping us save money. In the future, we're hoping to buy a house again.
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