Mary Jo Bane, former assistant secretary of Health and Human Services (HSS) for Families and Children and commissioner of the New York State Department of Social Services prior to her appointment with the Clinton administration, will speak Friday, Nov. 14, from noon to 1:30 p.m. in E405 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall at Cornell.

Her talk, "Expertise, Advocacy and Deliberation: Lessons from Welfare Reform," is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center and the Department of Policy Analysis and Management in the College of Human Ecology.

Now a professor of public policy at Harvard University, Bane also was co-chair of President Clinton's Working Group on Welfare Reform; she resigned from that position when Clinton signed the 1996 welfare bill.

At HSS, Bane was responsible for the federal management of about 60 programs with an annual budget of about $30 billion, including Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Child Support Enforcement, Head Start, child welfare and others.

Bane is the author of numerous books and articles on poverty, education, families and welfare, including Here to Stay: American Families in the Twentieth Century (1976) and with David T. Ellwood, Welfare Realities: From Rhetoric to Reform (1994).