According to Bolden, she and her four-month-old daughter were placed in a shelter in Springfield, Mass. and told they had to find their own way to get there if they wanted to claim the space.

At the time of the move, Bolden was in a computer-training program. She was forced to drop out.

Bolden says she did not participate in any of the job placement and training programs offered by the DTA in Springfield because she was focused on getting back to Cambridge, where her family and friends live.

Unclean living conditions in shelters and inaccessible or indifferent caseworkers were other factors that Bolden says contributed to her exasperation.

"There is no reason to cut off some-one's check just because they forget to bring in one piece of paper," Bolden says. "They cut me off for a month. I had no money and I was starving."

Now Bolden's time is up; she received her last check Jan. 4. For the time being, Bolden is living with her grandmother and says she spends every day searching for a job.

A further tension between the DTA and welfare activists arises with their characterizations of welfare recipients.

Diane M. Younker, director of the Davis Square DTA office which serves Cambridge and the surrounding suburbs, says DTA staffers have been doing all they can for their clients, but clients are often unresponsive.

"We send out an 800-person mailing for a training program and are lucky if we get 10 responses," Younker says.

"We have people from training and job agencies who come and sit in our office all day and wait for clients," Younker adds. "We offer daycare vouchers for anyone working or in training."

She correlates the demanding nature of the training programs with the low participation rate.

"You have to get up at 7 a.m. to get there," she says. "It's like your mother telling you what to do. People have their own agendas."

Carmen Benson, who has been a caseworker at the Davis Square DTA for 14 years, says she suspects that along with strongly ingrained lifestyle habits, welfare fraud-such as when recipients don't tell the DTA that their living partner gets income-may be partly to blame for the lack of response to these programs.

"The more you push, the less you get from them," Benson says. "It's hard for me to understand why, when this source of help is coming to an end, and I'm offering them child care and a way to better themselves, they are indifferent."

But some welfare activists, like Marie Kennedy, associate professor of community planning at U. Mass-Boston's College of Public and Community Service, have been trying to fight this stereotype.

Kennedy describes the results of an informal survey she handed out to her students.