KVIG Informative

Welfare rights organizers in West Las Vegas built their own anti-poverty infrastructure in 1972 rather than wait on Washington, including a program that put food assistance directly into the hands of pregnant women and new mothers. More than 50 years later, a federal government shutdown put that same program’s funding in Nevada at risk, and the state had to commit millions of its own dollars to keep benefit cards loaded.

Ruby Duncan led welfare rights organizing in Las Vegas beginning in the late 1960s, after losing Aid to Dependent Children benefits following a workplace injury in a casino kitchen, according to UNLV Special Collections and Archives records on her papers. In 1971, after the state cut welfare benefits for women with children, she organized two marches down the Las Vegas Strip that drew more than 6,000 people, including Jane Fonda, Sammy Davis Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, according to the same archive.

Duncan co-founded Operation Life Community Development Corporation in 1972 to promote welfare reform and improve conditions in West Las Vegas, according to UNLV’s finding aid for the Ruby Duncan Papers on Operation Life. She served as the nonprofit’s executive director from 1972 until 1990, when poor health forced her to resign, the finding aid states.

Donate

Donate

Operation Life’s first service was donating space for a library in West Las Vegas, according to the same finding aid. It grew to include economic, housing and job development; a medical center; a HUD-certified home-counseling program; drug and alcohol abuse prevention; youth employment and recreation programs; low-income energy assistance; licensed daycare with an education component; and administration of the Women, Infants, and Children program, known as WIC, the finding aid states.

The organization also built housing. It developed homes under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Infill Housing Program and built Ruby Duncan Manor, 30 units for elderly and disabled residents financed through HUD’s Section 202 program, according to the same source. Operation Life operated until 1992, the finding aid states.

WIC still exists in Nevada, and it still depends on Congress appropriating money every year to load benefit cards — a vulnerability that showed up in October 2025. Nevada’s Office of Emergency Management submitted a request on Oct. 8, 2025, for $7.3 million in state emergency funds to keep WIC benefits flowing after a federal government shutdown cut off the program’s usual funding, according to the office’s own filing and the state Department of Public and Behavioral Health. State data showed more than 55,000 Nevadans, including 31,000 children, received WIC benefits as of June 2025, the same department reported.

Donate

Donate

Nevada’s Board of Examiners approved the emergency request unanimously on Oct. 14, 2025, and the state’s Interim Finance Committee took the matter up two days later, according to the same state records. Gov. Joe Lombardo’s spokeswoman, Elizabeth Ray, said the state also received $3.1 million in WIC funding from a $300 million pool of tariff revenue the Trump administration released during the shutdown, and a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesperson said the agency would keep using tariff revenue to fund WIC for the foreseeable future.

Half a century after Operation Life took on administering nutrition assistance in West Las Vegas because the neighborhood couldn’t wait for Washington to get it right, the program it once ran still runs on whatever Washington decides to appropriate from one year, or one shutdown, to the next.