That year, the city applied for a $1.34 million U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant that would have allowed the city to hire more health department staff focused on assisting the city’s ongoing efforts in preventing childhood lead poisoning. The grant would have funded city officials to test more young children for lead poisoning and collect better data that would allow them to identify the most at-risk kids.

Just months after applying, the city was denied. But the reason had nothing to do with public health. As the CDC explained, the 2010 U.S. Census counted Detroit’s population at 713,777, which was shy of the grant’s 750,000 minimum population requirement. The CDC said in a statement that it does not advance grant applications that don’t meet eligibility criteria requirements for further review.

The lost opportunity underscores the importance of having an accurate count of all people living in the United States during the constitutionally-mandated decennial Census. The count factors into how billions of federal dollars are distributed throughout the country. The number of people in your city can determine eligibility for resources needed to address lead, fix up roads, or improve schools.

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It is unclear whether Detroit’s 2010 population was undercounted by exactly 36,223 people, the number of residents by which the city fell short of the lead prevention grant’s threshold. But there is a lot of evidence that Detroit’s Census population in 2010 was less than the number of people actually living in the city, and it’s probable that it would have reached 750,000 with a more accurate count. Undercounts are typical for large cities with a large number of hard-to-count populations such as renters or immigrants.

In Detroit, only 64 percent of households responded to the Census, according to Victoria Kovari, the executive director of the city’s 2020 Census campaign. In total, about 220,000 people did not send in the forms. The Census Bureau was able to track down information about some of those households after workers spoke to residents at their doors, as well as landlords, neighbors, or even the mailman.

But, according to the Census Bureau, 26,585 people were never counted, and instead represented an estimated number of people living in uncounted units, which the federal agency calculated based on a formula that includes comparable household sizes for the specific neighborhood. It is likely that the Census Bureau was off on its estimates and that the actual number was higher.

The populations in Detroit that the Census was unable to collect any information for and forced to guess about include people living in gated communities or renters such as young people and small, low-income families living in multifamily apartment buildings, Kovari said.

Kovari said it was too tough to tell whether there was an undercount, but based on the high number of people that the Census Bureau had to make a guess about, the count was likely not accurate. “It’s clear that renters in multi-family housing were not counted,” Kovari said. “I would go as far as to say we did not get an accurate count in those areas.”

For a city like Detroit, which filed for municipal bankruptcy just six years ago, those federal funds that were denied because of a likely undercount could have been critical, said Lyke Thompson, director of Wayne State University’s Center for Urban Studies, who studies lead poisoning in Michigan.

While childhood lead poisoning in Detroit has improved in recent years, its rates still surpass those in nearby Flint. In 2016, city officials found that 8.8 percent of tested kids under the age of six were positive for lead poisoning, compared to 1.8 percent of kids in Genesee County, which encompasses Flint, according to the Detroit News. The elevated levels were higher in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, including one zip code that encompasses the Atkinson Avenue Historic District and Yates Park, in which 22 percent of 686 kids tested positive.

A lot of the city’s childhood lead poisoning problems stem from aging infrastructure that makes the water undrinkable and the city’s aging housing stock, often located in poorer neighborhoods, with lead paint-covered interior and exterior walls. Children in those neighborhoods are exposed to chippings and dust that come from the walls and breathe in exposed lead after nearby homes are demolished without following environmental remediation standards.

“$1.3 million would go a long way for [city officials] to get to the houses, to measure the blood levels in those houses and to provide case management and other services to those families. They simply lose that through this process,” Thompson said. “Detroit has some of the highest percentages of children with lead poisoning of any major city in the country so they really do need the support.”

Other cities likely experienced similar lost opportunities. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services relies on population data when distributing nearly $3 billion each year in funding and reimbursements of five of its grant programs, including Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, a foster care program, an adoption assistance program, and a child care and development fund program, a 2018 report from George Washington University’s Institute of Public Policy found.

Those researchers identified 37 states that may have lost out on millions of dollars in federal funding in fiscal year 2015 if their populations were undercounted by 1 percent during the 2010 Census. This includes Texas by $291.9 million, Pennsylvania by $221.7 million, Florida by $177.8 million, Ohio by $139 million, Illinois by $122.2 million, and Michigan by $94.2 million.

In most cases, it is impossible to tell which communities may have lost out on federal funds because of a Census undercount due to the fact that there are many overlapping programs with different complex funding formulas that take into account statistics beyond population size, such as the age and income of an area, according to another recent report from George Washington University’s Institute of Public Policy.

But what is clear is that undercounts do occur throughout the United States, disproportionately impacting the black population.

According to the Census Bureau’s own 2014 analysis, nearly 1 million children — 4.6 percent of all kids under the age of five in the U.S. — were not represented in the 2010 count. Children who are Latinx or black were undercounted at higher rates than white children. Such undercounts are due to children who have complex living situations, such as splitting time living between parents who do not live together, or who come from families that are considered hard-to-count, such as those who live in high-poverty neighborhoods or rental housing, according to the website FiveThirtyEight.

“The undercount of children under age five in the decennial census, and in surveys like the American Community Survey (ACS), is real and growing,” the 2014 Census Bureau report read. “This is not a new problem and has been present in decennial censuses for many decades. The differential undercount of this population across geography and demographics makes this a larger problem for some racial and ethnic groups and some parts of the country.”

It is reasonable to conclude that Detroit’s undercount was larger than the national average. The city’s population of children under five is higher than the national average and, according to research conducted by the City University of New York, several of its neighborhoods are considered among the hardest to count in the country.

In fact, the city’s population meets the very definition of hard-to-count: Areas in which less than 73 percent of its residents responded to the bureau’s first attempt to reach them.

Hard-to-count communities often include young children, racial and ethnic minorities, non-English speakers, low-income people, people who are disabled, people who are experiencing homelessness, and people who do not live in traditional housing, according to Ron Jarmin, deputy director of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Detroit has a poverty rate of 37.9 percent, 85 percent of its population are considered ethnic minorities, more than 10 percent of its population uses a language other than English at home, and 20 percent of its population is disabled, according to Census Bureau data.

To complicate matters, one in five Detroiters is evicted each year, a problem which, according to Pulitzer Prize winning author Matthew Desmond, disproportionately impacts black women, which would also lead to an undercount.

Lastly, the 2008 economic recession, which crashed the city’s economy, may have also played a part, according to Kurt Metzger, a demographer and Michigan mayor who started the local data organization, Data Driven Detroit. In 2010, city leaders, he said, were trying to address Detroit’s high unemployment rate, foreclosure crisis, and plummeting housing values as residents were underwater on mortgages and land contracts, so they were not thinking about the Census.

Metzger expected an undercount, but the end result was much worse than he anticipated, he said.

“While I have no exact undercount in mind, I was floored when I heard the 2010 count. I knew there was going to be a significant pop loss even without an undercount, but was expecting something closer to 775,000,” Metzger said in an email.

“The undercount was the reason for not qualifying for the grant. Many Detroiters had no interest in being counted and the city never worked to convince them otherwise,” he added.

The Trump administration is going to make this bad situation worse. It tried to include a citizenship question in the Census, a move that would have caused an undercount of at least 9 million people, since non-citizens and households or families with non-citizen members would fear retribution from the government if they answered. The Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could not include the question unless it changed its justification for adding it, which they claimed was to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.

The Trump administration shortly after dropped the question, but is still providing an inadequate supply of resources needed to ensure an accurate count. The NAACP filed a lawsuit last year against the Census Bureau and the Trump administration, claiming that their lack of preparedness for the 2020 Census violated the U.S. Constitution, since the government is required to conduct a full head count of everyone living in the country.

The civil rights organization claimed the Census Bureau was under-funded and under-prepared, hiring fewer people to knock on doors and count people that did not self-respond, and opening half the number of field offices throughout the country. Those cuts are being made while the Census Bureau rolls out, for the first time, an Internet-based survey response system.

There are widespread cybersecurity concerns related to allowing people to respond to the survey digitally, and such techniques could affect responses from communities with limited Internet access, which are often areas with a high population of people of color who are considered hard-to-count.

The Census Bureau in a statement defended its 2020 count efforts. According to the bureau, the agency is planning the most robust marketing and outreach plan in the agency’s history: It will spend $500 million on marketing, up from $376 million in 2010, advertise in “many different languages,” and is designing a “robust” outreach plan and hiring locally to engage with communities and reach hard-to-count populations.

The bureau also said that households in areas where Internet is unreliable will receive a paper questionnaire on the first mailing and all households that do not respond, regardless of the area, will receive a paper questionnaire on the fourth mailing. It added that people can respond in 12 different languages other than English over the phone or through the Internet, and enumerators will have 59 different non-English language guides among other ways of reaching out to non-English speakers.

But such threats to the accuracy of the count are real, according to Kelly Percival, a counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program.

“The 2020 Census is facing a lot of threats. A lot we have seen in past Censuses and a lot is unique for 2020,” said Percival.

“These are having a snowball effect and they could lead to an undercount in certain communities,” Percival added. “This will translate into less political power and less funding for those that need it… I think it’s an attempt to politicize the census which is not what the census is about.”

A relatively small lead prevention grant can go a long way and help a lot of children. According to Detroit officials, the 2017 grant would have enabled the city to increase the number of children under six years old who are tested for lead by 20 percent, allowed the city to collect better data so it could identify higher-risk populations, improved lead exposure outreach and education for those higher-risk populations, and better identified kids who have been exposed so they could be connected with services. It would have also provided new training for public health professionals, the lead prevention workforce, and other stakeholders who are on the front lines of the fight.

Ask the city, though, and losing out on the grant was no big deal. While, “Federal dollars will certainly assist the Department in coordinating lead related activities,” the city is doing just fine addressing the problem without it, according to city spokesperson Tamekia Nixon.

“After we didn’t receive the 2017 grant, the Detroit Health Department pursued other funding streams to allow us to provide the same scope of service intended in the grant, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree. However, at this time we are not able to quantify the exact difference in numbers,” Nixon wrote in a statement.

Last week, the city received a $9.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to assess 120 housing units and address lead hazards in 450 homes throughout the city for low-income families with young children, among other functions.

However, the primary function of the grant is for lead abatement, not surveillance of lead poisoning, like the CDC grant would have provided, and it will not solve the issue, said Thompson. Federal funds for such prevention efforts is crucial, he said.

“It’s really hard for the Health Department to get to even a fraction of the houses and really work with the families and they lost support to do that,” Thompson said.

Members of Detroit’s Health Department spoke to TalkPoverty on background but referred questions to the city’s communications department before going on the record. The city’s communications department gave TalkPoverty basic information about its lead program after more than a week of requests, but gave vague answers about whether losing out on the CDC funds hurt the city’s lead prevention efforts in any way. At times, Nixon told TalkPoverty to “file a FOIA” (Freedom of Information Act request) for such information.

It is unclear why the city downplayed the importance of missing out on the federal grant. However, after being denied the CDC grant, the city’s former Health Department Executive Director, Joneigh Khaldun, in a July 10, 2017 appeal of the federal agency’s decision, characterized the federal funds as a “severe need.”

“Addressing lead exposure remains a critical need given the history of Detroit as a large industrial community and the subsequent ubiquity and permeation of lead in our neighborhoods,” Khaldun said.

As American cities like Detroit scrap for federal funding to address very important issues facing their communities and their residents, an accurate count in 2020 is crucial.

There are currently almost half a million children in foster care in the United States, 123,000 of whom are waiting to be adopted. Child welfare data indicate that approximately 23 percent of children in foster care identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer, like Alex.

In the state of South Carolina, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently waived federal nondiscrimination policy for foster care and adoption. While South Carolina is the only state that has been granted such a waiver to date, there are 10 states — Alabama, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Virginia — that use federal dollars to support private faith-based agencies, even when those agencies discriminate against foster and adoptive parents who do not share their stated religious values.

There has been a lot written on the principles of this policy. But much less has been said about whether these agencies are even able to effectively do their jobs.

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Delaying, or even preventing, placement with permanent families — which agencies do by default when they restrict the pool of available families — can have life-long consequences for kids in foster care. Every year, about 20,000 youth age out of the foster care system without being adopted, leaving them with fewer educational and employment opportunities, and more likely to experience homelessness, become pregnant early, lack access to health care, and become involved in the criminal justice system.

There is also a more nuanced question as to whether agencies that discriminate against prospective parents are capable of supporting the diverse children  —  children of varying religious backgrounds, races, ethnicities, abilities, gender identities, and sexual orientations  —  that make up the foster care population.

Optimally, the foster and adoptive parents working with states should reflect the same diversity as the children they serve, and most importantly, every foster parent a state works with should be able to support, affirm, and meet the needs of any child in care. The demographics of children in foster care, and foster and adoptive parents, look different in every state. However, children of color and children who identify as LGBTQ+ are disproportionality involved in child welfare systems and experience disparities while there. There is also incredible diversity in the faith needs of children in foster care. Many young people express the desire to be connected to their faith community. This is a critical part of a young person’s identity, and the only faith and spirituality needs that should be taken into account are theirs.

Studies have found that attention to a child’s identity is core to promoting health and well-being — and that doing so has an impact on their success and stability as adults. For example, research has demonstrated that providing children of color with opportunities to cultivate a positive relationship with their ethnic and racial identity can serve as a protective factor, offsetting trauma, increasing self-esteem, and helping to mitigate the effects of racial discrimination. Research also shows that acknowledging and affirming youth’s sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression is critically important to a young person’s health and well-being, and promotes both safety and their success in foster and adoptive homes.

In reference to South Carolina’s new order, Erin Hall, a former provider and the previous CEO of the Palmetto Association for Children and Families, stated, “Finding foster and adoptive homes is about matching a child’s needs with a family. In South Carolina, we have put the preference of one faith-based agency ahead of the mission of child welfare. This is not reflective of what we know is in the best interest of kids or what most of the faith-based service providers in South Carolina believe is right.”

When child welfare agencies prioritize the needs of faith-based agencies over children, that restricts their ability to recruit and license loving and affirming foster and adoptive homes, there are significant negative consequences for children. Alex’s experience is one example.

In Alex’s case, by placing a young child in a home that was not affirming, she grew up without the support that foster and adoptive parents have committed to provide, and the state has committed to establish.

Child welfare experts, including many faith-based providers, know that these religious refusal laws hurt children. Unfortunately, the current political climate, and the too often unchecked power state governors and legislators have over the policies that govern child welfare systems, is likely to lead to more religious refusal in the future. Texas’ attorney general has now asked for a waiver to exempt religious groups in his state. In Pennsylvania, several lawmakers, without going through their governor, sent a request for such a waiver directly to HHS. These actions may respond to the desires of some providers, but is not aligned with the majority of faith-based child welfare providers and is firmly outside of the norms of child welfare best practice.

Lena Wilson, vice president of the children and families division at Samaritas, one of the largest faith-based providers in Michigan, described what she saw as the obligation of organizations like hers in the wake of the passage of a religious refusal law in her state: “We as agencies have to be vigilant to ensure all of our children and families are served without discrimination. Currently discriminatory legislation is being passed in the dead of night, which further marginalizes our LGBTQ youth and families and denies them equal access to services that they deserve.”

*Name was changed for privacy.

My earliest memories of food are complex. I remember the rush of adrenaline and the pound of my heartbeat as I yanked daffodils from their cool flowerbeds nestled to the side of what looked like an abandoned house. Selling them to houses on another street, sliding scale, I could afford more than just my standard free lunch when my texture sensitivities made everything available impossible to eat. It also meant not spending an afternoon pushing the “Coin Return” buttons on the vending machines in the recreation center, a less embarrassing way of begging for change.

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I remember clearly the free breakfast I had each morning, usually Cinnamon Toast Crunch with chocolate milk out of a small plastic bowl. The vegetables I grew up eating were in cans due to the cost, boiled and buttered because I was Southern.

Food became a symbol of love in certain family rituals, such as the fried bacon, cheese biscuits, eggs, and grits that would line the table every Sunday morning at my great-grandmother’s house. I sought after Lunchables and Hershey bars like Fendi bags. Over-processed foods that are now described as “cheap” were luxuries. Salad was iceberg lettuce that had no flavor until you covered it with ranch dressing.

But then the family I knew fractured, split, and drifted apart, and at 15 I moved to San Diego, California and immediately noticed more than just my usual sense of otherness.

The people talked different. There were no seasons. I was made fun of for saying “y’all” and began to curb the strength of what I thought was a weak Southern accent in comparison to my family. The city I moved to was very wealthy. I found this out awkwardly when I went to a classmate’s house to complete a project on existentialism (ironic) and their pool house was as big as the small apartment I lived in. I had always assumed that because I had a computer, I was “middle class” and this city taught me otherwise.

But the most striking difference? The color of the vegetables that were nothing like the bland, boring isles of pale green that I grew up around, where the fanciest thing about the aisles was the automatic water mister. The vegetables in San Diego had real color. And they crunched when you bit into them.

I, at first, found this repulsive. But my Virgoean craving for self-improvement pushed me to accept the challenge. But food was and is never just food. It is always symbolic.

As I was surrounded by very thin people who did things like “cleanses” and very wealthy classmates who complained they got the wrong color Hummer for Christmas, meanings began to shift. Fried chicken livers no longer represented a quirky side of my Southern upbringing, the way I know haggis is connected to Scotland. Instead they were inextricably linked to poor, fat, uneducated white people.

Society links fatness to ignorance and stupidity. The comic image of the white poor, the people I came from, is always fat and eating “unhealthy” foods with the same voracity that they hate gays or illegal immigrants. I didn’t want to be one of them. I couldn’t spend like my classmates, so I instead tried to eat like them. Kale represented cleanliness, in both mind and body, and I wanted to fill the gap I shoved between myself and my Southern heritage with Jamba Juices. My intimate connection to poverty grew more and more obvious, like a pox mark, and I thought the best way to shed this image was to shed pounds.

I viewed fat and grease in foods as pathogens of a poor, white and ignorant outlook that would infect me if I consumed them. That’s when my obsession with becoming healthier to disassociate myself from the poverty and fatness of my background in the same way I now masked my Southern accent in class became just that: an actual obsession. It’s a lot easier to motivate yourself to diet obsessively if you believe it will lead you to a better mind as well as a better body. And when people believe that being poor and fat goes hand-in-hand with being a racist, you’re even more motivated to do an extra crunch.

Weight is a perfect poison for anxiety because the results are never immediate and simply avoiding eating altogether is not a lifelong, sustainable option. I used to count the number of chews — 20 — I took with each bite to make sure that I never choked. Now I counted every single possible calorie. In the process, food and life became joyless.

I can’t tell you when my moment of clarity came and, in truth, I still struggle to shed the idea that thinness represents health. Perhaps it was realizing when my now more academic way of speaking made people read me as “nicer” than others. The jokes white liberals make about “hillbilly” incest and inbreeding right in front of me because they assume I’m one of them feel like daggers in my back.

There are and probably will continue to be a lot of poor, fat, racist white people. There are also thin, wealthy, white racist people. When I stopped distancing myself from the trappings — namely food — of Southern culture, I realized that being poor has given me an understanding of life and the way the world works that no amount of kombucha will give a Goop fanatic. And that those white people who draw fat white people as racist and ignorant are dissociating themselves from their own white supremacy. They are not actually addressing anti-Blackness as they continue to ignore the systemic causes of poverty.

But after decades of collecting this data, the government is putting it to use. This information is feeding algorithms that decide everything from whether or not you get health insurance to how much time you spend in jail. Increasingly, it is helping determine whether or not parents get to keep their kids.

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When someone phones in a report of suspected child abuse — usually to a state or county child abuse hotline — a call screener has to determine whether the accusation merits an actual investigation. Sometimes they have background information, such as prior child welfare reports, to assist in their decision-making process, but often they have to make snap determinations with very little guidance besides the details of the immediate report. There are more than 7 million maltreatment reports each year, and caseworkers get overwhelmed and burn out quickly — especially when a serious case gets overlooked. New algorithms popping up around the country review data points available for each case and suggest whether or not an investigation should be opened, in an attempt to offset some of the individual responsibility placed on case workers.

The trouble is, algorithms aren’t designed to find new information that humans miss — they’re designed to use the data that humans have previously input as efficiently as possible.

“If you give it biased data, it will be biased,” explained Cathy O’Neil, mathematician and author of the book Weapons of Math Destruction, while speaking with me for a story I wrote for Undark last year. “The very short version is that when you’re using the past as a kind of reference for how it works well, you’re implicitly assuming the past is doing a good job of rewarding good things and punishing bad things. You’re training the system to say if it worked in the past, it should work in the future.”

Historically, low-income families have had their children removed from their homes at higher rates than wealthier families. As a result, these new algorithms work to codify poverty as a criteria for child maltreatment. Some of the variables that these tools consider are public records that only exist for low-income parents, such as parents’ poverty status, whether they receive welfare benefits like SNAP and TANF, employment status, and whether they receive Medicaid. Other factors, like previous criminal justice involvement and whether or not there have been allegations of substance misuse in the past, are also dramatically more likely for families living in poverty.

This bias exists even in systems that have been highly praised, like the Allegheny Family Screening Tool currently being implemented in Pittsburgh, where prior arrests and parents’ mental health histories are considered factors in whether a child should be removed. It’s similar in other, less-transparent systems, like one in Florida where tech giant SAS contracted with the Florida Department of Children and Families to research which factors were most likely to contribute to the death of a child by maltreatment. According to press releases by SAS (some of which have been unpublished since they began garnering media attention) the company used public records such as Medicaid status, criminal justice history, and substance-use treatment history.

The results led jurisdictions in Florida to zoom in on factors that apply to huge swaths of families, including mine. In April of last year, an allegation of drug use and child abandonment led Broward County, Florida child welfare investigators to investigate my family. When my drug tests were negative, the investigation pivoted to my recent financial setbacks, which had been caused by my husband’s acute health crisis. My children were ultimately removed from my care, and we have been separated for nine months for reasons that are primarily financial. My case is far from unique. Three-quarters of child protective cases in the United States are related to neglect, not abuse, and that neglect usually means lack of food, clothing, shelter, heating, or supervision: problems which are almost always the result of poverty.

Ira Schwartz, a private analytics consultant, thinks he may have found a way to help re-balance this system. He conducted a research study in Broward County — the same county in which my case is based — that discovered the current approach to child welfare substantiation is highly flawed. According to his research, 90 percent of system referrals were essentially useless, and 40 percent of court-involved cases (which typically involve child removal) were overzealous and harmful, rather than beneficial, to the families. He created his own system that, like the Allegheny tool, predicted the likelihood that a family would become re-involved with the system. But he admits quite openly that predictive algorithms like his target the poor.

“We found in our study that lower socioeconomic status was one of the significant variables that was a predictor [for reinvolvement with the system],” said Schwartz. “The issue with higher-income families is … they just don’t really come into the system because they have other options. With higher-income families, when there’s child abuse or neglect or even spouse abuse and it’s reported, they can afford to go to private agencies, get private mental health services; they can see a psychiatrist or social worker or psychologist … it’s a discrimination factor.”

Schwartz believes that these types of admittedly discriminatory computer programs can still be put to good use when combined with prescriptive analytics, which would determine the services that high-risk families need in order to remain out of the system in the future. Schwartz says this would include services like rental assistance, food assistance, day care funding, and housekeeping services. This would help welfare agencies understand which families need what services, and streamline the process of providing them. (All jurisdictions are legally required to make “reasonable efforts” to help families resolve the issues that brought them under investigation, but how agencies go about meeting that standard varies widely by location.)

The issue with these algorithms is certainly not malice on the part of their creators. Even the more secretive, proprietary algorithms being created by companies like SAS claim to want to create a safer system that results in less child maltreatment. But it’s unclear if that is possible with the data that’s available. Without comparable data from wealthier populations, which are better protected by privacy laws, the new systems cannot produce accurate results — and even if more data were added, it would mean more families are being separated and surveilled.

When most people hear “the state took my kids,” their minds jump to the worst conclusions. These cases are quiet and the courtrooms are closed, so I don’t blame you for assuming I was beating them up, or looking the other way while they were abused, or some other such nightmare scenario you see on the Lifetime channel. Those kinds of cases happen, but far more common are the ones where parents do their very best but still come up short on money for the heat, or the rent, or a licensed babysitter. My case is one of those, in which a little more cash and sympathy would have kept my daughters with me.

Three-quarters of substantiated child maltreatment cases are related to neglect, and the kind of neglect that triggers a CPS case is almost always the result of poverty. Although each state gets to set its own specific definitions for neglect, they typically center around deprivation of things like food, shelter, clothing, or medical treatment, which are problems almost totally exclusive to poor people.

The accusation that brought child services into my family was related to drug use. My mother-in-law, with whom I’ve never really gotten along, called the child abuse hotline and told them she suspected I was out using heroin while she watched the kids.  After a series of urine and hair panels tested negative, child protective services broadened their investigation. They raised concerns about the fact that I was living with my in-laws, and that I had been unable to attend trauma therapy for a month while I waited for my new state insurance to go into effect.

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The investigation lead to a dependency trial, where the investigator made it clear that my daughters showed no signs of abuse or neglect. I lost anyway. There are no juries involved in child welfare cases, and the burden of proof is lighter than in criminal cases: It only requires a “preponderance of the evidence,” which means the judge’s ruling depends on their personal opinion. In this case, the judge didn’t think I was a credible witness, so she ruled against me.

This means that my daughters now live with my in-laws, and I am legally barred from being in their home after 8 p.m. I get two supervised visits per week while I navigate a web of random drug tests, mental health evaluations, parenting classes, and trauma-based therapy — the details of which get reported back to my case worker, the state attorney, my daughters’ guardian ad litem, and the trial judge — in an effort to win back custody.

If I had been in a different city, or a different state, things might have turned out a lot differently. Child protective services is an umbrella term used to describe individual local agencies. They are governed by standards set at the federal level but operate independently in each state, and city-level jurisdictions set their own policies to manage reports of neglect or abuse. This means that location plays an enormous role in CPS response. Families who live in an area experiencing an economic boom are more likely to receive support, like help turning the water back on if it was shut off for nonpayment, while families in more depressed areas are less likely to have resources available to them. Because of the subjectivity of these cases, it’s likely the politics of the judges and caseworkers play a large role as well.

I’ve experienced this difference first hand. This time last year, I was living in Seattle. When I overdosed during a brief relapse in 2016, the King County child protective agency inquired about my family’s financial difficulties. After learning that the relapse had been prompted by legal difficulties with my abuser — for which I could not afford representation — they referred me to an agency that was ultimately able to provide me with an attorney pro bono. When I disclosed that I was having difficulty accessing trauma therapy because I could not afford child care, they helped secure placement for both of my daughters in a free, comprehensive daycare. And when I told them our utilities were pending shut-off, CPS paid the portion required to keep them running. My daughters did not spend a single day out of our home, and our lives began to improve.

But Seattle is a very wealthy area, with a high cost of living. When my husband had a mental health crisis that prevented him from working, we had to move somewhere more affordable and closer to his family. That somewhere ended up being Broward County, Florida. The economic differences are stark: Seattle’s median household income is almost 50 percent higher than Broward’s, and its minimum wage is nearly twice as high. Although it can be hard to catch your breath in Seattle if you’re poor, there are more avenues for help available than in Broward, and the CPS response between the two areas reflects that. In Seattle, we were given a chance to recover. In Broward, it was assumed we wouldn’t be able to.

Josh Michtom, a Connecticut public defender who represents child-welfare involved parents and children, says that poor families have the most difficulty when they come under CPS scrutiny. “Starting from the beginning…poor people as a general rule live a little closer to the edge. Scrambling to and from daycare, hurrying from job to job or job to home, living in more precarious housing or housing that isn’t as well kept-up…it’s not to say all poor people are neglectful or abusive, but run the simulation a hundred times and it’s going to come out with more things that raise an eyebrow for a teacher or daycare worker or hospital worker [who are mandated to report suspected abuse or neglect to CPS].”

According to Megan Martin, vice president of public policy at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, the “vast majority” of child welfare cases are poverty related. Martin also points out that the numbers may not even fully capture the extent of the relationship between poverty and child welfare involvement. She says that the official figure, which links 47 percent of cases to poverty, measures families who are financially unable to meet their basic needs. (For example, a parent who does not have the means to heat their home in the winter.) But that doesn’t include other issues related to poverty. She uses the example of inadequate supervision, a common factor in child removals that has gained some past media attention.

“If you can’t afford child care and don’t have other resources like family to watch your kids, you might end up with a nine year old watching a two year old,” says Martin. “When kids are removed for inadequate supervision, that’s not necessarily included in that 47 percent.”

In his practice, Michtom also struggles with the huge cultural divide that often exists between mandatory reporters and many parents living in poverty. He describes how something such as a parent deviating from the typical upper- or middle-class vernacular may lead a teacher or pediatrician to subconsciously distrust the parent and therefore ascribe malicious intent to something like a bruised knee or unkempt clothing.

Even using that vernacular can count against parents who don’t look the part. At the end of my trial, the judge cited my “skill with language” as her reason for disbelieving my testimony, adding that I could “sell ice to an Eskimo.” My advanced education and ability to communicate clearly should have benefited my case, but coupled with my poverty and substance use disorder diagnosis, it led her to read me as a con artist instead.

“Middle- and upper-middle-class people have a language and way of talking to professionals that seems ‘good and responsible,’” Michtom observes. “When a kid has a completely not abuse related injury and the school nurse calls the parent and says ‘can you explain this?’ and the parent maybe doesn’t speak English as well or just seems less trustworthy to this middle-class nurse in a way maybe the nurse can’t quantify, then the nurse says ‘I have a duty to report this.’”

Once an investigation is opened, the family’s life is picked apart. Even if the original allegation turns out to be unfounded, a myriad of other factors — issues that may not have been enough to prompt a call on their own — can be used against the parent. In my case, the state obsessed over the fact that I didn’t have my own housing, despite the fact that more than one-third of adults were living with their parents in 2015.

Michtom believes that cultural differences between investigators, judges, and other people involved in the substantiation process directly affect how even small deviations are perceived. “If you don’t know what it’s like to be poor and you don’t know what it’s like to make the compromises poor people have to make,” explains Michtom, “the wrong social worker calls them deplorable or filthy even if it was just messy or cluttered, and that increases the likelihood that it leads to a court petition [for the child’s removal].”

As he says this, I remember the shame and anxiety I felt doing something as simple as going to the playground, where my daughter’s coats, though surely warm enough, looked dingy and stained next to the kids running around in clothes so absurdly bright they looked like something out of a cartoon. My anxiety wasn’t just based on embarrassment; it was also couched in the visceral fear that people would assume I was a bad mom because of something as simple as clothing my daughters in used coats.

Parenting in poverty creates a cycle of factors that compound each other. For my family, an inability to pay for child care or legal aid in 2016 created a snowball of stressors that ultimately led to a relapse and almost killed me. This year, when we were managing to get by, a sudden unexpected health emergency sent us spiraling right back into the system.

As I continue to fight for the return of my daughters, I can’t help but wonder what it would look like to have a uniform child welfare system that recognizes these types of complexities. Maybe my daughters would be with me now. Maybe my husband would be on a road to wellness instead of struggling alongside me to find permanent housing. Maybe the other 3 million families involved with CPS would flourish and thrive. Maybe parenting in poverty would stop being so hard.

That tells you a lot about Congress’ priorities—especially since, for less than the cost of the Republican tax plan, Congress could eliminate child poverty in the United States. Twice.

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According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the 5.7 million poor families with children would need an average of $11,400 more to live above the poverty line in 2016. In total, the income needed to boost these families—along with the additional 105,000 children who were not living with their families—above the federal poverty level is about $69.4 billion per year in today’s dollars. Over ten years, that adds up to about 46 percent of what Congress plans to spend on its tax plan. There would be so much money left over after we boosted these kids out of poverty that the United States could also pay tuition and fees for all of them to get an in-state education at a four-year public university, and it still wouldn’t costs as much as the tax plan.

If Congress wanted to really let loose, and spend just 12 percent more than the tax bill does—for a total of $1.74 trillion—we could completely eliminate all poverty in America.

But instead of reducing poverty in the United States, Congressional Republicans are chipping away at the existing programs that support low-income people. Congress was so fixated on repealing the Affordable Care Act this summer that it ran out of time to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which insures 9 million kids. It has been 73 days since CHIP’s funding expired, and more than half of states could run out of money in the first months of 2018. Some are already paring back services in preparation.

And now, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and his fellow Congressional Republicans have announced that their next priority is cutting critical programs such as Medicaid, which provides health care to 2 in 5 U.S. children, and Social Security, which is the nation’s largest children’s anti-poverty program. To pave the way for these cuts, Ryan and friends are already rolling out poisonous rhetoric that paints low-income families as lazy and idle—even though Census data show that most families with children living in poverty do work, and are just being paid so little they can’t make ends meet.

These policies are obviously cruel. But, for a group of lawmakers who fancy themselves business-minded, they’re also stunningly financially irresponsible. Child poverty costs the United States a lot of money: an estimated $672 billion per year in lost productivity, worse health outcomes, and increased criminal activity.

Instead, congressional Republicans are choosing to saddle the nation’s kids with debt—the very thing they’ve repeatedly accused past administrations of doing—to finance a massive giveaway to the wealthy.

Yet we also have much unfinished business, in part because so many of the administration’s promising initiatives—such as comprehensive immigration reform, a significant investment in child care and early childhood education, and a major youth employment initiative—were not enacted. And unfortunately, the ideas currently proposed by leaders in Congress and the President-elect’s transition team would tear apart not only President Obama’s successes but also the core of our safety net.

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Here are five areas where the Obama administration sought to drive progress for children and families—and what we expect from the next administration.

Expanding Health Insurance

Children’s health insurance has increased dramatically under the current administration. Thanks largely to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), about 1.7 million children gained coverage from 2013 to 2015. Now more than 95% of children are insured—a record high.

These improvements in health insurance have long-term positive consequences. There are obvious benefits like reductions in infant mortality and childhood deaths, improved health, and reduced disability. But there are subtler effects, too: expanding health coverage for low-income children improves high school and postsecondary success, and also employment over the long haul. Plus, children’s life chances are improved when parents are able to get the care they need, like treatment for depression (which is widespread among low-income mothers of young children).

Despite the mounting evidence of lifetime benefits for children, President-elect Trump and Republican leaders in Congress have vowed to repeal the ACA. If they succeed, the number of uninsured children will double—even without accounting for the additional cuts now being discussed for Medicaid, which is especially important to low-income families.

Reducing Child Poverty

During the worst of the Great Recession, more than 21% of children lived in poverty—15.6 million in total. By 2015, the number had dropped by about one million, and the child poverty rate was down to 19.7%. While that rate is still far too high, the improvement reflected an economic recovery that helped all families.

The Obama administration fought to protect key safety net programs that support families when they are most economically vulnerable—such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps)—and successfully expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC). These programs are crucial for low-income children—in 2015, SNAP reduced child poverty by 2.7 percentage points and the EITC and CTC together reduced it by 6.5 percentage points. As with health insurance, these programs pay off for a lifetime: children getting this help have improved health, education, and employment outcomes.

Despite this strong evidence, Congress and others have argued to sharply cut SNAP or change its structure to a block grant—a fixed amount of money that states can spend for various purposes. That fixed dollar amount—which doesn’t increase during tough economic times—leaves families and communities without resources when they need them the most.

Addressing Disparities for Children of Color

Despite some progress, disparities for children of color remain stark. About 1 in 3 African American children and 3 in 10 Hispanic children live in poverty, even with high levels of household work effort. That’s more than double the poverty rate for white children. Fixing these disparities matters more than ever to the nation’s future, because of who today’s children are: almost half are children of color (a milestone already reached for young children), and about one-quarter are children of immigrants.

The Obama administration made important commitments to build ladders of opportunity for children and families of color, though the work remains unfinished. The administration made strides on educational equity, beginning with early childhood education up through improved access to postsecondary education and job training. It also focused on justice reform, with the goal of reducing interactions between students of color and law enforcement in schools.

In addition, more than 5 million U.S. children have at least one parent who is an unauthorized immigrant. In an effort to keep these families together, the administration issued an executive action providing temporary protected work status for parents of children who are American citizens or long-term residents—but court action blocked it. Now these children remain at risk of separation from their parents, which creates high levels of stress and undercuts their development and their families’ economic security.

Fair Wages and Working Conditions for Families

About two-thirds of poor children live with a working adult. These families typically must confront a combination of low wages, volatile and inadequate work hours, and insecure jobs.

Over the past eight years, dozens of states and cities have passed paid sick time, paid family leave, and scheduling laws that make a big difference to these families. The administration’s commitment to paid leave—including strong support for the federal Healthy Families Act and its “Lead on Leave” campaign—helped fuel change at the local and state level. Moreover, the administration’s paid sick days and minimum wage executive orders for government contractors and the overtime rule are crucial expansions of labor protections that could benefit millions of workers.

But while bills to take the paid leave, scheduling, and minimum wage provisions nationwide were introduced, none has passed the divided Congress—and the President-elect’s announcement of a Labor Secretary who is sharply critical of regulations to help low-wage workers suggests the modest steps taken so far could be rolled back.

Stalled Budget Investments in Children

Unfortunately, what has not improved nearly enough in these eight years is public investment in children through child care and Head Start, as well as youth development activities and career opportunities (with the exception of modest increases in Pell grants).

The administration’s strong budget proposals to provide all low-income infants and toddlers with access to high-quality care, and to expand other early learning programs, were never enacted. In fact, even though Congress did enact important bipartisan measures to improve the major federal program that helps low-income parents with child care—such as streamlining rules so parents can keep child care support despite unstable work hours, and strengthening training for child care workers—it never provided funding to support the changes. Today, less than 1 in 6 eligible children receive child care assistance, less than half of eligible preschoolers benefit from Head Start, and Early Head Start serves less than 7% of eligible infants and toddlers. This lack of action flies in the face of resounding evidence that early childhood investments pay off both for children and the economy over the long run.

Overall, the agenda being discussed by Congressional leaders and the President-elect’s transition team fails to build on the administration’s accomplishments. It also proposes denying basic help like health care and nutrition to a generation of children, which would have lifelong consequences. All Americans need to fight back against these devastatingly shortsighted choices, which would place children’s own healthy development, education, and work success at risk—along with our nation’s economic future.

Editor’s note: TalkPoverty presents this series in collaboration with the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.

“There are two economic realities in America today,” said moderator Lester Holt. “There’s been a record six straight years of job growth, and new census numbers show incomes have increased at a record rate after years of stagnation. However, income inequality remains significant, and nearly half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.”

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Holt is right about the challenges Americans are facing. Nearly 50 percent of all U.S. households report that they would struggle to come up with $400 during an emergency. And 80 percent of Americans will experience at least one year of economic insecurity—either living in poverty, needing public assistance, or having an unemployed head of household.

The fact that inequality and income volatility were mentioned at all is a big deal.

In 2008, as millions lost their jobs in the midst of the financial crisis, the first presidential debate featured no questions on poverty or income inequality. And in 2012, just as Americans were beginning to climb out of the Great Recession, poverty was ignored by debate moderators—although President Obama still managed to talk about issues like low-wage work, access to community colleges and training, affordable healthcare and childcare, and pay equity. Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the presidential election this year, news networks have devoted less and less attention to poverty and inequality in favor of horse-race election coverage.

But just talking about poverty isn’t enough.

It’s critical that we move beyond talk, and focus on real solutions. Case in point: According to a recent analysis by Media Matters for America, Fox News covers poverty more than any other network on the air—but rather than educating the public on solutions, their stories reinforce stereotypes and false narratives about those of us who are struggling. Similarly, conservative politicians like Paul Ryan have delivered high-profile speeches and put forward so-called “poverty plans” for low-income communities, while still supporting trillions of dollars in cuts to antipoverty investments over ten years.

The same goes for the presidential debates. We need to know where the candidates stand on the policies that would dramatically reduce poverty and expand opportunity for everyone in America.

Where do the candidates stand on Unemployment Insurance, which is woefully underfunded and currently reaches only 1 in 4 workers who need it? What would they do to address college affordability—at a time when student debt has ballooned to about $1.3 trillion and too many low-income students are simply priced out of a college education? Where do they stand on raising the minimum wage—even $12 an hour by 2020 would lift wages for more than 35 million workers and save about $17 billion annually in government assistance programs. What about expanding Social Security—the most powerful antipoverty program in the nation—which lifted 26 million people out of poverty in 2015?

It’s time to ask the candidates: #Wheredoyoustand

That’s why this election season, TalkPoverty.org is working to push questions about where the candidates stand on poverty solutions into the presidential debate.

Unlike the first debate, the next forum will be a town hall featuring questions submitted through social media. Building off a successful 2012 #TalkPoverty campaign led by The  Nation magazine and the Center for American Progress, today we’re launching our #Wheredoyoustand campaign encouraging you to share the questions you want to hear in the next presidential debate. The idea is simple: if the media isn’t going to dig into the candidates’ policies, we will.

Share your question now.

Whether it’s through a photo, a video, or a tweet, we want to know the questions you think need to be asked. Once you’ve tweeted your questions using #Wheredoyoustand, share them on the Open Debate Coalition website so that more people can vote to hear them in the debate.

Below are some examples of questions to get you started.  It’s time to move beyond focusing on whether someone said “the p-word,” and make sure the debates address real solutions to poverty.

Every dollar spent on food assistance generates $1.70 in economic activity. Ask the candidates #Wheredoyoustand on food stamps #Debates2016

— TalkPoverty.org (@TalkPoverty) September 27, 2016

The US has 5% of the world’s population, but over 25% of the world’s prison population. Ask about that. #Wheredoyoustand #Debates2016

— TalkPoverty.org (@TalkPoverty) September 27, 2016

.@IamMikeRich is asking: #Wheredoyoustand on investments in jobs that reach low-income communities? #Debates2016 pic.twitter.com/ZLOXxJ3aum

— TalkPoverty.org (@TalkPoverty) September 26, 2016

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Fortunately, boosting the incomes of very poor families has been found to reduce the effects of child poverty, and the Child Tax Credit (CTC)—which offsets some of the cost of raising children—should be a key part of that effort. The problem, however, is that the CTC excludes families earning $3,000 or less per year and does not provide the maximum credit to other very poor families, so the children with the greatest need don’t receive full benefits.

If very poor children received the full tax credit—just like middle-class children do—the evidence suggests we would see healthier, better educated children with greater earning power as adults.

Boosting incomes for poor young children has long-term benefits

The benefits of income support during a low-income child’s early years last a lifetime—from higher birth weights (which impact future health), to better performance in school, to higher expected lifetime earnings.

Studies consistently show that income matters most for the poorest children. After conducting a systematic review of the academic literature on the effects of income during childhood, researchers at the London School of Economics and Political Science found that “there is very strong evidence that increases in income have a bigger impact on outcomes for those at the lower end of the income distribution.” For example, one study found that the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) boosted children’s test scores by almost three times as much for the poorest children as for other children.

Young children warrant particular attention. They have higher poverty rates than older children or adults, and the evidence that increased family incomes yield long-term benefits for children is particularly strong for those up to age 6.

Poorest working families get little or no Child Tax Credit

Unfortunately, the Child Tax Credit doesn’t do enough to help the children who are most in need (and stand to benefit the most, too).

The CTC is worth up to $1,000 per child under age 17. However, working families with earnings below $3,000 are ineligible for the tax credit. Once a family’s earnings reach $3,000 the credit phases in slowly, at a rate of 15 cents for each added dollar of earnings until reaching the $1,000-per-child maximum. As a result, families with two children don’t receive the full credit until their earnings reach $16,333. Roughly 8 million working families received only a partial CTC or none at all in 2014 (the latest year for which data are available).

What Congress can do

The CTC’s current design means that children in the poorest working families get no benefit and many other children in deep poverty—those with incomes below half of the poverty line, or less than about $10,000 for a family of three—get only a partial tax credit. This needs to change. Children shouldn’t be denied the credit’s full benefits because their parents have fallen into desperate times and have little or no earnings.

By making the full $1,000 CTC available to all low-income children—in tax parlance, making the credit “fully refundable”—Congress could boost young children’s potential to succeed in life, starting even before their first day of school.

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This has serious consequences, both for the individual children and for the country as a whole. The infant and toddler years are a critical time period for child development, and they can shape a person’s outcomes for the rest of their lives.  And since our country is growing more diverse every year—the majority of young children are now children of color—the soaring poverty rates among children from diverse backgrounds is risking our long-term economic stability.

Home visiting programs, which connect families with trained professionals who help create healthy and safe home environments, are proven to directly address many of the harmful impacts of poverty before the effects take hold. The benefits are dramatic—families who voluntarily participate in these programs have improved child and maternal health, increased school readiness, prevented child abuse and neglect, and reduced participation in the juvenile justice system.

Here’s how it works

When parents bring their baby home from the hospital, they don’t come with a handbook. Home visiting aims to be the next best thing, by connecting parents and families with professionals—who may be nurses, social workers, or other trained parent educators—in their own homes through regular visits. Home visitors partner with parents to develop strong parenting skills, ensure child and family safety, and access other community resources and social services.

The services families receive during a home visit can vary depending on the specific needs of the family. A home visitor may work with a new mom to help her understand the importance of breastfeeding, or how praising a child can reinforce positive behavior. They may screen for signs of child abuse and neglect or domestic violence, and refer families to other health and social services. Home visitors will also help parents to set goals for the future—they might work together to develop a plan to go back to school, look for a job, or identify safe and reliable child care.

The results are impressive

Home visiting programs have been proven to benefit everything from child and maternal health, to increasing school readiness, to reducing child abuse and neglect. In 2014, 70% of federal home visiting program grantees saw reductions in the rate of tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drug use among enrolled mothers.  Similarly, 79% of grantees saw an increase in the household income of families participating in home visiting, and 76% saw an increase the rate at which women and families are screened for domestic violence.

These programs are so effective that they end up saving taxpayers money in the long-run. For example, improved health among participating families can lead to Medicaid savings by reducing health care costs, and improved school readiness can boost a child’s academic achievement later in life and lower participation rates in special education. In fact, for every dollar invested in these programs, we see a return of up to $5.70 in reduced federal and state costs and social benefits.

But it doesn’t reach enough people

Home visiting only reaches a small portion of families living in poverty. In 2015, 145,500 children and parents—less than 10% of families in poverty across the US—received federally-funded home visits. Even when home visiting services are available, many of the people who would benefit are unaware that they exist or unfamiliar with how they work.

What’s worse, federal funding is at risk of expiring if Congress fails to act. The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting, or MIECHV, program is the single largest funding source for home visiting—it’s the only guaranteed source of funding in all 50 states, and it provides $400 million per year to expand evidence-based programs. Since it was established in 2010, MIECHV has expanded home visiting programs so that they now reach families in every state, the District of Columbia, and 5 territories across the United States. After the original authorization ended in 2014, MIECHV received two short-term reauthorizations—the most recent of which is slated to run out at the end of September 2017.

Where do we go from here?

Without action from policymakers, the families who currently participate in the federal home visiting program may lose a critical source of support. Worse yet, millions of others will never benefit from a highly effective program. In many states, MIECHV is the only source of financial support for home visiting, and without it services would disappear.

Rather than letting a highly effective program expire, Congress should increase MIECHV funding and extend the program for a minimum of five years. That way the program will reach more of the families who need it, and states will be able to focus on providing services rather than worrying about finding sustainable funding.

As we see from last week’s Census data release, there are still too many young children and children of color bearing the burden of poverty. In the long run, this will only exacerbate inequality and harm our country’s economic outlook. Home visiting has the potential to address inequality before its effects are realized—if the program is given a chance to succeed.

This is especially true for the parents of young children. The birth of a child is one of the leading triggers of poverty in the United States, and since young children have unique costs—like diapers, formula, and child care—poor families often struggle to make ends meet.

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Research continues to confirm what we already know: Children do best when they are raised by their families and in their communities, as long as it is safe. The trauma children experience when they are removed from their parents unnecessarily can have significant and life-long effects, which can be particularly damaging for young children.

Current safety-net programs—including income support and child care and nutrition assistance—are essential for low income families, but if they were modified to be more family-centered, responsive, and flexible, we could prevent unnecessary system involvement and make it easier for families to care for their children safely at home.

Three key strategies could improve existing programs so that they better meet the needs of young children and families.

1. More flexible funding sources to support families facing multiple barriers

Most safety net funding is narrowly focused on providing a specific service, such as food, rent, or utility assistance. These programs are crucial, but the limited focus of each results in gaps across the safety net that can leave families vulnerable.

For example, one of the most common reasons that families become involved with child welfare is because caregivers are often forced to leave children at home—without adequate supervision—so that they can go to work or appointments. If families had cash resources to provide for unexpected costs such as backup child care, parents of young children could juggle multiple demands and attend work, school, or appointments while still keeping their children safe.

Funding sources that provide benefits to families through tax programs and direct cash transfers help meet this need. That’s why the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit, which lifted 9.4 million people out of poverty in 2013, are so crucial for millions of low- and moderate-income families. Child allowances, which provide cash benefits to families with young children, would provide even greater flexibility —and have the potential to significantly reduce poverty.

2. Coordinate between the programs that are designed for young children and families

For families who are navigating multiple benefit programs, overlapping, duplicative, or contradicting eligibility requirements can make it difficult to access the supports they need. For instance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) work requirements are often not aligned with the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). That can make it difficult for families who rely on TANF to participate in WIOA work or training opportunities, since they do not always “count” as work for TANF work participation rates.

In addition, data sharing across programs—along with other information technology enhancements—would help families get the most out of safety net programs. Many states now use document imaging systems to save and file household verifications, and provide call centers for clients to call in and report changes to their status or benefits needs. This can simplify the eligibility determination process and allow states to create a single process for determining eligibility across a number of programs.

Several states participating in the Work Support Strategies demonstration project have implemented these strategies to better integrate various procedures for major safety net programs including Medicaid, SNAP, and child care subsidies.  These states are improving coordination on intake, verification, and periodic redetermination of eligibility to create a more cohesive and easy to navigate set of work supports.

3. Make services available in locations that are convenient for families

Providing services and supports in the places where families already spend time—such as child care centers, libraries, schools, and pediatricians’ offices—makes it more likely that families will receive the essential services that they need.

For example, Project DULCE provides parents of infants with support in addressing stress, building resiliency, and developing a nurturing relationship with their young child, while simultaneously linking families to legal and other community resources—all during the course of standard well-child visits. An evaluation of Project DULCE has shown that the intervention contributes to improvements in preventive health care delivery and accelerated access to concrete supports, such as nutrition or utility assistance, among low-income families.

Safety-net programs that are flexible enough to meet the needs of families, are well-coordinated, and offered in environments that are comfortable and convenient are critical to ensuring that children can thrive at home with their families.

Just ask Benjamin, whose father—a distinguished Connecticut lawyer—committed suicide shortly after being placed on anti-anxiety medication. Benjamin was 12. When their life insurance company refused to pay the family’s death claim, Benjamin’s mother used the family’s remaining savings to pay off their mortgage so that they could count on a place to live. Then, she turned to Social Security to help them make ends meet.

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In 2014, 3.2 million children under 18 received Social Security. Families like Benjamin’s receive benefits through the survivor insurance program, which provides income to the dependents of covered workers who have died.  Children under 18 also qualify for Social Security if they are the dependents of a parent or guardian who is disabled or retired.

But it turns out that’s only half the story.  A new study by my organization, the Center for Global Policy Solutions, found that official reports overlook children who live in extended families where someone receives a Social Security check. According to data from the U.S. Census and the Social Security Administration, an additional 3.2 million children receive indirect support in this manner from Social Security. That doubles previous estimates of the total number of children receiving benefits, bringing it to 6.4 million. It also means that 9 percent of all U.S. children benefit from Social Security, making it one of the nation’s largest antipoverty programs for children.

Since 2001, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of children benefitting indirectly from Social Security, as a result of larger socioeconomic forces. Economic inequality, income stagnation, immigration, and the recession have all contributed to the rise of extended, multi-generation families with shared living arrangements.

There has also been a significant increase in the number of grandparents who are caring for grandchildren without the direct involvement of their parents. This underscores the fact that Social Security is a multigenerational program that serves individuals at every stage of life. And while white children are still the vast majority of child recipients, children of color represent a rapidly growing share of child Social Security beneficiaries, reflecting the nation’s changing demographics.

Given its broad reach, Social Security is an underappreciated policy mechanism that—along with the more frequently discussed examples like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit—should be expanded to boost economic security for vulnerable families. As policymakers look for solutions to offset economic pressures on U.S. workers, they should integrate additional anti-poverty strategies into Social Security—such as child allowances, college assistance, and paid family leave.

If national debates over the past decade are to be heeded, there are those who will inevitably argue that the nation can’t afford to expand Social Security, even though we could by lifting the program’s cap on taxable wages (currently $118,500), and making other minor adjustments (like increasing the payroll tax by 1/20th of one percent over a 20-year period). They will claim we need to cut benefits in the name of deficit reduction, even though scholars have shown that Social Security doesn’t have a direct effect on the national deficit or debt. They will argue that Social Security trust funds aren’t sound or real, even though the bonds in its trust funds are backed by the United States government (the same guarantee that ensures the value of the dollar). And, they will completely ignore the 6.4 million child beneficiaries in their zeal to redirect the program’s funds into Wall Street-invested private retirement accounts for older adults.

The fact that each of these anti-expansion arguments can be rebutted misses the larger point: Workers and their children are caught in a broken economy.  There is an urgent, growing need for policy solutions that can strengthen the economic security of American families while ensuring children have a real chance at success in life. Social Security, and social insurance more broadly, are proven policy tools that can help meet this need.

It certainly helped Benjamin, who is now a 35-year-old elementary school music teacher. His mother still counts on Social Security, and Benjamin says if his family didn’t have it when he was growing up, they would have been “over the edge for sure.”

Poverty can impede children’s brain development and harm biological processes in ways that damage long-term health. Numerous federally supported interventions, including Head Start, children’s health insurance, and child nutrition programs are deployed to ameliorate these disadvantages.  While these programs are crucial, they don’t get to heart of the matter.

What if we tackled the problem of child poverty head-on by providing a modest amount of cash assistance to parents?

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In 1997, in the mountains of Western North Carolina—a region affected by grinding rural poverty—one community did exactly that. When the Cherokee Nation built a casino on the border of its reservation, they distributed the proceeds to local tribe members—the average family received $4,000 per year. Since non-tribal communities nearby lived in similar conditions, but were not eligible for the monies, these payments created an opportunity to examine the impact of cash assistance on the children who received it.

Researchers at Duke University tracked the participants from childhood into adulthood, and found that those who received the assistance “used less alcohol and fewer drugs, were less likely to commit minor crimes, and more likely to graduate from high school.”

What’s striking about this assistance—which was given without restrictions, guidance, the stigma of welfare, or the intervention of social workers—is that it paid off large dividends on problems that seemed intractable, such as alcoholism, crime, and education outcomes.  The study also made it clear that when parents have additional resources, they spend it on key investments like education for their kids, safe housing, meeting basic needs, and preventing hardships (like a broken down vehicle) that can push a family into crisis.

These results should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the success of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which provides an average of $3,000 to a working family of three. Studies have found that the EITC facilitates infant development, reducing the incidence of low birth weight. They have also shown that children in families that receive larger credits have higher test scores in elementary and middle school, and are more likely to graduate from high school and complete one or more years of college. In fact, a modest $3,000 increase in annual income for children ages 0-5 is associated with a 17 percent increase in annual earnings as adults.

Given the amount of evidence we have on how much a child’s future can be impacted negatively by poverty, and how that trajectory can be shifted in a positive direction by modest additional resources for their families, it’s time to re-imagine how we ensure that all children have the opportunity to thrive.

Universal child allowances, which exist in many industrialized countries, provide a useful model. These benefits are delivered monthly to help families cover recurring expenses, which is difficult to do with the once-a-year Child or Earned Income Tax Credits. Basic monthly benefits are modest. In Australia, Canada, and Britain they range from approximately $100 to $345 per month per child (USD).

We could establish a universal child allowance in the United States, by reforming our existing Child Tax Credit. Representative Rosa DeLauro’s Young Child Tax Credit Act (co-sponsored by House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Representative Sandy Levin) would increase the child tax credit to $1,500 per year for children ages three and under, remove arcane earning thresholds that keep the credit from reaching many impoverished families, and deliver the credit monthly (or as frequently as administratively possible).

A report by the Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative at the Century Foundation (where I work) modeled a number of different options for a child allowance, and found that a $2,500 universal allowance for children under six would lift 3.2 million children out of poverty—nearly twice as many as the current Child Tax Credit—at a cost of $33.7 billion (that’s less than the U.S. spends on estate tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires). Given the societal costs related to childhood poverty—more than $500 billion annually—it is a price well-worth paying.

Is it possible to move Washington to pass and implement such a bold policy? There is reason for hope. Tax reform is sure to take center stage in the next Congress, and there should be no reduction of corporate tax rates without commensurate help to our most vulnerable residents. Moreover, there is growing support from both the left and the right (and even venture capitalists) for a universal basic income, as well as popular support for family-friendly policies like paid family leave and child care. Given the broad interest in helping both low- and middle-income families, reforming the child tax credit to maximize its reach in the fight against child poverty should be a priority for any new administration.

Consider the story of a foster child named Alex:

Alex was taken into foster care at age twelve after his mother’s death. Over a six-year period, he was moved at least twenty times between temporary placements and group homes. Soon after losing his mother, Alex learned his older brother might be able to care for him, but then his brother died. There were also hopes that Alex could go to live with his father, but then his father died as well.

Unknown to Alex, he was eligible to receive Social Security survivor benefits after his father died. These funds could have provided an invaluable benefit to Alex, supplying an emotional connection to his deceased father and financial resources to help with his difficult transition out of foster care.

But without telling Alex, the Maryland foster care agency applied for the survivor benefits on his behalf and to become his representative payee. Then, although obligated to only use the benefits for the child’s best interests, the agency took every payment from Alex. The agency didn’t tell Alex it was applying for the funds, and didn’t tell him when the agency took the money for itself. Alex struggled during his years in foster care, left foster care penniless, and continued to struggle on his own.

Unfortunately, Alex’s story is not unique. Across the country, agencies and their contractors target children who might be determined disabled or whose parents have died, apply for federal disability (SSI) and survivor (OASDI) benefits on their behalf, and then apply to gain control over the children’s money. Often, the children never see the money and receive no benefit. Many states also confiscate Veteran’s Assistance benefits from children whose parents died in the military. The Nebraska foster care agency even drafted a regulation so it can claim a foster child’s burial space.

By taking their resources, foster care agencies are forcing vulnerable children to pay for their own care—when the agencies and states are already legally obligated to do so. Further, if a parent or relative serves as representative payee and uses a child’s disability or survivor benefits to help with expenses for a child’s care, the child is better off because more funds are available to help in the household where the child lives. But when foster care agencies take resources from children, the children receive no benefit; their money is used to provide neither them nor their foster care home more assistance. The agencies simply ignore their fiduciary obligations and route the funds to government coffers—while the contractors also take a cut.  All of this is usually done without informing the children or their advocates.

In contract documents obtained from public records requests, foster children are treated as “units” on revenue maximization conveyor belts (or, in the case of the Maryland foster care agency, a “revenue generating mechanism.”) They are “scored and triaged,” plugged into “data mining” and “algorithms,” and subjected to “dissection” to increase the “penetration rate” of children whose resources can be taken.

Why are foster care agencies doing this to the very children they’re supposed to serve? The agencies are underfunded. States have continued to cut funding necessary for child welfare services, including assistance to help families stay intact so that foster care is not needed. In a desperate search for revenue, foster care agencies have reached a point where they have prioritized their own fiscal self-interests over the interests of children in their care.

Cash-strapped agencies would argue that this is all for the greater good, because increased agency funds will lead to improved agency services. But the rationale fails. The notion that child welfare agencies should fund themselves by taking resources from children they exist to serve is counterintuitive, at best. Further, foster care agencies are not even better off after they confiscate children’s resources: the funds are either routed directly to general state coffers, or the state reduces funding for the agency based upon how much money is obtained from the children.

Given the intense difficulties that foster children already face—especially as they age out of care—policymakers need to address this issue. The recently enacted ABLE Act, which allows disabled children to conserve their SSI benefits, is a helpful step in the right direction—but it will only help foster children if agencies stop taking their funds. And pending legislation from Congressman Danny Davis (IL) would do just that—it would protect foster children’s resources so the children can best help themselves.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated practice. In The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens, I expose how states and their human service agencies team up with private companies to profit from the vulnerable. In addition to taking foster children’s assets, the poverty industry uses illusory budget shell games to siphon away billions in Medicaid funds intended for children and low-income adults. Child support payments for foster children and families on public assistance are converted into government revenue. Nursing homes and juvenile detention centers sedate residents to reduce costs, and pharmaceutical companies encourage the drugging through illegal marketing practices. States use nursing homes to take the facilities’ federal aid while the elderly languish in poor care. Counties and court systems hire companies to mine the poor for funds in modern day debtor’s prisons. And the poverty industry keeps expanding.

We may disagree about the best way to help vulnerable populations. But we all should be able to agree that when aid funds are generated with specific intent to help those in need, those funds should be used as intended.

For the first time since 1880, it is now more likely for young adults ages 18-34 to live with parents than with a partner or on their own.  On average, parents also provide young adults with about $2,200 annually in material assistance—such as food, educational expenses, or direct cash assistance—throughout the transition to adulthood.

But for the tens of thousands of young people exiting or aging out of the foster care system each year, most often when they turn 18, parental support is not an option. Without parents as a safety net, these young people face a vast array of extreme disadvantages. They are more likely than the average youth to drop out of high school, be unemployed, and rely on public assistance. Many of these young adults find themselves in prison, homeless, or as parents earlier or less prepared than they would have liked. Any one of these outcomes can result in immediate and long-term hardship. For example, adults without a high school degree have an unemployment rate of 8 percent, compared to 5.4 percent for those who have one. Interaction with the criminal justice system can make it difficult to obtain employment, housing, education and training, and more. And homelessness causes and exacerbates health problems, ranging from communicable diseases to behavioral health problems.

Overall, the cost of aging out is devastating to these youth and to our society.

Since 2000, more than 340,000 young people have aged out of foster care without permanent family connections. Taxpayers and communities pay nearly $300,000 in social costs over the lifetime of the average young person who ages out of foster care. Even conservative estimates find that the overall social costs of these young people to the United States hover around $8 billion every year. Yet policymakers have real opportunities available to help some of our nation’s most vulnerable youth and save public dollars.

In an effort to address some of these challenges, Congress enacted the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008. This law permits states to receive federal support for young adults who remain in foster care through age 21, while they are working or pursuing education and training. In short, the legislation allows young people to remain connected to their foster families as they transition to adulthood.

So far, the results of the Fostering Connections Act have been encouraging. It is associated with an increased likelihood that these young people will complete at least one year of college, which can result in higher earnings. Other studies suggest that extending foster care to age 21 is related to a reduction in the number of foster youth who become homeless. Another study revealed that remaining in extended care is associated with less reliance on public assistance and a lowered likelihood of being arrested.

Disappointingly, fewer than half of states have chosen to take up the federal option to extend foster care to age 18 under this legislation. Considering the effects of aging out and the proven benefits of this additional support, this is a commonsense choice that all states should take. It not only will give some young people a better shot—it will also likely save on social costs that instead can be invested in housing, education, training, or other initiatives that support youth aging out.

The cost of the status quo is too high and the potential benefits for extending support to older foster youth are too promising for states to justify their continued inaction.

In some of the worst performing states, almost one in three children live in poverty.

Despite performing so poorly, many states on this list have adopted conservative policies that have made life harder for low-income children:

• In Arizona, Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana, fewer than 10 families for 100 living in poverty can access cash assistance through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Arizona presents a particularly brutal example of prioritizing cutting families off of aid over cutting poverty. Although the state still faces one of the nation’s highest child poverty rates, it has dramatically reduced eligibility. As a result, the number of families served by TANF fell 61 percent between December 2006 and December 2013.

• Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina fully ban individuals with felony convictions from accessing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and TANF—even well after they have served their sentence. Such bans increase the risk of parents being unable to provide for their children’s basic needs or being charged with child neglect; these policies also encourage recidivism by denying individuals the services they need to successfully reenter society after incarceration.

• Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee do not allow incarcerated noncustodial parents to pause child support orders—this policy traps non-custodial parents in a vicious cycle of debt, nonpayment, and even re-incarceration, further undermining their ability to be involved with their children. It is this cycle that led to the tragic death of Walter Scott, a South Carolina father who was pulled over for a broken tail light and then shot in the back while trying to flee law enforcement for fear of being arrested for owing child support debt.

Certainly, if you ask people what they think about making high-quality, affordable early childhood care and enrichment opportunities available for everyone—not mandating them, but simply making them available—few, if any, would say they are opposed. This consensus is in part due to mounting research in neuroscience, public health, economics and social science that supports a simple conclusion: investing in early childhood benefits the development, wellbeing, and long-term health of children. We also know how to create, scale and support these social and educational programs—Head Start, for example—and make them accessible.

Nevertheless, not all children have an opportunity to experience high-quality early childcare, for the simple reason that we have chosen not to support universal access. So why aren’t we committed to ensuring these opportunities?

Our political discussions about early childhood tend to center on parents’ choices and responsibilities—on the need for parents to make good decisions for their young children. But wouldn’t a tighter safety net of opportunities and support make good decisions easier, and make parents less likely to stumble in their efforts?

Instead of casting aspersions on parents, we need a new conversation—one that places children and what is optimal for them at the center.

That’s what The Raising of America—a new, five-part documentary series—is trying to do. I’m proud to be a part of the film, which probes how conditions faced by young children and their families form the foundation for future success—both in school and in life.

In exploring the prolific data about the positive effects of quality early care on health, The Raising of America brings to light the consequences of our failure to provide adequate support for parents raising young children.

Our Experiences Shape Our Biology

In recent years, as the film shows, we’ve seen a gradual shift in the way we understand health. Medical professionals are now examining health outcomes through a more holistic lens. What we’ve learned is that health is profoundly influenced by socioeconomic factors seemingly outside of the healthcare system.

Study after study has shown that our experiences—positive as well as negative—influence the ways our biological systems develop and operate. We also know that children who live in high-stress homes and environments with a lot of concentrated disadvantage are most likely to have adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. A higher prevalence of ACEs can affect children’s emotional regulation, which in turn can impair optimal learning. A child who has difficulty regulating his or her emotions is not likely to be able to stay in the classroom and learn. And a child who drops out of school is less likely to succeed in life.

We’ve come to understand that where you live matters to your health. In a neighborhood that suffers from chronic poverty—with a lower ratio of caregivers to kids, low employment, unsafe housing, community violence and physical decay—the odds are stacked against optimal health and development.

Yet with all of this knowledge, we still haven’t bridged the gap between data and practice by offering universal early care and enrichment opportunities.

The Choice We’ve Made

It strikes me that as a society we have accepted the notion that the challenges parents face are all “just part of raising a child”—that it’s not imperative for all children to have access to the high-quality early care that they need to succeed.

I would love to give working parents a sense that they are not alone in their experience—that there are countless others like them who want to be great parents but are struggling to give their children what they need. This sense of community in itself can be powerful and galvanize positive action.

What if together we called for the consideration of health and wellbeing in all of our public policy choices? Adopting this new framework might help us understand that policies that support safe neighborhoods promote not only crime reduction, but also physical and mental health and educational success.

Families cannot meet the demands of both our economy and raising children alone. It’s my hope that the larger conversation we’re launching—through ongoing research and with The Raising of America—will prompt a closer look at how we can develop an opportunity agenda for our nation’s children, and steer a course that puts the needs of children front and center.

I hope this is the moment when society looks at the status of young children and declares that it does not have to be this way, that we can change the experience of childhood. Let’s get started.

When I think of it, I get chill bumps.

I never thought I’d see the day when so many women — of all backgrounds, but mostly women of color — would come together to make Mississippi a better place for ourselves, a better place for our children and a better place for our future.

But that’s what we’re doing right now with the Mississippi Women’s Economic Security Initiative (MWESI) — a movement to push an agenda that was developed the old-fashioned way: by talking to people about the obstacles they face and then addressing the issues they are concerned with. Nine town halls have been held across the state over the past year to give women a chance to speak up about their lives and learn from one another. And what we learned was this: The top priorities for women who are struggling — or who have struggled — in our state, are childcare, education, jobs and wages, health care, and domestic violence and child support.

As the initiative moves forward, the MWESI Leadership Team will draft bills that reflect the most crucial needs women raised in the Town Talks; and they will encourage women and supporters to call and write and e-mail our state legislators. They will need us to come to the state capitol next year when the 2016 legislative session starts, and we must turn out by the hundreds — by the thousands — to get lawmakers to vote on issues that matter to us.

I hear that MWESI team members are planning to go back to the places where they hosted Town Talks to hold civic workshops to teach us how bills become laws — so that we will understand why it is so important for us to push our legislators. I hear they are also planning to work with their partners to hold legal clinics to help us learn how to better navigate the system, and we have to come out to those workshops by the hundreds. These are the important next steps we must make toward making Mississippi women secure.

I am so thankful to have so many women standing with me as we embark on this journey to make our new agenda a reality in the state where you might least expect it: We have the highest women’s poverty rate in the nation at 23.1 percent; almost 1 in 3 of our children live in poverty, and nearly 65 percent of families in poverty are headed by single mothers. I consider all of the women who have come forward to work on this effort to be my sisters, and that makes me feel safe as we confront the great challenges that lie ahead for us.

I’ve come quite a long way in my own journey — a journey which has led me to become a part of this movement. I haven’t always been a woman who could stand confidently with other women. There was a time in my life when I felt small and unimportant. By the age of 18, I was pretty much a walking billboard for many of the negative stereotypes that are often attached to African-American women. I was a college student — so I was uninsured, unemployed, technically uneducated — and I was pregnant. And while having a child was a life shock to me, for many other naysayers it was exactly what was expected, because my own mom was only 19 years old when she had me. To many policymakers and too many other people, I was just another poor black child, born to another poor black child, bearing another poor black child. I was of absolutely no consequence.

The labels that were attached to me — baby mama, poor decision maker, uneducated, unworthy — I let those labels hold me down. And I held my head down for a long time. I took Medicaid to cover my child’s prenatal care and her delivery, and WIC so I could provide some essentials to her. And I went out and I found a job. My mom and my neighbor — they handled a lot of the child care my daughter needed because the wages I earned weren’t enough to cover the cost. That’s true for too many women in Mississippi and around the country today too. In fact, a mother earning the minimum wage ($15,080 per year) with two children would spend more than half of her income on child care in our state.

Eventually, I returned to school. But a year after my daughter was born, my Medicaid ended. So I was an uninsured mom, unable to access a lot of the routine health care that I needed in order to be a healthy mother to my child. As a student, I worked nights and weekends. And I struggled. A lot. I worried about my child care. I worried about my child. I worried about my bills. I worried about my own health care. But, eventually, I learned to stand tall again and to hold my head up for my own good and the good of my child. I graduated from college and I now have two degrees in social work.

But I quickly became aware that while education lessened my burden, it didn’t completely alleviate my struggle. For more than 10 years I worked two jobs trying to make ends meet. In our state, 26 percent of black women with college degrees still struggle to make ends meet. This statistic should come as no surprise, since the women of Mississippi make up half of the state’s workforce but hold 72 percent of the minimum wage jobs. And when women do look for opportunities through job training, too often they are steered towards low-wage jobs rather than family-supporting careers.

I know from experience how it feels to be college educated and still struggling. When my employers needed me on nights or weekends, many times I had to take my daughter with me. And I’m grateful for those employers and clients who allowed me to bring my little girl into the room with me, and let her sit in the corner and color or listen to music or put her head down, because they knew that I was struggling and just trying to make it for my child.

Now, as a social worker, I meet women all the time who ask me, “What do I need to do so that I can have safe, affordable, reliable child care for my children?” “How do I find health-care providers who have mom-friendly hours and allow me to come in after hours?” “What do I need to do for my own health-care services — not just for family planning but also my regular health-care needs?” And I have seen too many women, in tears, with their hands trembling, ask me “What do I need to do to make sure that I feel safe from domestic violence or sexual assault?”

To be honest, I didn’t always have the right answers for my clients. I didn’t always know what to tell them.

But I’ve learned that these questions are not unique to me or to my clients, and there are answers. When I came to the Initiative’s town hall in Jackson, there were 35 women and many of them stood up and asked these same questions and more. And I had chill bumps — because now I could go back to my clients, my friends, my family and my community, and say that we are working and fighting on these issues in order to make Mississippi women secure.

I can tell them that there are literally thousands of women who are working to make sure that we all have access to health care — 90,000 more women would be covered through Medicaid expansion alone. I can say that we are working for family-sustaining wages so that we don’t need government assistance; paid sick and family leave; and funding and technical assistance so that women can pursue non-traditional occupations. I can let folks know that we’re trying to close that wage gap so that we are paid the same money for the same jobs as our male counterparts, instead of 71 cents on the dollar. And I can tell people we’re fighting to make sure that women are protected in the event of sexual assault or domestic violence — 50 percent of sexual assault victims lose their jobs or are forced to quit. We are doing all of this and more — fighting for the economic, physical and emotional security of women in Mississippi, because you can’t separate any of those three things or substitute one for another.

I wish I could tell women it’s going to be easy, but we know it won’t be. There are going to be times when someone may be the only woman in a room, standing up for this agenda, but we won’t waiver. There are going to be times when people will try to divide us or make us feel small, but we will stand firm and hold our sisters tall. There are going to be times when we’re afraid, or just plain tired, but we can’t give up. And we can’t worry too much about how this ends, or where we are right now as we get started. We just need the courage to take a stand, and to fight for the women of Mississippi.

Three of these advocates share their stories here.

Editor’s note: Tell Congress to Protect and Strengthen Vital Nutrition Assistance Programs Now.

If you look at the studies of poverty, most poor people in this country have computers, have big screen TVs, have cars, have air conditioning. This myth that there are kids who don’t have anything to eat is a total lie. […] You are telling me that you believe in the United States of America, with all the entitlement programs and food stamps and everything else, there are urchins running around that don’t have any food because of the system?

As Bill O’Reilly apparently does not know a single family straining to make ends meet, we did his homework for him and asked four mothers who have experienced hunger to tell us what they think about his comments:

Bill O’Reilly said show me hunger and I say, “Here I am.” My children have lived through a lot of adverse situations; we have been homeless and have relied on shelters. Without food stamps, my children would starve. When is it okay for children to starve in this country? When is it okay to actively ignore starving children in your country? — Asia Thompson, Pennsylvania

He hasn’t experienced poverty but Bill O’Reilly should know that poverty can happen to anyone. When my twin sons were 9 months old, my husband lost his job and we had to go on WIC to feed our children. This program provided support and the food was one less thing we had to worry about. And as a Head Start teacher, I see firsthand how kids can’t focus in school because they’re so hungry. – Mary Janet Bryant, Kentucky

I used all of these programs for my children, and I am a success story like thousands of other parents. My oldest daughter is in her fourth year of college studying stem cell biology on her way to a PhD. I beg to differ with Bill O’Reilly’s opinion, as he doesn’t have firsthand experience with hunger and poverty. – Vivian Thorpe, California

I think it’s easy to miss the signs of child poverty and hunger in our society because people often look better than they feel. I was less hungry as a kid because my family benefited from WIC, SNAP, and school lunch. I also graduated from high school, college, and graduate school. I have worked hard for 25 years in the TV business and I am the social safety net for my family now. To my way of thinking, Bill O’Reilly is seeing the emperor in a fine new suit of gold-threaded clothes but that emperor is naked. – Sherry Brennan, California

O’Reilly is right about one thing. Without nutrition assistance, hunger would be a lot worse. In fact, 50 years ago, images of malnourished Americans with sunken eyes and bloated bellies helped spur the creation of programs that kept nearly 5 million people out of poverty last year.

But his comments represent an attempt to muddy the waters and reduce public support for action on child hunger. We can’t turn our backs on hungry kids. Instead, we need to protect existing nutrition programs that are threatened by cuts and double down on smart public policies that create jobs, boost wages, and increase access to nutrition assistance benefits for families struggling in today’s economy.

Only then will we actually end child hunger.

Editor’s Note: To hear more from families who have experienced hunger, check out our Community Voices: Why Nutrition Assistance Matters booklet.

Funds for Head Start were restored by Congress in 2014, but tensions during recent budget negotiations have left Head Start families bracing themselves once again. The temporary solution reached by Congress would maintain funding at current levels through December 11. But if Congress doesn’t reach an agreement on the budget before then, Head Start programs could be subject to massive sequestration cuts, and vulnerable families may be without access to services.    

Victoria Hilt of Bremerton, WA was homeless and six months pregnant when she turned to Head Start. She describes her family’s experience with the program and the impact sequestration had on her community.

When I was six-months pregnant I left an unsafe living situation and became homeless. I went to my local WIC office, where I received information on prenatal care and nursing and was directed to an Early Head Start program. The WIC office told me the program would help me learn how to best care for myself in order to have a safe pregnancy and prepare to be my child’s first teacher. In the end, Early Head Start and Head Start would do that for me and so much more.

Since birth, my daughter, now age four, has grown up in the Head Start buildings with exposure to the same staff over that time period. The program has taught me about many aspects of healthy child development—from routine visits with the pediatrician and dentists, to positive father-daughter relationships, to social-emotional and cognitive development. My daughter and I have learned not only in the classroom, but also through home visits, parent-child activities, policy council meetings, board meetings, and everyday interactions with staff. Early Head Start also connected me to the Kitsap Community Resources Housing Solutions Center, where I was able to find temporary housing and, ultimately, the home where my daughter and I have now lived for four years.

I’m hardly alone. Throughout the nation, Head Start and Early Head Start are helping struggling families—and the communities where they live—build a better future.

When sequestration hit my hometown of Bremerton, Washington, Head Start had to cut the number of slots available for children. Many of these families had no other options for high quality care. The staff also took a cut to their benefits in order to maintain the high quality of services provided to the families who were still able to attend. These cuts disrupted the continuity of care for the children. Some “non-essential” personnel such as kitchen aids and training aids were let go. Other employees were asked to take on more tasks without a pay increase. Job insecurity made some staff members seek employment elsewhere—who could blame them? Federally-funded jobs were on shaky ground to say the least. The agency has now reduced staff down to the bare bones needed to meet the existing performance standards. If the sequester hits again, the program will have no other option than to further reduce the number of slots available. This bad policy is a disservice to the future of our community and many others: When a family’s foundation or a community’s assets are weakened or cut, progress is slowed or even halted.

I can’t even imagine where my daughter and I would be had we not had this incredible resource available to us.

Prior to Head Start, I was struggling to find my voice and my direction—homeless, pregnant, and sometimes hopeless. Through the program, I not only found a home, but I also attended finance classes and learned how to provide for my family on a budget. I learned the importance of self-care, and how this sets an example for my daughter. Using the skills we learned through the program, I am successfully co-parenting with my daughter’s father. Engaging in Head Start has also reignited my passion for learning, helping others, and advocating for policies that help people build a better life just like I have. I am back in school, working on completing a degree in political science so that I can pursue a career in grant and policy writing. I’m very involved in early learning and welfare policy in my community, and am interested in perhaps running for elected office someday so that I may continue contributing to my community in a positive, powerful way.

But that’s down the road. Right now I’m concerned about this: Head Start might not be available to me and my daughter and too many other families if Congress doesn’t act soon. If my daughter can’t attend Head Start, I worry that she will fall behind developmentally, and that I will not have a high quality program to send her to while I pursue my educational and employment goals and forge a path toward financial independence.

Head Start is crucial to families and communities that are most at-risk. Take it away, and you are simply making a life on the brink more precarious.

Despite these constant shifts, Brandy was able to stay in the same school because of a federal law, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which among other things paved the way for the hiring of two school “homeless liaisons.” These liaisons helped her travel to and from school, made sure she had something to eat during the day, clothes to wear, and encouraged her to aspire and thrive. This law and the support she received in school proved critical to Brandy’s success in high school and later in college.

As a civil legal aid attorney with Columbia Legal Services, I help homeless students and their families address barriers to their enrollment and participation in school. I use a variety of tools such as community education about McKinney-Vento, data and policy analysis, and individual and legislative advocacy.

McKinney-Vento recognizes and provides strong protections that promote education continuity. It gives homeless students the right to transportation to and from school; the right to enroll in school immediately (even without registration records); and the right to have a district-level homeless liaison that helps out with whatever a student may need for academic success. Those protections make McKinney-Vento one of the strongest education laws and, when enforced, it has done a great deal to assist students like Brandy. But far too few students are afforded these crucial legal rights. Take Brandy’s sister, Felicity. She did not receive the support of a homeless liaison. With each move, she lost credits, friends, and the opportunity to receive a basic education. She repeated the ninth grade four times.

Felicity’s story is unjust and all too common. In Washington State alone, we have 32,000 homeless students, which represents an 82 percent increase from the 2006-2007 school year. That’s enough to fill half of the seats in the Seattle Seahawks’ enormous football stadium. It’s particularly disturbing because children are estimated to lose four to six months in academic progress each time they move during the school year.

Children and youth who are of color, LGBT, who have limited English proficiency or disabilities are more likely to be homeless than their peers. We also know that homeless students struggle in school when compared to their housed peers; in fact, they are less than half as likely to be proficient in math, with similar gaps in other subjects. These disparities also hurt local communities and society generally, since these students are about half as likely to graduate as their housed peers and more likely to end up in the criminal justice system. It makes sense because imagine trying to focus in school when you have moved five times during the school year because your family could not find an affordable place to stay; or trying to study for an important math test in a crammed one-bedroom apartment where seven other people live.

This crisis of student homelessness comes fourteen years after the passage of McKinney-Vento. While the federal government provides grants to help schools fulfill their obligations under the legislation, these dollars are extremely limited. For example, in Washington, only 34 of 295 school districts received McKinney-Vento grants last year. That means most schools don’t have a homeless liaison, and when they do, they are juggling multiple job positions and can only devote a few hours a week to serving the needs of homeless students. As a result, students suffer and the spirit of the legislation is undermined.

The fact is that we need to increase funding for McKinney-Vento. But we can’t stop there. We must also provide housing subsidies to families experiencing homelessness. A recent study, by the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that families are more likely to maintain stable housing if provided with a permanent housing subsidy.

With this idea in mind, Columbia Legal Services is working to provide stable housing for homeless students and their families by engaging in state-level advocacy. In 2014, we helped pass the Homeless Children Education Act (HCEA) that required the state to provide comprehensive data on homeless student graduation rates. This data-driven approach is already helping advocacy groups and policy makers develop a better picture of how homeless students fare academically compared to their housed peers and which education reforms are needed to better support homeless students.

The McKinney-Vento Act alone cannot guarantee education continuity. The few schools that are able to hire full-time liaisons cannot fully address the biggest need of homeless students: safe and stable housing.  When the bell rings, kids should be concerned about homework, not working to find a home.

While hunger is difficult for any family to endure, those with very young children seem to be the hardest hit. Researchers estimate that half of all children under age 3 live in low-income or poor households. The challenge of finding child care that is both trustworthy and affordable makes it all the more difficult for parents who are trying to work their way out of poverty.  For families with employed mothers living in poverty and making child care payments, 36 percent of the family’s monthly income is spent on child care.

As a result of these high costs, too many families are forced to choose between child care, meals, and other basic necessities.  But the CACFP indirectly subsidizes child care by providing healthy meals and snacks for young children at care facilities. By providing these resources, the tradeoffs that most low-income families make in securing child care become a little easier to manage.

Given that child care is now more expensive than in-state college tuition in many states, the affordability of quality child care should be the prime focus of any CACFP reform effort. The law that authorizes this program – which served nearly 2 billion meals last year, mostly to young children – is scheduled to expire this September. As Congress considers the next Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act, it marks an opportunity to renew and strengthen our public investment in quality child care and education. The CACFP not only makes quality child care more affordable for countless families, it also encourages school readiness for children who are at the greatest risk of developmental delays – health outcomes that are often connected to frequent hunger and food insecurity.

A few key changes to CACFP would allow the program to reach more children and families who need to access these benefits. Current reimbursement rates for the sites providing the meals are inadequate and out of step with rising food costs, especially as quality child care centers strive to serve healthier meals. Moreover, since many parents are now working longer and nontraditional hours, the next Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act should allow three meals per day to be reimbursed by the CACFP, instead of the current two meals.

Administrative procedures also need to be updated. Congress should reform the CACFP area eligibility test so that more sites are able to participate in the program. Further, we should recognize that CACFP is the direct point of contact between government and our most vulnerable young citizens, and use the program to ensure safe child care settings that promote best practices.

By taking these modest steps we can expect to see more accessible, affordable, quality child care centers. And if parents can count on these programs to keep their kids healthy and secure, they’re better able to work and support their families.

Editor’s note: To learn more, read “How the Child and Adult Care Food Program Improves Early Childhood Education”.

While the broad range of indicators presented reveal both opportunities and challenges for our country’s newest citizens, one startling truth leaps out: Nearly half (48 percent) of infants and toddlers live in families who are poor or near poor, while  young children of color have the highest poverty rates. Black infants and toddlers have a poverty rate that is triple that of their white counterparts; Hispanic and American Indians have a rate that is more than double.

What is the takeaway? An alarming number of today’s babies – tomorrow’s workforce – are spending their early years in distressed economic circumstances, impacting their health, their families, and their opportunities for learning.

Low Birth Weight

What happens before a baby even enters the world can impact later development.  Low birth weight can stem from the limited access to resources facing families in poverty, such as lack of early prenatal care and health insurance. States with higher rates tend to be those with higher poverty rates.  These infants are more likely to have serious health problems and long-term disabilities, which can impair learning and affect school readiness.

Nationally, about 8% of babies are born with low birth weight.  In fact, babies born in the U.S. are more likely to be low birth weight than those born in almost every other developed country.  States with the lowest rates cluster between 6% and 7%, and states with the highest go up to 11%.  The national health goals established a target of 7.8%, which 23 states currently meet. However, this goal is much more modest than the 2010 goal of 5% – which no state and only small pockets around the country ever achieved.

The disparity between African American newborns and other racial or ethnic groups is particularly striking.  African American babies are almost twice as likely as white babies to be low birth weight.  This difference has puzzled scientists for decades and cannot solely be explained by access to prenatal care or socioeconomic status.  Much current attention is focused on the cumulative stress African American women experience during their lifetime.

 Stress at a Young Age

The young children behind the poverty stats are spending their most vulnerable years in stressful circumstances that undermine healthy child development – from food insecurity to unstable housing to parents struggling to make ends meet. By age three, almost half of the toddlers in poverty have had one or more adverse experiences, such as childhood abuse, neglect, or exposure to other traumatic stressors. Chronic stress can undermine development – emotionally and biologically – and can be toxic to the developing brain.  It changes how the nervous system manages adversity and how the immune system resists infection, as well as impairs brain areas that affect attention, memory and thinking.  Poverty literally gets under the skin.

The good news is that babies are resilient, even in the face of such challenges. The key is strong, nurturing relationships – they can buffer the toxic effects of chronic stress. Close relationships with trusted adults give babies security, allowing them to become confident learners.

Quality Child Care

All parents want to give their children the right start, but it’s not always easy. Three of every five mothers with an infant are working, meaning access to high-quality child care is essential to supporting family economic security and early learning.  Working parents quickly learn that without paid family leave it’s too costly to stay home and care for one’s baby.  Moreover, child care takes a big bite out of paychecks. For single mothers, the average cost of infant care is more than 40% of median income.

Quality child care can have a positive effect on cognitive, language, and social-emotional development, and thus school readiness.  The strongest effects are found with the most at-risk children – but they are often the ones whose families can least afford it.

The reverse is also true: poor quality care can have a detrimental effect.  Much of the infant-toddler care in this country is of poor to middling quality.  Few states set sufficient standards that promote quality interactions for children with well-trained – and suitably compensated – providers. Simply put, child care is not just a work support, it’s an integral part of early childhood education.

The state of America’s babies is critical – it’s when we lay the foundation for our future workforce. When babies and families have the supports they need, we create innovators, thinkers, and stronger communities. Our shared vision of a prosperous future will be realized only if there is a robust quality of life for babies today.

Though the child welfare system has an important role to play in protecting families and children, taking a child away from his or her family is too often the main tool in its toolkit. Poverty, homelessness, mental illness and substance abuse can lead to child neglect and abuse, but if those factors are addressed, a safe home environment with family members can be achieved.

Foster care itself is an incomplete solution. As many as half of young adults who age out of foster care spend time homeless. More than half a million unaccompanied youth experience homelessness every year, and only 10 percent of them are served by targeted programs funded under the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act, such as basic care centers, emergency shelters, transitional living programs and street outreach.

The Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH) calls on Congress to change child welfare policy based on what works: “Keeping Families Together” (KFT).  KFT is a pilot effort that uses federal Family Unification Program (FUP) vouchers to provide affordable housing to families at risk of losing their children and also to youth aging out of foster care at risk of becoming homeless. Rather than targeting the most “stable” families, KFT is unusual because it seeks out families with the most complex cases. Case managers build trust with the families, help them navigate multiple government systems, connect them with parenting classes and resources, and mediate between the family and the child welfare system to resolve new and ongoing cases based on direct knowledge of the family’s circumstances.

Michelle and her three young sons offer a clear example of how KFT helps sustain families. Michelle spent years struggling with poverty and drug abuse and shuttling her children between homeless shelters. With the help of KFT, the family moved into a two-bedroom apartment. But suddenly, crisis struck. Michelle’s 13-year-old son, Donovan, has serious behavioral and emotional problems and can be physically aggressive. One night, he attacked Michelle with a broom.  The only way she could defend herself was to strike back. Donovan reported his mother for hitting him and the city opened a child welfare case against her. Michelle’s KFT case manager interceded with child welfare on Michelle’s behalf. Now Donovan is getting proper treatment and medication, and Michelle’s family has stayed intact. “I don’t know what I would do without the services here,” Michelle said. “Sometimes when you need support, you need it right then—not tomorrow or next week.”

Thanks to KFT, families once on the brink of crisis now have a place to call home and the support they need to stay together. Most families had no new abuse or neglect cases after moving to supportive housing. Six children were reunited with their families from foster care. Nearly all of the families with substance abuse problems reported that they were clean and sober at the end of the evaluation period. School attendance improved steadily. Moreover, so much money was saved by reducing the use of foster care and the shelter system that the program cost the public only three dollars per family per day. The pilot was therefore expanded to 665 families in five states, through a private-public partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services.

We now have important evidence about how to use FUP vouchers effectively. First, youth leaving foster care currently only receive 18 months of assistance. This isn’t nearly enough time to adjust to their new housing and services and successfully transition to independence. We urge Congress to extend assistance to 60 months. Second, family FUP vouchers are not being used as an early intervention strategy to stabilize families, which is essential to avoid the trauma of separation. Finally, there are almost no ongoing services for families or youth receiving the FUP voucher.

Congress should follow the lead of the KFT program—enact legislation that encourages family preservation and reunification, community-based services, and developmentally appropriate services for youth leaving foster care.  If we value families, we should do everything we can to help them stay together and succeed.

TalkPoverty had the opportunity to speak with Kavitha about her work.  The interview is cross-posted at BillMoyers.com.

Greg Kaufmann: Do you consider yourself solely an education reporter, or a poverty reporter as well?

Kavitha Cardoza: I think you can’t separate the two. When I first started it was strictly education and it was like test scores, test scores, test scores—and then the more I spoke to people who were actually in the classroom doing the work, it was clear these kids have a lot of challenges that are coming from their outside lives.  And then I realized a lot of it was related to poverty. So I asked my news director to broaden the beat to education and poverty because you can’t separate the one from the other.

Greg: So was this a realization you made here in DC, or in a previous gig?

Kavitha: Here.  But having said that I was very familiar with poverty because I grew up in India and knew a ton of people who were poor. And the one thing I noticed was how easy it was to be separate in the U.S. In India, you would hear these stories all the time: my husband doesn’t pay for the children. I can’t pay for my kid’s school fees. I don’t have a car and the bus didn’t come. I hear these stories here too but the difference is that here it’s really hidden.  If you live in a nice neighborhood you are not likely to see poverty. Office cleaners come overnight. When you go to a McDonald’s or any place paying a minimum wage, people are wearing uniforms. We’ve sanitized poverty. And so when I report, I overwhelmingly get listeners who say, ‘Oh my god, I never knew that was happening.’

Greg: You have been on the beat for four years now.  Is it striking to you that people continue to react to your work in this way—like God, I never knew?

Kavitha: I don’t blame listeners, or viewers, for being surprised. I don’t think we’ve done a very good job as journalists. We are very reactive over here. We cover Katrina, and then how many stories do you find about New Orleans and poverty after that? I heard former Washington Post reporter Katherine Boo talking once—she said we have a tendency to tie everything up with a little bow at the end of a poverty story, and she said poverty reporters do a disservice to readers by doing that. And I think she’s right—because life isn’t like that.

Greg: And so how do you avoid that trap?

Kavitha: I have really good relationships with a lot of schools, and principals, and guidance counselors, social workers, teachers, nonprofits…So when I first started they would say, ‘Oh, the media twists things.’ And I would say, ‘Look at my body of work.’  And I would send them examples of my work or ask them to sit in on interviews, I have nothing to hide.  So now it’s easier because I’ve built up some trust that my story is not going to be, ‘Oh, how pathetic these kids’ lives are,’ and it’s not going to be, ‘They are all angels.’ No, there is a range of people within this beat just like any other.  You have to show that range. Otherwise, it doesn’t seem real, and it’s not real. I think what I try to do is get to the why.

Greg: Tell me more about that.

Kavitha: For example, I saw a line in the newspaper once, it said about a third of crime committed on the Metro is done by teenagers. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I should interview some kids to see what’s going on behind the statistics.’  I interviewed this 11-year-old boy. And he talked to me about how he robbed someone’s wallet. As we continued chatting he told me he was wearing his school uniform and did it right outside of his school. And he looks like a little baby at 11—he was like a small, little boy. And not bragging or anything, very innocently telling me about it.  And so I started asking questions—what was going on? And he said, ‘It was getting dark and I didn’t have a way to go home. So I saw this person, and I thought, he can afford like 100,000 bus passes.  And so my friend said just go and take his.’  And the guy identified the boy the next day in school.  So I said, ‘What did your mother say?’  And he said, ‘She was very upset. She said why didn’t you call me? And I said, with what phone and what money?’ And he said she never spoke about it again. So it’s never simple. There’s so much going on, and I think just getting to the why is the best I can do.

Greg: And what are some other powerful moments that really stand out for you and say a lot about your beat?

Kavitha: The more time I’ve spent in schools, the more I see what kids deal with—just a lot of issues: scared to come to school because of gangs, or feeling that they don’t have the right clothes to wear. Like one of the kids told me his mom used to shop for him at Payless and Walmart, and those were not the cool clothes, and so he was always teased… So when people say, for example, ‘poor people—how come they have nice clothes?’ It’s because they don’t want to show that they’re poor. Because the stigma is so great here. It’s such an American story, right? You can make it happen, you can do anything if you believe, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And so if you’re poor, it means you haven’t tried hard enough. That’s the underlying narrative that people know and [so] they want to hide.

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Or, one of the kids in [my] Beating the Odds series—her parents were immigrants, and she was living a very comfortable lifestyle. Her dad was a lawyer and then he was caught for fraud and deported. They spent all of their money on his trial. Overnight, she had nothing. She said they had to decide whether to have food, or electricity and water. They chose food. So they had to go to the Chik-fil-A nearby to wash up and brush their teeth and use the bathroom. The mother and the three kids slept in the basement on one bed because it was the coolest place in the house. And I think that’s another thing we don’t think about enough, how fluid poverty can be—people are middle class, and then low-income. It’s not like these rigid structures that people often think it is.

Greg: Do you often find when you go after a story about poverty, you end up getting something completely different than what you expected?

Kavitha:  Always.  There is so much going on inside of people and their backstories.  I remember interviewing an elderly lady when the DC plastic bag tax took effect and she didn’t like it.  And I said, ‘But it’s only 5 cents.’  And she said, ‘If I save up some of those 5 cents I can buy an egg.’  And I remember just stopping and thinking, ‘Oh my lord, this is just a whole different scale we’re talking about here.’

Greg: In addition to ‘getting to the why’, are there other fundamentals to good poverty reporting that you think about?

Kavitha:  I’m always interested in how poverty plays out in very specific, day-to-day ways. You want those specific details where you are like, ‘Oh, I had no idea’—both for you, and your audience.  Like when I did my Yesterday’s Dropouts documentary series [for Breaking Ground], literally every person I interviewed was telling me ‘I forgot my glasses.’  And suddenly I was like, ‘Wait a sec, what’s the glasses deal?’  And so I asked this woman, ‘It’s not your glasses, right?  You can’t read?’  And she said, ‘No, I can’t.’  And so once I realized people are hiding it I started asking, ‘What are the different ways in which you hide it?’  Looking at colors on medicine bottles; or colors on skim and whole milk.  I remember one guy telling me he was sent to buy grits, but that the picture on Quaker Oats and Grits is the same, and so he brought home the wrong thing, and that’s when his wife realized he can’t read.  Lots of people keep it from their spouse.  And I thought, ‘God, how alone must you feel, right?  How invisible and full of shame and sadness.’

And with children I think it’s even harder because they are so small.  So when they talk about like violence, or—things that even adults would have a hard time comprehending—you have to really develop a level of trust.… Like one boy who hadn’t graduated and he was talking about running with street gangs, and he totally accepted that he was making poor choices.  But at the same time he was very proud—in middle school he used to make honor roll, his teachers loved him… And so we got to talking further and I asked, ‘So what happened?’  His twin brother was shot in front of him.  And then it’s like of course he didn’t stick around in high school.   What would I do?  Or thinking about that kid who [robbed] the bus pass—I remember leaving that interview and thinking, ‘What would I have done if I was 11 years old and it was getting dark and I didn’t have a way to go home?’

Greg:  As you have put together this body of work, and have gotten to know so many children and families living in poverty—are there things that you feel like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe as a country we are doing A or B, or failing to do C?’

Kavitha: As a reporter I really believe it’s up to the community to decide what kind of community they want, and what kind of world they want to live in. Personally, yes, to see the amount of poverty, especially in DC, and to see what these children have to deal with—and yet we say, ‘Oh, why don’t they succeed?’  When I hear that I just feel [like] people are operating without all the facts.  And so that’s where I think my role comes in—I will show you a different side that you are not seeing.  I will present people and voices.  Any time you say, ‘People are lazy,’ I’ll show you someone who’s working really, really hard, and it’s just—incredibly hard.  And listen to those stories too.  So in the mix of all of the stories you hear about all of these different viewpoints and policy debates, I want you to think of a person—a mother, a child, a parent who doesn’t have the skills or the training, or is paid low wages…

Greg:  When it comes to the intersection of poverty and education, are there things that you think are missing from the current debate about education reform?

Kavitha: When people talk about education reform—we should have implemented reforms a long time ago.  Because it’s clear our kids are not learning. But the reality is that poverty does affect these kids. And I remember someone said to me many years ago, ‘Well in D.C., we have a social worker and we have a guidance counselor and serve breakfast in school.’  Yes, except you’ve got one social worker for 200 children.  There are a lot of poverty issues that spill into the schools—whether it’s violence, teen pregnancy, hunger, stress of things they see at home, substance abuse, homelessness, obesity. I did a series on obesity, and teachers were talking about how it’s hard to schedule classes. If a class is on the third floor, some kids can’t walk up to the third floor. Suddenly, they have to rearrange classes. Or, I remember this little child saying, ‘I need to go to the bathroom often.’ Because his belly is so big, it pushes down on his bladder. And the teacher is like, ‘No, you can’t go. What is this? You keep going to the bathroom.’ And so there are these kinds of misunderstandings. That’s the challenge of poverty reporting—there is no simple A to B to C line.

Greg: As a DC resident and as a reporter, what’s most stunning to you about the economic divide and the lack of awareness about what people are experiencing?

Kavitha: I think that the lack of awareness goes both ways. A lot of the kids I speak to have no idea that people care west of the [Anacostia] River, or want them to do well in school. I remember once, ‘Beating the Odds’ listeners had called and offered money to help a student. And when I told the student she said, ‘Why would a white person care about me?’  I remember another white lady called me and she said, ‘You know, this story really touched me because I went to Georgetown University, and I met my husband there, and he was living in his car.’ And when I told that to a student I was interviewing she said, ‘That can’t be possible. White people don’t live in cars.’  So there are all these kinds of misconceptions.

But telling these stories through children [results in] tons of listeners calling up and saying, ‘We want to help.’ They want to donate money, time, or volunteer.  After that kid who robbed the wallet for a bus pass, several people called up and said, ‘We want to donate bus passes to him so he can get home.’ Homeless college kids, people are like, ‘We want to invite them for Thanksgiving so they have a place to stay’ or ‘For summer, I want them to have my basement apartment.’ The divide comes when people ascribe fault. I remember doing a story on two kids—one was homeless, lived in a shelter and was doing really well, and talked about how he had to pack up all the time and it was so hard.  A ton of people reached out to help, to give him money for school.  But then the other boy talked about how [in the past] he had assaulted someone, did drugs, went to jail.  He was like 19 or 20 now and had really turned his life around and was mentoring other kids. No one called about him.

Greg: As we enter 2016, potential presidential candidates are already talking about poverty and it looks like it will be a campaign issue.  What are your hopes and fears for how the media might cover it?

Kavitha: I hope that poverty is covered in terms of real people, not just in a theoretical way in terms of policies. I hope people who have solutions and programs that work are highlighted, so people don’t think this is an issue that cannot be tackled. I hope the diversity of poverty is covered, and I don’t mean that it affects all races. But how does poverty play out differently in the suburbs? What is it like for the newly poor versus the generationally poor? The elderly versus children? The working poor? There are just so many aspects to get at this issue.

Greg: Thanks for all of your great work and for talking to us.

You can follow Kavitha Cardoza @KavithaCardoza.  The next Breaking Ground will be out later this year and you can check out previous pieces at breakingground.wamu.org.

In many ways, the District of Columbia has been an outlier in its approach to TANF, a federal block grant program meant to provide income assistance, job training, and other services to low-income families with children.  When other states instituted time limits on how long a family could receive benefits, DC resisted and used local funds to allow families to stay in the program as long as their need remained.

However, when budget considerations made that approach less feasible, the District instituted a series of graduated cuts that reduced benefits for families’ receiving TANF for five years or more.  At the same time, the District engaged in a massive redesign effort to improve the services available to parents.  It recognized that the services needed to be better tailored to meeting the needs of all parents receiving TANF—including those who faced numerous barriers to work, ranging from disability and domestic violence to a lack of work experience.

But the redesign also had a catch—the families who had received benefits for five years or more would lose all access to the TANF safety net on a date certain.  That date certain is October 1, 2015.  This October, 6,000 District families—including 13,000 children—will lose their primary income source.  In the months that follow, more families will lose their income too as they reach the five-year TANF time limit.

The withholding of TANF cash help and services comes despite evidence that single parents in the District—the local population most likely to rely on TANF—face a higher rate of unemployment than their childless counterparts or parents with partners.  At the same time, studies in other states have found that parents who have stayed on TANF for many years are more likely to have significant barriers to employment, including low cognitive functioning, limited levels of education, and limited English proficiency.  The economic landscape in the District and pressures of single parenthood, combined with the barriers known to limit many long-term TANF participants, suggest that parents affected by the impending TANF cut will have a difficult time finding permanent, stable work that allows them to replace even their small monthly TANF benefit.  (It’s also important to note that even a small amount of cash assistance can make a significant difference in a family’s ability to cover basic expenses, such as buying necessary personal care items or school supplies for children.)

Moreover, the changes promised in the TANF redesign are not fully available to the parents who most need them.  Many of the parents subject to the full loss of benefits in October have spent months or years without being offered meaningful services by the DC government.  Wait times for these improved services can be as long as 10 to 11 months.  At the same time, those especially vulnerable parents who may not be ready to work due to other demands in their lives, such as managing the effects of domestic violence or caring for a sick family member, are without a clear path for stopping the clock on the time limits.

Although District law outlines exemptions from the TANF time limits for families experiencing certain types of hardships, the government has yet to propose regulations or publish any publicly-available policies to explain how and to whom these exemptions should be applied.  Without timely access to employment-related services, long-time TANF recipients who could find and maintain work if given the right assistance are effectively shut out of the reforms.  Likewise, without transparent, detailed standards for exemptions from the time limits, parents who could qualify may be overlooked by agency staff and unaware of their own rights.

In this environment, it is difficult to see how cutting families off of TANF in October will have anything but negative consequences.  Parents who lose eligibility for TANF will lose not just cash and services, but possibly also their priority access to subsidized child care.  Approximately 2,000 children between the ages of 0 and 3 are expected to be affected by the upcoming TANF cut.  Their parents are even less likely to find work if child care is no longer available at low or no cost.  The loss of income could put further stresses on the District’s already burdened systems for responding to homelessness and child welfare concerns while perpetuating the District’s notable level of income inequality.  There are also longer-term effects of this kind of deep poverty, including physical and mental health problems for children who are continually exposed to high levels of stress.

The DC government still has time to mitigate some of the effects of its flawed TANF time limit policy, if it acts soon.  It can change its TANF law to allow parents who have exceeded the program’s five-year time limit to remain able to access benefits and services until it can create a more reasonable approach to addressing these families’ needs.  With a delay of a year, the government could direct funds towards reducing the wait times for all TANF parents seeking to connect to employment-related services, so that the parents who could possibly benefit from this kind of help are realistically able to do so.  Government officials could also use this extra time to streamline and formalize the process of identifying families who should be exempted from the limits due to employment barriers.

The District’s long-term vision for its TANF program must recognize that reform does not have to penalize people in our city who are least likely to be able to bear its costs.

Ninety percent of a person’s brain development occurs before the age of five. This means that children’s experiences between the time they are born and the time they enter school are critically important for setting them on a path to success. Unfortunately, not all children have the supportive environment they need to thrive – especially children living in households where they are exposed to economic instability, domestic violence, child abuse, or significant mental health challenges.

The good news is that public policy can address these risk factors. The Maternal Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program is a proven solution that is helping parents provide the nurturing environment children need. In the program, home visitors – who can be health, social service, or child development professionals – work with expectant mothers and families with young children to assess their needs and to refer them to other services. They also provide coaching and parent education to promote healthy child development.

MIECHV has a strong track record of success. Rigorous evaluations and research of home visiting services demonstrates that the program ultimately improves health and saves money for taxpayers. The services lead to tangible results like better birth outcomes; improved child health; better educational attainment for moms; improved school readiness; reduced child abuse and neglect; and more economically self-sufficient families. In addition, the federal grant program has allowed the home visiting program to reach more people in states and tribal communities across the country; it has also helped connect home visiting with other early childhood services to ensure that families can access the continuum of social supports—from health services, to income support, to early education.

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MIECHV expiring due to a lack of congressional action would be devastating, as it serves some of the most vulnerable families in the country. Recent analysis found that most women participating in MIECHV-funded home visiting were young, single parents who did not have formal schooling beyond high school. The majority of these women made less than $1,000 a month on their own.

These families know how critical MIECHV support can be. Christina had a challenging upbringing in a home where she experienced abuse, homelessness, and poverty. When she became pregnant at age 15, she enrolled in the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) program. Throughout her pregnancy and the first two years of her child’s life, she received regular visits from a trained nurse who monitored their health. The nurse also provided support and guidance to ensure that Christina’s baby achieved the appropriate developmental milestones. Participating in NFP gave Christina the skills and confidence to be a good parent and also achieve her own life goals – she has since been able to complete her high school education and is on a path toward success for herself and her child.

Authorization for MIECHV expires at the end of March and without action from Congress, states and tribes will be unable maintain services for all of the children and families served by MIECHV funded home visiting. In order to prevent this harm to already vulnerable families, Congress must act quickly to reauthorize MIECHV at current funding levels before it expires on March 31^st.

Evidence-based home visiting is a solution that improves the lives of thousands of families across the country. Failing to extend this critical lifeline now is unacceptable. Congress must reauthorize MIECHV to create more opportunities for low-income children and their families to thrive.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “America is going to hell if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.”

Today, 150 years after the end of slavery, every other black baby in America is poor. Every third Hispanic baby is poor. Nearly every fourth rural child is poor. All told, there are 14.7 million poor children and 6.5 million extremely poor children in the United States of America. It is a national disgrace that such an unconscionably large number of children are homeless, hungry and living in poverty in a country with the world’s largest economy.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

It is way past time for a critical mass of Americans to confront the hypocrisy of America’s pretension to be a fair playing field while almost 15 million children languish in poverty. Sadly, politics too often trumps good policy, moral decency and responsibility to the next generation and the nation’s future.

But the Children’s Defense Fund has just released a groundbreaking report, Ending Child Poverty Now, showing how — for the first time — we can massively reduce this scourge. The CDF’s plan would cut child poverty overall by 60 percent, shrink black child poverty by 72 percent, and improve economic circumstances for 97 percent of poor children – all at a cost of $77.2 billion a year, a relative pittance.

By pursuing these policies immediately, we would not only improve the lives and futures of millions of children; over the long term, we would save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Child poverty costs our country about half a trillion dollars a year, six times more than what it would cost to significantly reduce child poverty and improve the future for millions of children, their parents and the country.

In its report, the CDF has identified multiple ways to pay for these changes without increasing the federal deficit, such as closing tax loopholes and cutting corporate subsidies. The report concludes that by investing another two percent of the federal budget to improve programs and policies we already know work – such as parental employment, making work pay and ensuring that children’s basic needs are met – the solution to ending child poverty is within reach.

Children have only one childhood — they can’t wait. It’s time to act with urgency and, together, ensure that all God’s children have the opportunity to reach their potential. If we love America, and we love our children, we must all stand against the excessive greed that tramples the millions of children entrusted to our care.

Read the report at the Children’s Defense Fund website, and sign up to receive updates about how you can fight for a real plan to reduce child poverty by 60 percent right now.

Importantly, most of these programmatic improvements can be made even without congressional action or more federal funding.

Nearly 4 million children live in families that receive federal rental assistance.  But just 15 percent of the kids whose families receive rent subsidies through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) three major rental assistance programs — the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, public housing, and Section 8 Project-Based Rental Assistance — live in high-opportunity neighborhoods with access to good schools, safe streets, and high employment rates.

More kids in assisted families — 18 percent — live in extreme-poverty neighborhoods, where at least 40 percent of the residents are poor.

The research shows the difference location can make.  Kids who are exposed to extremely poor and violent neighborhoods often suffer cognitive, health, and academic deficiencies, while those who grow up in safer neighborhoods with better schools fare better.

Policymakers have tried for several decades to reduce the concentration of low-income families receiving federal rental assistance in distressed neighborhoods.  To improve these families’ access to higher-opportunity neighborhoods, they’ve relied increasingly on housing vouchers (rather than housing projects that often are in very poor, segregated neighborhoods) to give families greater choice in where to live.

The HCV program has performed much better than HUD’s project-based rental assistance programs in enabling more low-income families with children to live in lower-poverty neighborhoods (see chart).  Having a housing voucher also substantially reduces a family’s likelihood of living in an extreme-poverty neighborhood.

Nevertheless, a quarter of a million children in the HCV program live in these troubled neighborhoods.  The HCV program simply doesn’t deliver on its potential to expand children’s access to good schools in safe neighborhoods.

Two near-term goals for federal rental assistance programs could help improve on this track record:  1) the programs should provide greater opportunities for families to choose affordable housing outside of extreme-poverty neighborhoods; and 2) they should provide better access for families to low-poverty, safe communities with better-performing schools.

We can make substantial progress toward these goals in the next few years.

Federal, state, and local agencies can take four key actions to help more families live in better locations:

• Create stronger incentives for local and state housing agencies to help families move to better neighborhoods.  HUD could provide incentives for agencies to reduce the share of families using vouchers in extreme-poverty areas and increase the share living in low-poverty, high-opportunity areas in three ways: 1) give added weight to location outcomes in measuring agency performance; 2) reinforce these changes with a strong fair housing rule — one that requires recipients of federal housing and community development funds from HUD to take steps that foster more inclusive communities; and 3) pay additional administrative fees to those agencies that help families move to high-opportunity areas.

• Modify policies that discourage families from living in higher-opportunity communities. Currently, various policies unintentionally encourage families with housing vouchers to use them in poor neighborhoods that are often racially segregated. (Most extremely poor neighborhoods are predominantly African American and/or Latino). For example, the caps on rental subsidy amounts often are too low to enable families to rent units in areas in more demand; HUD should set those caps for smaller geographic areas than it does currently so they better reflect local price trends.  Also, agencies should be required to identify available units in lower-poverty communities and extend the search period for families seeking to move to these communities.

• Minimize jurisdictional barriers in the HCV program that make it more difficult for families to choose to live in high-opportunity communities. Nearly all of the largest metro areas have one agency that administers the Housing Choice Voucher program in the central city and one or more that serve suburban cities and towns. This separation makes it harder for families to move to safe neighborhoods with high-performing schools. HUD should encourage agencies in the same metropolitan area to unify their program operations and simplify “portability” procedures to use vouchers in areas served by other agencies.

• Better assist families in using vouchers to live in high-opportunity areas. State and local governments and housing agencies should adopt policies—such as targeted tax incentives and laws prohibiting discrimination against voucher holders—that expand the number of landlords participating in the HCV program in safe, low-poverty neighborhoods with well-performing schools.  These reforms would increase the number of housing choices available to families in these neighborhoods.   Programs such as mobility counseling — supported by state or local funds or philanthropy — could also help interested families use their vouchers in these communities.

Kids benefit from living in safer neighborhoods with good schools, and the nation benefits when children have better life outcomes.  These changes to the HCV program would make a big difference for many of the 2.4 million children in families that currently use housing vouchers.

Most states operate CCDF as a voucher program.  Eligible parents use vouchers to offset the cost of child care—the fee for each family is determined on a sliding scale basis set by each state. Child care centers that accept vouchers are paid through a combination of voucher reimbursements and family fees.

Many states are now attempting to improve quality in their CCDF child care programs through “quality rating and improvement systems” (QRIS).  While QRIS guidelines vary among states, they often feature a rating system based on progressively higher quality standards.  In many states, the higher a center is rated, the more money a center receives for each voucher.  By tying voucher reimbursement rates to these ratings, the system is designed to incentivize and ultimately fund quality improvements for participating centers.

However, achieving a higher rating in order to receive more money requires a significant capital investment. We at the Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative (MLICCI) are concerned that many childcare facilities serving low-income families—already struggling to offer desperately needed services to even a fraction of the eligible children—cannot afford the initial investment that is necessary to achieve higher QRIS ratings. It amounts to a Catch-22: for too many centers, the QRIS incentive system is in fact an insurmountable financial obstacle to receiving the financial assistance they need to serve vulnerable children.

To test this concern, we conducted Step-Up, a project designed to demonstrate what centers serving low-income families would have to do to achieve higher quality ratings and greater reimbursement rates in Mississippi. While QRIS systems vary by state, our findings are relevant for any state that finances quality improvements through boosted reimbursement rates—which is the vast majority of states.

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Step-Up selected 16 representative centers from around the state, all serving low-income working families.  We walked the centers through the QRIS requirements and documented what actions were necessary to attain higher quality ratings. Together, we developed comprehensive, detailed quality improvement plans; and the centers received significant financial resources—provided by MLICCI through a grant from the Kellogg Foundation—to fund the improvements.

The interventions worked. All participating centers achieved higher quality rankings. But it was also very clear—and hardly surprising—that low-income childcare facilities with limited resources never would have been able to make these quality improvements without Step-Up funding.  Average cost? $11,475 per classroom, which included monies to buy furniture and equipment, and renovate interior classroom spaces and exterior playground spaces.

In addition to requiring an initial investment that is often prohibitive, the QRIS system has a second serious flaw: its reimbursement rates for vouchers are significantly below what is needed to fund QRIS improvements. In Mississippi, the rates begin at just 62% of the state’s market rate for child care. When a center improves to a 2-star rating, it receives a reimbursement of 69% of the market rate; 3-stars merit a 79% reimbursement rate. Even at the highest 5-star rating—which only 11 out of 1,600 licensed centers in Mississippi have attained—a center receives only 87% of the state’s market rate for child care.

Finally, reimbursement rates are paid only for active child care subsidies. With only 1 in 6 eligible children receiving a voucher, the number of higher reimbursements is simply too small to finance the quality improvements. In fact, we estimate that it would have taken about 4 years for the child care centers in the Step-Up project to recoup their initial investment.

Quality improvements are indeed important—important enough to warrant the additional investment required.  But we cannot keep pretending that these improvements can be paid for out of the current pool of meager resources.  If we do, then even fewer children will be served by CCDF.  Child care centers serving low-income families will either opt-out if the quality improvements are voluntary, or be priced-out of existence if they are mandatory.  Either of these outcomes will exacerbate the struggles of the working poor.

This nation needs to do more than just talk about the need for quality, affordable childcare for all children—it needs to make a real commitment.

“As time went on, I saw how my own country, the place where I lived, was actually a bad place. I would see people fight and I thought that would be my life. I thought, that’s me–then I turned 4.”

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But in the opinion of Ulises and his parents, the difference in the United States is opportunity.

My Brother’s Keeper: Toward a More Inclusive Nation

Lisalyn R. Jacobs: Can My Brother’s Keeper Fulfill Its Promise Without Keeping Sisters Too?

The President’s announcement of the My Brother’s Keeper (MBK) initiative did not surprise me.  I advocate on behalf of a women’s rights organization; I worked through several sessions of Congress with the offices of then-Senator Barack Obama and Representative Danny Davis on their fatherhood bill.

I was, however, frustrated by the announcement and I remain so.

The initiative contemplates a public-private partnership with the federal government primarily using the power of the bully pulpit – though Administration officials have also taken part in community outreach and listening sessions, and spent a considerable amount of time and effort to gather, synthesize, evaluate and submit a first report to the President.  But MBK looks past struggling girls and at-risk young women while urging that time and resources be spent on at-risk boys and young men.

Let me be clear:  I think that programming that supports children and young men and women in at-risk communities is vital, and desperately needed.  I salute the President for acknowledging the need for a focus on the needs of youth in communities that are—as we have seen in Ferguson this summer—under siege.

What troubles me, however, are two things:  The suggestion that the problems being faced by boys and young men of color are so unique – or so much worse than those that girls and young women face – that they need their own initiative; and the related but in some ways more dangerous idea that the violence that young men face is more deserving of focused attention.

In a recent editorial, the Washington Post summarized the “men of color are at greatest risk” argument this way:  “That minority men are at disproportionate risk throughout their lives has largely been seen as unavoidable.”

What this observation fails to acknowledge is that the minority males that are the focus of MBK live in places where crime rates are high, homicides are commonplace, and schools are oftentimes failing, and consequently, that these are problems for everyone in the community:  struggling families and their boys and girls, alike.

For instance, schools compound the problem by disproportionately sanctioning youth of color, from preschool age and up. Black girls are suspended at rates higher than girls of any other race and most racial groupings of boys as well. The fact that the suspension rate for African American boys is 20 percent – versus a 12 percent rate for black girls – should send a message that the education system needs to do better by all youth of color; not that young men should be the chief focus of the Administration’s first major initiative to examine the enduring and entrenched problems experienced by youth of color in at-risk communities.

Additionally, whether you look at educational attainment or economic prospects, black and Hispanic men and women are doing worse both in absolute terms and relative to their white counterparts.

Nevertheless, I’ve encountered too many people who have fallen prey to the notion that MBK and similar programs that exclude or marginalize at-risk girls are the solution. Two problems stem from this view:  1) providing more opportunities in at-risk communities will not change the preconceptions and bias that felled Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, and most recently Mike Brown; 2) focusing on young men exclusively (or primarily) overlooks the fact that young women are similarly situated and that the unique challenges they face might very well be ignored by this type of “trickle down” programming.  To paraphrase a post-Ferguson tweet I saw recently, “you can’t [save just] half the community.”

People point to the salience of the verdict in the Trayvon Martin murder case, and now, the killing of Mike Brown to explain the narrow focus of MBK on young men.  The concern in these cases grows, at least partially, out of this country’s ugly past, which is strewn with black and brown bodies that were lynched or otherwise dispatched for reasons trivial to non-existent, and never with the sanction of a court.  So, it’s crucial to recall that black women were lynched, too, with the earliest records dating back to the late 19^th century.  And it’s equally important to recognize that women of color, including trans women, continue to be brutalized and murdered, whether by law enforcement or private citizens (see here, here, and here).  Moreover, we cannot hope to begin the work of dismantling the systems that permit this kind of institutionalized oppression to continue unless we acknowledge that Asian, Arab, Latino, and Native communities are at-risk as well.

As we observe the 20^th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act this month, it’s important to point out that the type of violence that women of color experience is simultaneously similar to and distinct from the kind of violence most often experienced by men.  Young women in many of the above-mentioned communities also struggle with staggering levels of domestic violence and sexual assault (see also here).   This violence is particularly difficult to identify and respond to because of underreporting, which is connected to the pervasive levels of police mistrust in of color, Native, immigrant, and LGBT communities.  And, as we’ve been reminded recently, the failure to report can also be a result of crimes of sexual violence being perpetrated by the police.

There is a deep reservoir of expertise within the Administration when it comes to providing culturally appropriate services in communities that are rightfully dubious of law enforcement, and supports for children who have witnessed violence.  These are among the approaches that MBK should assess and replicate in the months ahead.  As the Administration contemplates the way forward for MBK, it is also vital that the program includes a focus on the ways in which violence and other obstacles – including poverty, maternal morbidity, reproductive justice, underemployment, limited access to apprenticeships and job training – manifest in the lives of girls and young women of color.  Until both MBK and its well-financed external counterpart, the Boys and Men of Color Initiative, widen their focus to include girls and young women of color, at-risk communities will have neither the tools nor the resources necessary to ensure that they can move forward and flourish.   Make no mistake:  there is no going forward, unless we all go forward together – boys and girls, young men and young women, are our collective future.

The fact is that the challenges at-risk boys and girls face are community challenges.  Until we are all safe and prospering, none of us will be.

Lisalyn R. Jacobs is V.P. of Government Relations at Legal Momentum.  She leads the organization’s federal advocacy on violence against women, poverty, and economic issues.  A single mother, she lives in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. with her 6 year-old son. On Twitter:  @LRockL

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Sam Fulwood III: My Brother’s Keeper: Toward a More Inclusive Nation

Not long after President Obama announced his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, an ambitious effort to rally public and private support for boys and men of color, a group of concerned activists mounted a high-visibility campaign to alter – some might say, to undermine – the White House plan.  Surprisingly, this rear-guard action came, not from the ranks of right-wing conservatives, but from the President’s skeptical, left-most flank.

The African American Policy Forum, which describes itself as “an innovative think tank connecting academics, activists, and policy-makers to dismantle structural inequality and engage new ideas and perspectives to transform public discourse and policy,” assumed leadership in the effort to compel the White House to include women and girls in the “My Brother’s Keeper” Initiative.  The group collected signatures of more than 1,000 women of color demanding gender equality in the President’s program and rallied 200 black men to publish an open letter in a major newspaper.

While their argument packs the emotional wallop of seemingly protecting the interest of girls and women, the logic is faulty and the public shaming tactic is divisively misguided. Arguments that President Obama’s initiative to support boys and men of color is somehow disrespecting or ignoring the plight of black girls and women strikes a hollow and discordant note. Worse yet, it comes from within the ranks of those who profess to share the President’s ultimate objective of creating a fairer society and more opportunity for all.

To be clear, those critical of the “My Brother’s Keeper” effort are focused on tactics and resources, not the end goal. Like politicians, social activists must marshal money and media attention to drive public support to its cause. In and of itself, that’s neither a good, nor bad thing; it’s the way of the public policy world.

But public policy is just that, serving the greater good of the entire society. If the policy is well-crafted and executed, the larger society will benefit.  The acid test of a targeted effort, such as “My Brother’s Keeper” would be whether all – not just boys and men of color – prosper. True, women and girls of color, too, have challenges deserving focused attention. So do communities of immigrants and people with disabilities and folks in the LGBT communities.

But in a universe of short attention spans and limited (to nonexistent) resources, can we target all at once? Where does the President (or any socially conscious group) draw a line when seeking to reach the greatest public policy end?  Or, stated another way, is support for one cause, by definition an affront to another?  It doesn’t have to be.

Indeed, such fallacious zero-sum thinking is at the heart of the opposition to the “My Brother’s Keeper” Initiative. “My Brother’s Keeper” draws one set of targeted efforts to protect boys and men of color, but there’s nothing about it that excludes anyone – including women and girls.  Quite the contrary, if the President’s initiative is successful, the totality of America will benefit.

Valerie Jarrett, the Senior Advisor to the President, argues that line of reasoning in defending the White House and pointing out its efforts to assist girls and women. “I think the flaw in logic is not understanding that this is not either/or, this is both/and,” Jarrett said in a recent appearance television interview to defend the initiative.

The same logic undergirded a recent White House Summit on Working Families, where the President made it clear his focus is on improving the life opportunities for all Americans, including women and girls.

And here is a critical point:  All too often, these issues are thought of as women’s issues, which I guess means you can kind of scoot them aside a little bit.  At a time when women are nearly half of our workforce, among our most skilled workers, are the primary breadwinners in more families than ever before, anything that makes life harder for women makes life harder for families and makes life harder for children.  When women succeed, America succeeds, so there’s no such thing as a women’s issue. . . .This is a family issue and an American issue — these are commonsense issues.

john a. powell, director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California at Berkeley, and Maya Rockeymore, chief executive of the Center for Global Policy Solutions, are convincing in their support of “My Brother’s Keeper’s” targeted approach.   In an essay for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, they draw an analogy to public debates over to the Americans with Disabilities Act, which became law in 1990 and outlawed discrimination based on disability and provided protections for the disabled. It was a targeted law that proved to be beneficial to a much larger, public body. They write:

We can understand this idea if we think of individuals who are in a wheelchair trying to reach an upper floor. An escalator will not support those individuals in the same way as it would those who are able-bodied. It is not the disabled group that needs fixing but the structure. The goal is to convey everyone to the upper floor, and it is universal. But the strategy to achieve this goal must be targeted toward the disabled individuals to address their circumstances, which differ from those of other groups. We call this strategy “targeted universalism.”

Does this mean that we should only focus on the individuals in the wheelchair? No.

But neither does it mean that we treat all groups attempting to get to the upper floor the same. A targeted universalism approach is concerned about the mobility of all groups while recognizing that some groups will require targeted strategies to get there.

Should we remain concerned about groups that are still not being targeted or well served, such as women and girls of color? The simple answer is yes.

Notice that if we build an elevator, it benefits not only the wheelchair-bound group but also everybody else. When we transform structures to work for marginalized groups, it can often benefit all groups, and it certainly doesn’t harm any of them, including those with unlimited mobility.

Unfortunately, rational reasoning falls hard on the ears of advocates who imagine an overflowing gravy train of administration focus on men and boys of color and their exclusion from the philanthropic largess. They’re wrong. And worse, in their crabs-in-a-barrel attacks, they do harm to an initiative that offers promise to help move us toward a fairer, more inclusive nation.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

Part of this work involves identifying areas where poverty is prevalent and finding out communities are particularly affected. This week, we learned that the national poverty rate fell slightly in 2013, with particular gains among children. However, we know that the national poverty rate doesn’t tell the whole story. We continue to see the same regional disparities in poverty rates, as many states (and policymakers) refuse to make the investments that this country needs to fight poverty.

In order to make the Census data more easily accessible and usable, we’ve updated our interactive map. We believe data is a key tool to hold policymakers accountable and to promote policies that we know can reduce poverty.  You can use these data to write letters to the editor, email or call your elected officials, and share your personal story.

Using our interactive map, you can see the overall poverty rate in your state as well as state poverty rates for women, children, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic/Latino Americans. Starting with this year’s data, you can also see the poverty rate in your congressional district, including child poverty and poverty rates by race/ethnicity and gender.

NOTE: The 2013 state and congressional district-level data distributed by the Census’s American Community Survey include rates for demographic subgroups (African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latino Americans). The poverty rates for these demographic sub-groups should be interpreted with care because due to relatively small sample sizes for these groups, there are sometimes wide margins of error around the calculated poverty rates. This is particularly true in low-population states and districts. The rates for sub-groups should therefore be taken as estimates.

Here is some of the data you can find:

Which states have the highest overall poverty rates?

Which states have the lowest overall poverty rates?

Which states have the highest child poverty rates?

Which states have the lowest child poverty rates?

Make sure to visit our interactive map to learn more!

Worth celebrating, right?

Hardly. While the reduction in poverty might be significant from a statistical perspective, it’s not from a people’s perspective: 15 percent of Americans lived in poverty in 2012; 14.5 percent in 2013—more than 45 million Americans lived in poverty in each of those years.  Further, historic levels of income inequality remain unchanged, with incomes flat for low- and middle-income Americans.

What is most frustrating, tragic, infuriating—pick your adjective—about this status quo that wastes so much human potential, is the fact that we know the kinds of policies and actions that would not only reduce poverty, but reduce it dramatically.

TalkPoverty.org asked a group of scholars and activists what we need to do to achieve Census numbers that we can truly get excited about.  Their responses reveal some of the rigorous research that should inform our priorities and policy choices, and also widespread activism that isn’t waiting on an anti-poverty movement, it’s building one.

Hilary Hoynes: “Remember the successes and get behind policies that work.”
Sarita Gupta: ‘What are you doing in this movement and can you do more?’
Dr. Deborah Frank: How Poverty Affects Children’s Health
Deepak Bhargava: Change this Broken System
Valerie Wilson: ‘Policymakers have been slow to use data to inform their agenda’
Sally Steenland: ‘Infusing grassroots protests and political advocacy with righteous indignation’
Alice O’Connor: Half the Battle
Deirdra Reed: ‘This is not your grandma’s skid-row poverty’

Hilary Hoynes: “Remember the successes and get behind policies that work.”

The Census poverty release this week contained some good news – particularly notable is that poverty rates fell significantly for children – but overall poverty rates remain high relative to their levels prior to the Great Recession.

Looking over the longer term, poverty can be best described as remaining stubbornly high over the past decades. Some conclude that this lack of progress in our fight against poverty implies a failure of our safety net. However, this misses the important countervailing force of stagnant or declining wages; in this light, the lack of a rise in poverty over the past 20 years represents (sadly) somewhat of an achievement for public policy. We have the data to know “what works” against poverty and inequality—and that our policies truly matter. A federal minimum wage increase to $10.10 would lift 4.6 million people out of poverty. The Earned Income Tax Credit, together with the Child Tax Credit, lifts roughly 4.7 million children or 9 million persons above the poverty line annually; SNAP raises 2.2 million children or 5 million persons above poverty. Increasing incomes for these families leads to improvements in health and children’s well-being.

We need to remember the successes and get behind policies that work.

Hilary Hoynes is a Professor of Public Policy and Economics and holds the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the Goldman School of Public Policy at University of California, Berkeley.

Sarita Gupta: ‘What are you doing in this movement and can you do more?’

The fight against poverty is already here, it’s happening, and it can work if we challenge ourselves to focus on the real and immediate solutions that help everyday working people create a pathway to economic stability.

The good news is, we’ve already begun to do that in cities and states across the country. In Massachusetts, we passed a domestic workers bill of rights designed to protect home care workers against poverty wages and working conditions. In San Francisco, we’re working to pass a retail workers bill of rights aimed at tackling the erratic, on-call scheduling practices that keep hourly and shift workers in a constant cycle of financial unpredictability. In Illinois, Connecticut and Oregon, we’re piloting a fair-share fee legislation that requires businesses that cheat their workers out of wages to pay a fee to offset their role in keeping employees in poverty.

So we’re making strides, but there’s still so much work to be done if we are to create more good jobs that pay good wages, invest in our communities, and strengthen the voice that every day people have in our democracy.  We need you, the reader, to ask yourself what you are doing in this movement and can you do more?  That’s how we’ll achieve the change we seek.

Sarita Gupta is the executive director of Jobs With Justice, an organization leading the fight for workers’ rights and an economy that benefits everyone.

Dr. Deborah Frank: How Poverty Affects Children’s Health

To me, a pediatrician for 38 years, I know the 2013 poverty numbers represent names and faces, including the poorest Americans – infants and toddlers and their families. Doctors know that poverty stacks the odds against children in the womb with poor nutrition and high levels of stress hormones, altering the intrauterine environment and leading to early deliveries and low birth weight.

Poverty’s toxicity does not end at birth. At Children’s HealthWatch, my pediatric and public health colleagues and I have conducted extensive research since 1998 on children up to their fourth birthday in five urban hospitals across the country.  We and other researchers showed that children in families who experience the most basic level of material hardships associated with poverty — not enough nutritious food, inadequate or inconsistent access to lighting, heating or cooling, and unstable housing — suffer negative health and development effects, which constrain the next generation’s opportunities to live healthy lives as successful participants in education and the workforce.

Children in poverty cannot wait for the slow recovery from the 2009 recession to finally arrive. We need to expand and protect programs to keep all our children nourished, warm and safely housed. It is not the federal deficit I worry about, but the preventable and treatable deficits in the bodies and brains of America’s young children.

Dr. Deborah Frank is the Founder and Principal Investigator at Children’s HealthWatch, and professor of Child Health and Well-being in the Department of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine.

Deepak Bhargava: Change this Broken System

It is outrageous that in the richest country in the history of the world, the vast majority of people are never more than a degree away from poverty.  New data shows that a good job has the power to move that needle in the right direction for children.

On Tuesday, the Census Bureau released data showing the child poverty rate has decreased for the first time since 2000. In 2013, enough parents were able to find full-time, year-round work to help 1.4 million children escape poverty.

At the Center for Community Change, the communities we work with know that the best anti-poverty program is a job that pays enough to allow families to make ends meet. Unfortunately, our broken labor market delivers too few jobs and unfair pay in exchange for hard work. We live in a system where no matter how much money people’s work brings into their company, they get paid as little as the CEO can get away with, and when they work harder, the increased wealth they produce goes right into the CEO’s pocket or company coffers.

Some of the people we are working with to change this broken system include carwashers in New York City; the formerly incarcerated in Texas; unemployed people in Washington, DC; and retail workers in Minnesota.  The Center for Community Change is working with grassroots groups fighting for access to good jobs and good wages in over 20 states.

People work in order to make the future brighter for their kids and more secure for their families.  America needs jobs that pay enough for people to earn a decent living and to have a decent life.

Deepak Bhargava is Executive Director of the Center for Community Change.

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We know that nearly 70 percent of the income of Americans in the bottom fifth is tied to work, either in the form of wages, employer-provided benefits, or tax credits that are dependent on work (such as the Earned Income Tax Credit).  We also know that in the past year, real hourly wages declined for all workers except those in the bottom 10 percent of the wage distribution, and that the increase for these low-wage workers was due to the states that raised their minimum wages.

This week’s Census report provides an update of our nation’s progress toward greater racial economic equality.  On the positive side, between 2012 and 2013, Latinos experienced a larger decline in poverty and a larger increase in median household income than any other group.  Much of the decline in poverty occurred among children – the poverty rate for Latino children is down 3.4 percentage points to 30.3 percent.  But the rate of poverty among Latino children is still 2.8 times higher than that of whites.  Still,  that isn’t the worst news from the Census.  While child poverty declined for nearly all groups of children, it stands at an astounding 38.3 percent for African American children – 3.6 times the rate for white children.

Reducing child poverty is as much about increasing employment and wages as anything else.  Unfortunately, progress toward greater racial equity in either of these areas has been painfully slow during the recovery, and policymakers have been slow to use data to inform their agenda.

Valerie Wilson is director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (PREE), a nationally recognized source for expert reports and policy analyses on the economic condition of America’s people of color.

Sally Steenland: ‘Infusing grassroots protests and political advocacy with righteous indignation’

The new poverty numbers released by the government show no statistical change in the number of Americans living in poverty: 45.3 million. That number is way too high. And, although it’s been stuck there for several years, we know how to reduce poverty in this country—with policies that make a measurable difference in people’s lives, like raising the minimum wage, providing paid leave and paid sick days, expanding Medicaid, and investing in child care and pre-K programs.

Another thing many of us know:  faith advocacy organizations are on the front lines working to reduce poverty. Faith communities see the human suffering that comes from living in poverty, along with the economic and social injustices that lead to being poor.  That is why faith-based groups are infusing grassroots protests and political advocacy with righteous indignation across the country.

Moral Mondays is fighting for a living wage, fair labor practices, Medicaid expansion, and other policies that recognize human dignity and the importance of family. Interfaith Worker Justice is leading the charge against wage theft and setting up worker centers across the country to fight for workers’ rights.

Along with PICO, NETWORK, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and others, faith-based advocates give each of us an opportunity to help reduce poverty. Whether we get involved on an individual, community, state, or national level, each of us can do our part and put our values into practice.

Sally Steenland is Director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress

Alice O’Connor: Half the Battle

This week’s release of the predictably dire annual poverty statistics has provided yet another occasion to gin up the narrative of “big government failure” that blames “trillions” in social spending for fostering the behavior that makes and keeps people poor.  Liberal advocates have done a good job of countering that narrative, with evidence of just how much higher—roughly double—measured poverty would be without the legacy of increased social spending the War on Poverty helped to launch.

But today’s anti-poverty activists have also lost sight of the most powerful weapons unleashed by the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), signed 50 years ago in August 1964.  One was macroeconomic policy.  The Council of Economic Advisers linked fighting poverty to its number one policy priority of pushing the economy to its full-employment growth potential—down from the unacceptably high 5.5% to 4% unemployment—which, when combined with robust anti-discrimination, minimum wage, and labor standards, would put workers in better position to combat poverty wages, and everyone in a better position to get a decent paying job.

The other was participatory democracy, embedded in the EOA’s mandate to assure “maximum feasible participation” among the poor in local community action agencies, but more importantly realized in the legacy of grassroots organizing and institution-building that empowered poor people to demand access to the educational and job opportunities, social and legal services, and political representation more affluent Americans had come to expect.

The War on Poverty certainly didn’t get everything right.  But the view it offers of the battlefield, then and now, does tell us where and how much more broadly—beyond defending the safety net and raising the minimum wage—we need to set the sights of an economic justice agenda.

Author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History, Alice O’Connor is professor of history at the University of California Santa Barbara.


Deirdra Reed: ‘This is not your grandma’s skid-row poverty’

One in every seven women lives in poverty. This is not and cannot be thought of as your grandma’s “skid row” poverty. This is post-recession, soccer mom poverty. Look at your Facebook friends list and count.  Every seventh (or every one) of those women may be working full-time and still struggling to make ends meet.

I am a woman of color, a working mother (and self-declared Southern Belle). As working women, we should take the U.S. Census Bureau report as confirmation that the economic pressure we feel is real; and we should hold our elected officials accountable for their part in job creation and passing policies that support family-sustaining wages.

As a Senior Organizer with the Center for Community Change, I have been working with community-based groups all year to empower women like myself to band together as we fight for good jobs with good wages, the end of income inequality, and the chance to have a secure retirement future.

At North Carolina Fair Share, a group of women who are recently retired or close-to-retirement are organizing to protect and expand Social Security, with a new credit just for caregivers.

In Atlanta, 9 to 5 and the Racial Justice Action Center’s Women on the Rise program are organizing working-age women, most of whom are heads of households, around the way that poverty is criminalized. For example, for a service industry worker who’s stretching to make it to the end of the month, a parking ticket can turn into thousands of dollars in fines and an arrest warrant.   Someone with means would just pay the ticket. Someone without means could lose everything.

In Alabama, members of the Federation of Childcare Providers of Alabama (FOCAL), most of whom are women who provide childcare in their homes, are organizing to expand Medicaid to help the families that they serve.

I hope next year, our work will have had a big impact in reducing the poverty numbers.  And I hope you will join us.

Deirdra Reed is a Senior Organizer with the Center for Community Change.

Earlier this week, the House took a step in the right direction by passing a bill to reauthorize the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which is the primary source of funding to help subsidize child care costs for low-income families. Given that the Senate passed a similar bill last spring, it’s likely to see the President’s desk soon. The program—last modified in 1996 as part of welfare reform—is badly in need of updating to reflect that child care is not only a work support, but also plays an important role in preparing children for school.

The bill makes important changes to the child care system, requiring minimum health and safety standards, background checks for providers, regular monitoring visits, and information to parents so they are aware of past violations. Such changes are long overdue: a number of children have died or sustained serious injuries in child care programs because basic health and safety measures were not in place. Child care standards are also embarrassingly low when compared to service industries like beauty salons and even pet grooming. The bill will apply mostly to children in publicly subsidized child care, but is likely to help raise minimum health and safety standards at all child care facilities and prevent taxpayer dollars from supporting unsafe child care.

In addition, the bill provides some stability by allowing children to remain in the program for a year. Under the current system, families often receive child care assistance for a few months at a time because of a small change in income or job schedule, or job loss. These changes will promote continuous access to early childhood programs for children, thereby helping parents sustain employment.

Child care reauthorization also reflects bipartisan support for early childhood programs—a rarity, given today’s gridlock. With just a week left before Congress adjourns for campaign season, the fact that Republicans and Democrats worked together—and across both houses of Congress—signals that early childhood education and promoting safety and quality is a priority for both parties.

While this bill marks an important step forward, there is still much work to do in order to provide affordable access to high-quality child care. The current child care subsidy program reaches just one in six eligible children. And while this bill puts minimum health and safety standards in place that will cost money to implement, there is no funding to defray costs for states. That means that improvements will come out of states’ block grant funds and reduce the number of children they can serve.  If we really want to expand the number of children who receive quality child care, we need to increase funding and tie those increases to high-quality programs.

Without additional funding, states also cannot raise the assistance amounts for families. Current levels are typically too low to support access to high-quality programs that effectively prepare children for school. With the average annual cost of a child care center ranging from $4,000 to $16,000 per year and rising, we run the risk of families turning to the unregulated and sometimes illegal child care market, which is of questionable quality.

It’s also time to move the child care conversation past health and safety standards and consider how to help families access high-quality child care—child care that goes beyond safe, custodial care to support children’s development and school readiness.

We often talk about early learning in the context of efforts to expand access to preschool. However, after decades of brain research, we know that children begin learning from birth. For better or worse, children are absorbing their environment and learning from their experiences immediately. Child care programs that are safe but fail to provide nurturing relationships with providers and enriching environments for establishing cognitive and socio-emotional skills will undermine our collective investment in child care assistance and efforts to promote future social mobility.

Given that most children spend a good deal of time in child care programs before they enter kindergarten, failing to provide a quality early learning environment is a missed opportunity. Children (and parents) don’t care if a program is called child care, Head Start, preschool, or school. To artificially talk about preschool and child care in different veins at the federal policy level is a disservice to the 12 million children who spend much of their days in child care programs. It’s also a disservice to families that would like to attend programs like state preschool and Head Start, but have work schedules that don’t allow for part-day early childhood programs.

Hopefully we’ll get another opportunity to reauthorize CCDBG before another 18 years passes. And next time around, we’ll be ready to have a discussion about how federal funds can support early learning and working families in high-quality child care programs.

Even though the FBI has identified Washington, D.C. as a high-frequency area for sex trafficking of minors, city officials there are expressing reservations about a critical component of an anti-trafficking law that advocates say would expand protections for survivors of this violence.

Nationally, the average age of entry into commercial sexual exploitation is 11-14 years old, and many of these survivors are lured by traffickers with false promises of economic security and emotional support.  Some don’t enter through a trafficker, but simply because they need to meet their basic needs of food and shelter. City Councilmember Mary Cheh and anti-trafficking advocates claim that the “Sex Trafficking of Minors Prevention Act” would take important steps toward changing that.

The proposed legislation would increase public awareness, boost reporting of missing and runaway minors who are especially vulnerable to trafficking, improve training for survivor identification, and expand access to services by requiring the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to refer minors to providers. The measure also includes a “safe harbor” provision that would require MPD to treat all minors suspected of engaging in commercial sex as survivors of trafficking, instead of arresting and charging them. National anti-trafficking advocates such as the Polaris Project support these safe harbor laws because they believe treating survivors as criminals instead of victims is re-traumatizing and harmful.

Despite strong advocate support for the legislation, Paul A. Quander Jr., the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice — who is tasked with overseeing the police department — objects to the safe harbor proposal, among other provisions. At a public hearing on the legislation earlier this month, Quander claimed that some minors arrested for the crime of prostitution are “legitimate offenders;” that some “prostitute through their own volition;” and that some “have procurement duties amongst a group of friends, who have decided that payment for sexual favors is the best way to gain monetary security.”

When asked for additional comment on these opinions, a representative for Quander stated, “Deputy Mayor Quander believes his testimony from last month is quite straightforward and speaks for itself. Nothing has changed since then, and he does not have anything to add to it.”

Councilmember Cheh, who introduced the anti-sex trafficking legislation alongside three other lawmakers, acknowledged to ThinkProgress that the bill still requires some adjustments. However, she believes that the legislation will “expand the possibility that people can get help.”

Advocates concerned with victim-blaming more forcefully objected to Quander’s assessment of the minors who are arrested for prostitution.

“Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, any child who is sold for sex is automatically a sex trafficking victim — full-stop,” Andrea Powell, who founded FAIR Girls, told ThinkProgress. “Children cannot choose to engage in prostitution in this country and those who buy them are having sex with a victim. When a police officer arrests a child for prostitution, they are arresting the victim.  This is a human rights issue for the District and the country.”

“Children under 18 who have been sexually exploited deserve support and services, not prosecution,” Audrey Roofeh of the Polaris Project added.

Ultimately, the Deputy Mayor’s reluctance to support a core provision of the legislation may delay benefits for marginalized groups that are particularly victimized. Advocates comment that this legislation, if passed, would especially benefit runaway, low-income, disabled, and LGBT youth, who are all at increased risk of exploitation.  Other groups, such as survivors of sexual abuse and undocumented immigrants, are also disproportionately targeted because they are already vulnerable.

“The vast majority (of minors) are from families living in extreme poverty because traffickers prey on vulnerable children,” Powell explained to ThinkProgress. “Traffickers want to take advantage of young people who won’t be missed. Of those 300+ American girl victims we’ve served, only two had missing children reports. The majority were not reported missing because they were in the foster care system. Instead, they are listed as repeat runaways and non-critical missing…. Pimps tell their young victims that if they speak up, they will just be arrested and treated as prostitutes. They are told no one will believe them and they are scared of the police.”

Despite the prevalence of sex trafficking of minors, the District’s human trafficking laws are currently ranked in the bottom half of all states by the Polaris Project. Mayor Vincent Gray’s administration has yet to take a formal position on Cheh’s bill, which is awaiting markup.

]]> https://talkpoverty.org/2014/07/24/reverse-robin-hood-conservatives/ Thu, 24 Jul 2014 11:53:46 +0000 http://talkpoverty.abenson.devprogress.org/?p=3181 Continued]]> This week, the House is set to vote on a bill that would systematically gut the Child Tax Credit (CTC) as we currently know it. We’ve seen conservatives offer this bill many times before.  In a reverse Robin Hood maneuver, they would take away CTC benefits from low-income families in order to expand them for wealthy families in the future—families with incomes as high as $205,000.

In 1998, Congress passed the CTC with the aim of bringing children in low-income families out of poverty. Depending on a family’s income, the CTC provides a tax credit of up to $1,000 per child; the credit increases as a family’s income rises, with higher-income families receiving a larger credit.  The CTC has successfully achieved its goal: in 2012, the program lifted more than 3 million Americans out of poverty.

Currently, immigrant parents of US citizen children are able to receive a Child Tax Credit by filing with an Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN). The IRS created the ITIN in 1996 so that immigrants who are not eligible for Social Security numbers would be able to file taxes. In practice, many ITIN filers are undocumented immigrants who are living and working in the United States.

These workers contribute much needed revenue.  In 2010, undocumented workers contributed $13 billion in payroll taxes.  In recent years, more than 3 million immigrants have filed taxes using an ITIN, contributing nearly $1 billion in income taxes. This system has clearly allowed immigrants without Social Security numbers to come forward and strengthen the coffers of the US while receiving needed assistance for their children.

So how would things change if conservatives had things go their way with this bill?  The short answer: 4 million US citizen children would be at risk of falling into poverty.

By requiring that all taxpayers use a Social Security number when claiming the Child Tax Credit, this bill would strip immigrant parents of US citizen children of their right to receive the credit. Currently, over 2 million people use an ITIN to file for the CTC, therefore 4 million US born children would be deprived of this crucial financial assistance.

This would be a devastating blow to these families.  In recent years, the average family income of ITIN filers claiming the CTC was just over $21,200, and their average refund through the CTC was $1,800.  As the annual cost of raising a child in the US steadily increases, and real wages grow sluggishly, low-income families need the CTC more than ever.  Eliminating the ability for immigrants to claim it on behalf of their children would simply push millions of Americans into poverty and create greater costs to our country now and in the future.

Adding insult to injury, the conservative bill comes after a year of inaction in the House on immigration reform.  By failing to pass immigration reform, House conservatives denied immigrants the ability to get right with the law and obtain a Social Security card. Now they are attempting to punish US citizen children whose parents don’t have a Social Security card.

Eliminating the CTC for those who file and pay taxes under the ITIN would take food off the table and clothes off the backs of US citizen children. Unfortunately, and to the shock of no one, yet another bill is targeting some of the most vulnerable Americans in an attempt to help the already fortunate few.

During the school year, school districts around the country provide 22 million students with free or reduced-price school lunches. This essential nutrition service helps underprivileged kids to stay focused and competitive during the school day. But once school lets out for the year, only 1 in 7 of these children continues to receive free or reduced-price lunches in the summer. That leaves millions of kids in America hungry during lunchtime over their entire summer vacation. In New York, my home state, 1.7 million children receive free or reduced-price school lunches during the school year; in the summer, only 27 percent of them will get the nutrition they need.

We have to do better.

A problem of this proportion – millions of students going hungry during the summer because they don’t have access to a nutritious lunch – is unacceptable. This is a crisis we should all feel compelled to solve. I recently stood at the Booker T. Washington Community Center in Auburn, New York, and announced the introduction of the Summer Meals Act – a bipartisan bill that would enhance the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Food Service Program.

Our Summer Meals Act has four goals. First, the bill would expand which communities are eligible to participate in the Summer Food Service Program. Right now, to be eligible for summer meals, a community must have 50 percent of its children eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches during the school year in order to receive meal assistance in the summer. Our bill would drop this to a much fairer 40 percent, opening up the Summer Food Service Program to many more communities.

Second, the Summer Meals Act would reduce red tape for public-private partnerships. Right now, it’s too burdensome for non-school organizations to supply much-needed meals to hungry children. Our bill would make it much easier for organizations like the local food bank or youth center to give kids the nutrition that they need.

Third, the Summer Meals Act would increase access to summer meals in hard-to-reach rural areas. Hunger is by no means just an urban problem; for many kids in underserved areas who don’t have access to healthy food, a formidable barrier is just getting to the summer meal site. Our bill would give kids new transportation options to reach their meal sites.

Fourth, the Summer Meals Act would lift the burden on hardworking parents who have to stay at their workplaces during dinnertime. Our bill would give kids the option of receiving two daily meals and a snack from the Summer Food Service Program, or even three meals, if they need them.

No child in America in 2014 should have to wake up every day wondering if he or she is going to have enough to eat before bedtime. The Summer Meals Act is a critically important bill that would seriously reduce child hunger in America. Every kid in America deserves a summer vacation that’s free of hunger.

Unmet diaper needs impact families’ ability to work and the public health of the communities where they live. Because diapers are required by most child care facilities, lack of diapers can reduce access to work and poor diapering can facilitate the spread of disease in public spaces.

According to The Diaper Bank, an adequate supply of diapers cost $100 or more per month. Making things worse, safety net programs such as TANF, SNAP and WIC do not allot money for diapers. Benefits themselves are already low. In California, the maximum TANF benefit—which provides cash assistance—is no more than 40% of the federal poverty level (around $670 per month for a family of three). According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, there isn’t a state in the country with a TANF benefit higher than ½ of the federal poverty line. To get by, families report diapering less. Some even report that their infants or toddlers have spent a day or longer in one diaper, which not only leads to potential health risks for the baby, but also puts them at risk for social, emotional and behavioral problems, according to a Pediatrics study.

Here in California, there are eleven diaper banks that are part of the National Diaper Bank network. Meeting the unmet diaper needs of very young children with donated diapers is their business, and they too report shortages on a regular basis and admit to covering only a small percentage of the state.

This is what I learned when I started advocating in support of a bill introduced in California this year by Assembly Member Lorena Gonzalez and Senator Holly Mitchell to address the growing unmet need among poor families with infants and toddlers. The idea that we need legislation to address unmet diaper needs usually gets a chuckle out of most people at first. However, the grim reality is that a lack of an adequate supply of diapers can have severe mental, emotional, and developmental impacts on parents and children. In response, Assembly Bill 1516 would provide an $80 per month diaper supplement to eligible children receiving public assistance and would create a public-private partnership fund to help facilitate the distribution of financial donations and diaper contributions to the neediest of families.

My work on the bill is through the Women’s Policy Institute (WPI) at the Women’s Foundation of California. The WPI trains women about how the legislative process works and how to advocate for legislative change. Since I am a single mom who knows how costly it can be to keep an infant adequately diapered and how difficult it can be to try to figure it out on your own, I am motivated to make the most of this opportunity. Still, I am most inspired by the personal stories and the sense of how real policy decisions can impact real people’s lives.

A mother I know who has three little girls is one of these real people whose story has inspired me. She was working several jobs, but was still living under the poverty line and receiving just over $100 a month in TANF assistance, when extra hours at work and $20 more in her paycheck made her ineligible for the TANF program.

She lacked job security at her hourly jobs, and the loss of the income from TANF left her family on unstable footing. As a result, she struggled to meet her children’s basic needs. She told me about how she forced her children to potty train way before they were ready to save money and about her feelings of being overwhelmed with stress during this period in her family’s life.

Throughout the legislative session, the team of advocates working on this bill has heard other powerful testimonies about the consequences for children when parents are unable to make it through the end of each month without reusing lightly soiled diapers or prolonging periods between diaper changes.

I don’t know if Assembly Bill 1516 will pass and, if it gets passed, if it would get signed. But I hope that its introduction has helped to educate lawmakers in our state’s Capitol about the great risks associated with deep poverty and unmet diaper needs and to inspire them to do something about it.  I also know that bills like this one, which tackle the real needs of real people and real policy solutions, are desperately needed from Sacramento to Albany and in every state capitol in between.  Until we confront the human and fiscal costs associated with allowing children to live in deep poverty and the deep inequities that start at birth, our poorest children will be hampered by unequal footing before they even learn to walk.

Many low-income students rely on school meals as a primary source of nutrition. While Congress hasn’t been able to agree on much these days, it was able to unite around the issue of improving the diets of children in America.  Why? Because of the overwhelming scientific evidence that the diets of our children are setting them up for a lifetime struggling with disease.  One in 3 children in the U.S. are obese.  A 2012 study by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation predicted that obesity rates in the U.S. could exceed 44 percent by 2030, costing our country an additional $66 billion per year in medical expenses. Poor eating patterns are major contributors to childhood obesity and other chronic diseases that begin in childhood, such as Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

But instead of allowing the implementation of these new well-founded nutrition standards, the House Appropriations Committee passed a 2015 funding bill in May that weakened standards.  That’s when the outcry began; eighty-five organizations  spoke out against the gutting of the new standards in a joint letter:

“ We… strongly oppose efforts… to change or weaken federal child nutrition programs, including potential efforts to require the inclusion of white potatoes in the WIC Program, to alter or delay implementation of meal standards in the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program, or to weaken or delay rules to limit sugary beverages and unhealthy snack foods in our nation’s schools. For decades, Congress has wisely ensured that federal child nutrition programs have been guided by science. Science-based decisions have served our children and our nation well. Accordingly, we strongly urge you to oppose efforts to intervene in science-based rules regarding the federal child nutrition programs.”

The new standards for school lunches and snacks set forth in the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act were written in collaboration with the School Nutrition Association (SNA), which represents 55,000 “school nutrition professionals.” But SNA has now withdrawn their support for the very rules they helped to create.  Last week, SNA CEO Patti Montague asked First Lady Michelle Obama to support the House bill and its weaker nutrition standards.

“Our members simply want relief from some of the onerous regulations slated to take effect this summer,” Montague said. “[They] will lead to fewer students receiving healthy school meals, more food being thrown away and many school meal programs in financial straits”.

In a letter to the First Lady and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, SNA also requested that the USDA or Congress act to prevent raising the standard for whole grains; maintain the current standard for permissible sodium levels, rather than improving it; and eliminate the requirement that students take a fruit or vegetable with their meals.

SNA justifies its new position in part by claiming that the new standards have led to more plate waste and decreased participation in the school lunch program. But the USDA points to a recent study by the Harvard School of Public health indicating that the new standards have not led to increased plate waste, and that data shows participation has actually been on the decline since 2006.

So what’s really behind this new plea from SNA?

According to writer Bettina Elias Siegel of TheLunchTray.com, we need to look at SNA’s corporate ties.  The organization receives significant funding from companies like Kraft, ConAgra and PepsiCo.  These corporate sponsors would surely benefit from the loosening of school lunch standards because they would not have to reformulate popular brands in order to sell to school districts.   Also, huge food service corporations like Aramark, Sodexo and Chartwell (Compass)—which operate approximately one-fourth of school lunch programs in the US—get a lot of their business from these same major food corporations.  As noted in a New York Times editorial, “An increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture processed foods and companies that serve the meals is making students — a captive market – fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.”

So are there legitimate concerns raised by SNA in regard to budgets, food waste and student acceptance of healthier foods?  Sure.  But maybe its response to these issues would be quite different if SNA were not financially hitched to Big Food.

The good news is that the First Lady is not backing down.  She came to her meeting with SNA accompanied by Dr. James Perrin, President of the American Academy of Pediatrics.  Perrin reminded the group that children consume up to half of their daily calories in school, so it’s important that those calories are high-quality. He called the rollback of standards “the wrong choice for children”—one that would “put politics ahead of science.”

Or perhaps, more accurately, it’s a choice that puts money and profits ahead of science and children.

In addition to growing poverty, we can see how much ground we have lost since the 1960s and 1970s in desegregating our schools. They’re intensely racially segregated not only in former Jim Crow states like Mississippi, but in New York, which now has the most segregated schools in the entire country—as measured by students’ exposure to peers of other races.

What is most critical, however, is how racial and income segregation interact with one another. Indeed, William Julius Wilson’s seminal 1967 book, The Truly Disadvantaged, jumpstarted an entire body of research on this issue. Recently, Richard Rothstein and Patrick Sharkey discussed both neighborhood- and school-level links between segregation, poverty, and related factors that particularly harm black and brown families and children. Their work prompted the Economic Policy Institute and Broader Bolder Approach to Education to explore what that interaction looks like for kids who are starting school now; our new paper uses data from US children who entered kindergarten in the 2010-2011 school year.

Our findings affirm those of Wilson, Rothstein, and Sharkey: due to racial segregation, minority status conveys multiple disadvantages. Chief among them, black and Hispanic kindergartners are disproportionately in schools in which the majority of their peers are poor. (The definition of poverty in this paper is that used by many policymakers to establish eligibility for many government supports – 200% of the federal poverty line, or less than about $37,000 annually for a family of three.

If our kindergarten classrooms were not economically and racially segregated, we would expect most students to be in classes in which about a quarter of their peers were low-income; since overall, about 25 percent of all kindergartners are from low-income households. But in our segregated society classrooms don’t look like that at all: Three in five white students are in classrooms in which just over 10 percent of their classmates are poor. This means that they are likely to be in schools that do not face obstacles like classmates whose lack of preparation demand extra teacher attention, or peers whose hunger and toothaches prompt them to act out and disrupt class. They are less likely to suffer from shuttered school libraries, counselors that must each support 1000 students, or a lack of nurses to treat ordinary and emergency medical needs – things that are increasingly common in low-income and heavily minority schools.

For black and brown students, the story is flipped: Only 11 percent of Hispanic and 7 percent of black students make it into such low-poverty kindergarten classrooms; most are in classrooms in which at least 75 percent of their peers are minorities, and the majority of those peers are poor. More than 56 percent of black students, and more than 55 percent of Hispanic students, enter kindergarten classes in which half of the kids are poor. Moreover, one-third of their classmates do not speak English at home, and the percentage of their peers’ mothers who have at least a bachelor’s degree is in the single digits. Less than 5 percent of white kindergartners attend schools facing these multiple disadvantages.

This pattern of concentrating black and Hispanic children in our poorest schools poses major obstacles to attaining the integrated schools and equal access to opportunity that our democracy demands. Reducing child poverty must be our ultimate goal, but if today’s students are to reap the benefits of schools with a diverse mix of peers, we must immediately enact education policies focused on deconcentrating poverty.

Revamping “choice” to incentivize integration by promoting socioeconomically mixed schools – at the federal, state, and local levels – would be a good start. For example, laws that authorize and evaluate charter schools could make socioeconomic integration a key metric, and districts that encourage choice among schools should also establish integration as a criterion for students who want to move out of their neighborhoods. At least one example suggests it’s good policy all around: students in Chicago’s non-selective magnet schools – which tend to integrate rather than further segregate students – see larger test score gains than their charter school peers.  Finally, the obsessive focus on test scores as a measure not only of student, but of school success, has exacerbated segregation by unfairly weakening and stigmatizing schools. Dialing that pressure back in federal and state policies would also promote integration. Policies such as these would help ensure that all schools are well-resourced, attractive options for parents, and conducive spaces for children to learn.

Those numbers make it seem like a pretty intractable problem. After all, it’s literally millions of our children—living without adequate shelter, without healthy food, without adequate opportunities to play and learn and grow. If we’ve let things get this bad then surely child poverty must be nearly impossible to solve.

But the fact is it isn’t difficult to end child poverty, or at least to dramatically reduce it. As Austin Nichols, an economist at the Urban Institute, wrote last year:

If the United States offered cash benefits to children in poor families, we could cut child poverty by more than half. According to calculations using the 2012 Current Population Survey, poor children need $4,800 per year each, on average, to escape poverty. That’s $400 a month for each child.

If we issued a $400 monthly payment to each child, and cut tax subsidies for children in higher-income families, we would cut child poverty from 22 percent to below 10 percent. If we further guaranteed one worker per family a job paying $15,000 a year, and each family participated, child poverty would drop to under 1 percent.

A child benefit is now common across developed countries, with amounts of about $140 a month in the UK, $190 in Ireland, $130 in Japan, $160 in Sweden, and $250 in Germany.  A smaller child benefit of $150 per month would chop child poverty from 22 percent to below 17 percent. Adding the job guarantee would lower child poverty to 8 percent.

So the fact is we could end child poverty, but we’d have to give poor families money to spend on their children—and there’s a lot of evidence that simply giving poor people money works. But it would be expensive, and in these economic times surely we can’t afford it, right?

That’s actually not so clear. It would be expensive in the short run—about $76 billion annually—to spend $4,800 a year on every poor kid. But what if it’s really expensive in the long run not to?

Empirical evidence suggests that the economic costs of child poverty each year in the U.S. are about $550 billion, or 3.8 percent of GDP.

Rigorous evidence is also mounting that being born into poverty makes it much likelier that a newborn will have a range of physical ailments, and that she’ll spend significant time in poverty during her childhood. That same body of evidence shows how much likelier it is that children who spend significant time in poverty will be poor as adults. And that effect compounds: the more time in child poverty, the worse the outcomes when the child reaches adulthood—including outcomes for health, education, economics, and criminal justice.

In other words we know—when a baby is born—if she’s likely to be poor as a child and therefore poor as an adult. And we know that if she’s poorer as an adult, she will have worse educational outcomes and less productivity in the job market. Her kids will likelier be poor and unhealthy, and the family as a whole will rely more on the social safety net.

Put that all together and it gets awfully expensive fast—up to $550 billion a year, compared to $76 billion or less a year to dramatically reduce poverty.

So what if instead we spent some of that money now—up front—to help children break out of the cycle? While it’s expensive, future savings stemming from higher productivity and lower safety net spending are great. That makes it sound a lot like—wait for it—an investment! You invest money now because you expect strong returns in the future.

Dramatically reducing poverty is in fact the financially prudent thing to do, and helping 16 million American children out of poverty is the moral thing to do as well.

The House bill also restricts funding for a summer food pilot program to rural counties in Appalachia. While this language would not, as some media reports have erroneously implied, end all summer meals programs for children in cities, it is still troubling.

The pilot program in question is the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children (SEBTC), which the USDA initially piloted in 2011 as an alternative approach to providing food assistance to children during the summer. It was designed to address a major barrier in the current Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) – namely, that children must eat meals onsite at community locations. For families with limited access to transportation, and for parents who work, taking children to a meal site in the middle of the day can be a challenge. Instead, SEBTC provides low-income families with an Electronic Benefits Transfer card (like a pre-paid debit card) that contains $60 per child per month – about the same amount the federal government spends per child on school meals – that can be used to buy groceries.

In its first two years, SEBTC was tested in rural and urban areas in eight states and two tribal nations in different regions of the U.S., and was effective in reducing child hunger. Nine out of ten families issued SEBTC benefits used them, and the program eliminated very low food security for one-third of the children who would otherwise have experienced it. Children in participating households also ate more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and drank fewer sugary beverages. And with increasing child hunger during the summer when school’s out, but stubbornly low participation in SFSP nationally, it is promising that USDA is testing innovative strategies that work in communities across the country – urban, suburban, and rural. These results are so promising that Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) is sponsoring the Stop Child Summer Hunger Act, which would expand SEBTC nationwide beginning in 2016.

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While the House Appropriations bill  would leave intact the larger summer meals program in urban, rural, and suburban areas, it would limit the successful SEBTC pilot program only to Appalachian counties.  That would mean the program would reach only a fraction of children living in poverty and experiencing food insecurity across the country, and it would also have deeply racialized outcomes – primarily benefiting White children. It is true that Appalachia has high rates of poverty and has for generations. However, only 7 of the 50 counties with the highest child poverty rates in the nation are in Appalachia; most of the others are in the Mississippi Delta and neighboring areas in Alabama and Georgia. And the counties with the largest numbers of children living in poverty are urban. In fact, pilot programs in just four counties – Los Angeles County, CA; Harris County, TX (Houston); Cook County, IL (Chicago); and Maricopa County, AZ (Phoenix) – would reach more children below the poverty line than pilot programs in all 418 Appalachian counties.

Likewise, limiting SEBTC to Appalachia in essence restricts participation in the program to majority White communities, excluding counties – both urban and rural – with high percentages of people of color. The Appalachian Regional Commission reports that Appalachia is 83.5% White, a much larger majority than the country overall, which is 63.7% White. Additionally, only 13 of the 50 counties with the highest child poverty rates are majority White – though 49 of those counties are rural. MSNBC reported earlier this year that the county with the highest overall food insecurity in the nation (Humphreys County, MS), and the one with the highest child food insecurity in the nation (Zavala County, TX), are similar in a few ways: “Both are in poor, rural areas of the South, [and] have socially and economically isolated populations.” They are both majority people of color, as well. But they are not in Appalachia.

These facts are not surprising when you consider how poverty disproportionately impacts people of color in both urban and rural areas. The national poverty rate is 14.3%; however, nearly one in four people who identify as Native American, Black, or Latino live below the poverty line. The poverty rate for Whites, on the other hand, is well below that of other racial groups and the nation overall, at 9.9%.

Geography, poverty, and race intersect in the U.S. in profound ways, and have for centuries, due to countless policies that have restricted access to economic and geographic resources by race. With its current proposal, the House continues the common practice of building policies that perpetuate racial inequities without actually naming race. If we want to ensure that all hungry children are fed—and all families have access to the most convenient and effective ways of feeding their children—then we have to make sure that our policies are truly inclusive of every child, considering both where they live and their racial identity.

Ending child hunger and ending racial inequities are not mutually exclusive. They must go hand in hand.

Under the now defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, states were not permitted to restrict eligibility in this way unless they obtained a waiver from the federal government.  Nevertheless, before the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 (PRWORA)—otherwise known as “welfare reform”—20 states were granted waivers to exclude infants and children from receiving AFDC benefits.

But California received only a provisional waiver for its MFG rule because then-Director of the California social services department, Eloise Anderson, refused to comply with two of the federal requirements: to exempt teen parents from the rule; and to evaluate the impact of the rule on out-of-wedlock births and child neglect.

However, when welfare reform was passed—ending AFDC and creating the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program—states were no longer required to obtain waivers in order to deny aid to children.  Director Anderson wrote a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services asserting that neither the waiver nor the impact studies were now necessary.  But the fact is California state law did still require compliance with those same AFDC provisions and also that a certificate declaring that the requirements had been met be issued and kept on file.

During the massive overhaul that followed passage of welfare reform, no one noticed that Anderson—who now serves as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s Secretary of the Department of Children and Families—didn’t conduct the impact studies or issue the certificate as required.   The California Department of Social Services has no record of either the certificate or studies.I e-mailed Secretary Anderson for comment but she declined.  The contact number listed on her Department’s website transferred me to a disconnected line—twice—the kind of frustrating experience that happens to low-income people all of the time.

Today, the California child exclusion rule is still in existence, denying newborns and children needed assistance which would help them meet their basic needs and promote better health and economic outcomes.

While I’m confident that this shortsighted and regressive policy will be repealed—an effort currently led by California Senator Holly J. Mitchell, chairperson of the Legislative Black Caucus—I am deeply disturbed by the 20 years of harm we have done to children and families.

How could it possibly make sense—to anyone on either side of the aisle—that welfare reform simply stopped requiring states to evaluate the impact of their policy decisions?  Had California conducted an impact study on its child exclusion policy, it would have learned that it had no impact on out-of-wedlock births and increased the likelihood of neglect for already very vulnerable children.  Further, welfare reform only allows a minimal role, if any, for the Department of Health and Human Services to call these outdated and dangerous state-based policies into question.

Today, nearly every child served by TANF lives in deep poverty—on less than half of the federal poverty line, or less than about $9,000 annually for a family of three.  Their lives are very tenuous, their hopes for the future dim.  And yet dramatic policy shifts under TANF still don’t need to be evaluated for their impact, and TANF policies that have failed people in poverty for decades are allowed to continue on unchallenged.

This July 4^th, I hope California will celebrate the repeal of our TANF child exclusion law, and that it marks the beginning of a broader reexamination of welfare reform.  It is long overdue.

TalkPoverty spoke with Senator Murray about her bill.  Here is the conversation:

TalkPoverty: Senator Murray, what is the impetus for introducing the Stop Child Summer Hunger Act at this time?

Senator Patty Murray: Right now, across the country, students are eagerly anticipating the end of the school year and starting the summer break. But for many children, the summer months can be a time of uncertainty, not knowing when they will get their next meal. During the academic year, millions of kids can get free or reduced-price meals at school, but during the summer, many students lose that access to critical food and nutrition. When it comes to making sure children get the nutrition they need, there are no excuses. We can and must do more to prevent child hunger. This bill – the Stop Child Summer Hunger Act – would help kids who qualify for free or reduced-price meals during the school year get access to food during the summer months.

This issue is very important to me personally. When I was a teenager, my dad, who had fought in World War II, was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and could no longer work. My mom found a job, but it didn’t pay nearly enough to support seven kids and a husband with a growing stack of medical bills. For several months, we relied on food stamps. It wasn’t much, but we were able to get by. So, I know what it’s like for families to struggle to put food on the table. I believe as adults it is our moral responsibility to take care of our children, and this bill would be a step to ensure more kids get the nutrition they need to live healthy lives.

TalkPoverty: Are there particular stories from any of your constituents that show just how needed this legislation is?

Senator Murray: I’ve heard from many parents who struggle to put food on the table, especially in the summer months. One mom from my home state said before every meal, her family prays that their food will be enough to sustain them until the next time they’re able to eat. But during the summer, those meals aren’t always enough to keep her kids’ stomachs from growling. These are parents who are doing their best to stretch every penny, and still coming up short. I’ve heard from another woman who said that last summer, she tried her best at the grocery store to shop sales, use coupons, and only buy the store-brand items, but it wasn’t enough. This legislation would help those families, and millions like them, by filling a gap in the social safety net during the summer months.

TalkPoverty:  If passed, how would the lives of low-income families improve during the summer months?

Senator Murray: This bill would target the challenge of summer hunger by helping families afford food when school is out of session. Providing families with an EBT card with funds for groceries would help replace meals that kids would otherwise get at school. Under this bill, families would receive an extra $150 for every child who qualifies for free or reduced-price meals during the school year. If enacted, it would help about 30 million children every year.

The bill is a common sense approach to help kids who might otherwise struggle with hunger. It’s based on a successful pilot program that has been proven to reduce “very low food insecurity,” often called hunger, by 33 percent. The pilot also resulted in children eating healthier foods, like fruits and vegetables.

TalkPoverty: What are the long-term benefits of this legislation—both in terms of children having more access to food and in moving the nation towards more effectively addressing food insecurity?

Senator Murray: When kids don’t get the nutrition they need, it can have ripple effects on their health, their development, and their chances at success in school and beyond. Studies have shown that kids who struggle with hunger and food insecurity don’t do as well in school and score lower on achievement tests. For low-income families, the challenge to put enough food on the table doesn’t end when school lets out for the summer. In fact, for many families, it can get more difficult because children no longer have access to school meals.  In 2013, only about 15 percent of children who participated in free or reduced-price school meals were able to participate in summer meals programs.

This is the kind of legislation that Congress should be pursuing. It’s based on a proven pilot program that achieved participation rates of about 90 percent in some sites. To stop hunger among children, we need to build on effective local, state, and national strategies that fill gaps in the safety net and give people the chance they need to climb the economic ladder. And that’s what this bill does.

TalkPoverty: Your legislation includes provisions to offset the costs of addressing summer child hunger by closing loopholes that reward companies for shifting jobs overseas.  Does this reflect a desire on your part that we reexamine our priorities as a nation?

Senator Murray: The legislation is fully paid for by closing a wasteful corporate tax loophole that encourages U.S. companies to shift jobs and profits offshore. So, this bill would help low-income and middle class families in two ways:  It would help more kids get the nutrition they need during the summer, while taking a step to make our tax system fairer, by encouraging companies to keep more jobs here in America, in the process. Right now, our broken and unfair tax system provides enormous subsidies to the wealthiest individuals and the biggest corporations, all while one in five households in our country struggle with food insecurity. So I do think we should eliminate loopholes for those who need it least and prioritize doing more to expand opportunities for more Americans to get ahead.

TalkPoverty: What are some of the challenges of moving this or any other anti-poverty legislation through Congress?

Senator Murray: The issue of hunger among children in the summer months is one that clearly affects every state in the nation and one that should be a concern of both Democrats and Republicans.  While I understand that any efforts to deal with hunger and poverty could be difficult based on some of the recent efforts in the House of Representatives, I believe that it is possible to achieve bipartisan consensus that would help address the problem of child summer hunger.  The best opportunity to do that will be in the Child Nutrition Act that needs to be reauthorized next year.

TalkPoverty: What role and/or responsibility do Congress and the Executive have in educating the country about issues of poverty and inequality? What is your sense of how well poverty and hunger are understood by Americans and your colleagues?

Senator Murray: I think in our country, there is a broad understanding and a long-held belief that every American, no matter their zip code or their parents’ career, should have the opportunity to succeed. In Congress, I believe it’s our obligation to enact legislation that furthers that ideal. That includes leading on issues that help struggling families find their footing and ensuring we have a strong safety net.

As someone who relied on food stamps earlier in my life, I also feel very compelled to remind other leaders that investing in children is a good investment.  Fortunately for my family, we lived in a country where the government didn’t just say ‘tough luck.’ It extended a helping hand.  Because our nation honored the commitment it made to the veterans who had served it, we didn’t have to worry too much about medical bills for my dad.  To get a better paying job, my mom needed more training.  Fortunately, at the time there was a government program that helped her attend Lake Washington Vocational School where she got a two-year degree in accounting, and, eventually, a better job.  My twin sister, my older brother, and I were able to stay in college through student loans and support from what later came to be called Pell Grants.  And all of the kids were able to stay in school because we are lucky enough to have strong local public schools.  My family got by with a little bit of luck. We pulled through with a lot of hard work.  And while I’d like to say we were strong enough to make it on our own, I don’t think that’s really true.  So when politicians refer to families like mine as “takers, not makers,” that these programs are “immoral,” or that we were in the “47 percent” who couldn’t be convinced to take personal responsibility or care for our lives, I remind them that the support we got from our government was the difference between seven kids who might not have graduated from high school or college and the seven adults we’ve grown up to be today.  Today, we are all college graduates, paying taxes, and doing the best to contribute back to our communities.  In my book, taxpayers got a pretty good return on their investment.

Every kid deserves a fair shot in life and that starts with a quality education, early on. So how are we doing?

The short and immediate, look-just-beyond-your nose answer is: not good. Last year, for the first time in a decade, fewer 4-year-olds had access to pre-K than the year before – a modest nationwide decline of 9,000 kids in all, according to the 2013 State Preschool Yearbook, published by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

But the long-term forecast is a good deal rosier. In state after state, legislators are waking up to more favorable fiscal outlooks at the same time that new coalitions of educators, social scientists, law enforcement officials, pediatricians, nurses and others are singing the praises of early intervention.

The list of states that have made progress in establishing pre-K is growing longer: Alabama. Arizona. Georgia. Illinois. Maryland. Oklahoma. In other places, like Pennsylvania, the debate is raging. Pollsters Celinda Lake and Christine Matthews recently outlined the debate in an op-ed published in Pennsylvania:

“What we are seeing around the country in the campaigns of many candidates this election season is broad support for access to high-quality pre-k. It was a central issue in the recent New York City mayor’s race, and it’s a simmering one in the hotly contested race for governor in Texas. Why now? And why in such very different political environments?

“Voters strongly value education and believe that pre-K education helps children arrive to Kindergarten (and beyond) ready to learn. Voters believe pre-K can improve a child’s social skills, which helps them through grade school. They see the long-term benefits in terms of better test scores, graduation rates, and lifetime earnings and employment.

“They overwhelmingly agree that the more kids who have access to high-quality pre-k, the better it is for ALL students in kindergarten classrooms, so teachers aren’t stretched doing remediation and classrooms aren’t disrupted.”

Politically, the issue seems to have resonance for two reasons. First, at the local level, education historically has not been viewed as a partisan issue. In fact, if you look at the three states with the highest enrollment of 4-year-olds in pre-K, one state is decidedly red (Oklahoma), one state is decidedly blue (Vermont), and one state is decidedly mixed (Florida).

Second, bipartisan support has emerged – and is strengthening – for pre-K. Again we turn to Lake and Matthews:

“Why does this seem to be a political moment for pre-k? The political will to invest in high-quality pre-k around the nation may also reflect what our research in Pennsylvania tells us: there is broad bi-partisan support for pre-k.

“Eighty-three (83) percent of Democrats, 61 percent of Independents, and 56 percent of Republicans favor ensuring every 3 and 4 year old in Pennsylvania has access to voluntary, high quality pre-K programs. In fact a majority of Pennsylvania voters see the benefit as so clear that they support increased state funding for such programs (59 percent) – Pennsylvania voters, like those in many other states, recognize the results justify the investment.”

So how do we bring this home and make universal pre-K a reality in the U.S.? It is only going to happen through a combination of public education and individual empowerment. The public education is happening – we see it in the letters to the editor and op-eds that, with increased regularity, are appearing in publications across the country.

The individual empowerment will happen as a result of neighbor talking to neighbor and groups that are fighting for pre-K (like Fair Share Education Fund) providing ordinary Americans with a platform to demand action. And it will happen when Americans realize that the benefits of pre-K go well beyond childhood education – they’re good for families and good for the economy.

Just ask Jill McCain Santiago, a lawyer and mother of two who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Massachusetts Fair Share recruited McCain Santiago to tell her story of how pre-K allowed her to go back to work, expand her law practice and hire additional employees. “We’re so thankful to have both boys in safe, caring learning environments that are helping them prepare for kindergarten and beyond,” McCain Santiago said. “This has allowed me to grow my business … I’ve been able to hire two employees and serve more families.  I strongly believe that all families deserve the fair shot that we have been lucky enough to get.”

On nearly every indicator that we use in the United States to measure progress, people of color are falling further behind. And it starts early.

A recent report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, “Race for Results: Building a Path to Opportunity for All Children,” provides a national and state scorecard for how we are providing opportunities for children of color, using 12 indicators, such as percentage of children enrolled in preschool, high-schoolers who graduate on time, and number of children who live in low-poverty areas. There isn’t one minority group that’s meeting all of these benchmarks, and even middle-class families of color have a very tenuous hold on their economic status.

In addition, the recent data from the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection show that we are exacerbating these disparities by essentially sending our children of color to schools that are not providing them with a high-quality education. For many of our children, schools become a pipeline into the criminal justice system. According to the data, Black students are suspended at much higher rates than White students, and the problem has become so pervasive and insidious that it extends to preschool. Despite representing just 18 percent of preschool children, Black children make up nearly half of all out-of-school suspensions in preschool.

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This school-to-prison pipeline – one in which African Americans and Latinos are grossly over-represented – is in stark contrast to their under-representation in the higher education system, where the non-Hispanic White population is well ahead of other groups in ultimately attaining a college degree or more.

The economic inequalities we see resulting from these educational inequalities are frightening. The unemployment data released earlier this month by the Department of Labor – revealing continued job growth but stagnant wages – still show that Black and Brown people are having the hardest time riding out this lengthy economic recovery. The official unemployment rate for African Americans is more than double the unemployment rate for non-Hispanic Whites. The rate for Hispanics is lagging behind, too.

When the numbers of under-employed and discouraged workers are factored in, the crisis is even more severe for workers from every background.

With the foreclosure crisis, the financial crash, and the great recession, the inequalities of wealth have actually increased. As the Urban Institute reports, Non-Hispanic White families before the recession had about four times the wealth as non-White families, a figure that jumped to six times by 2010. Hispanic families lost 44 percent of their wealth – and Black families lost 31 percent of theirs – between 2007 and 2010. By contrast, White families lost just 11 percent of their wealth over the same period.

This broadening racial wealth gap is scary, as is the school-to-prison pipeline, and it won’t be solved overnight. But we can start by reinvesting in our nation’s children, who all deserve equal access to a quality education – one that doesn’t leave their economic future imperiled. The federal government has a number of options that it can pursue to address this crisis, including taking on a more robust role in guaranteeing the right to education; greater and more equitable investment of resources in the public school system; and tougher enforcement of existing civil rights laws. Taken together, such actions would do much to improve the lives of our children, both now and in the future.

Sixty years after Brown, it’s the least we can do.

I’ve worked on the school meals programs for over 35 years, starting when I was in charge of the federal food assistance programs in the Agriculture Department during the Carter Administration.  They have long served a vital role and have continued to improve over the years with healthier meals and greater efficiency.

Under community eligibility, schools in which at least 40 percent of students are eligible for free school meals automatically, without submitting an application, can serve free meals to all students.  Students are approved without an application if they have been identified by another program (such as SNAP) as being low-income, or if they are at risk of hunger (for example, because they are homeless).

The option has been phasing in since 2011, and now, for the first time, will become available nationwide for the 2014-2015 school year.  The lists of eligible schools in all states are available here.  But schools have only until June 30 to opt in, so school districts need to move quickly to embrace this opportunity.

Community eligibility has led to a striking increase in the number of children in high-poverty areas eating school breakfast and lunch.  In schools in Illinois, Kentucky, and Michigan that have used the option for two years, lunch participation rose by 13 percent and breakfast participation rose by 25 percent, with 29,000 more low-income children eating breakfast daily.

This model of connecting low-income children to assistance is effective for several reasons:

• It’s targeted.  School meals have always been available free of charge to low-income children, but community eligibility expands the school meals programs’ reach in communities with high concentrations of poverty.  Over 80 percent of the students participating in community eligibility schools in its first two years had been approved for free or reduced-price meals the prior year.
• It’s administratively simple.  Community eligibility not only connects more low-income children to nutritious food, but also cuts red tape.  Families don’t have to complete applications or provide information on their income, and schools don’t have to process those applications or have a cashier figure out whether to provide a free or reduced-price meal every time a child goes through the lunch line.  A related benefit is that students can eat in the cafeteria without worrying about any stigma from receiving a free meal. Moreover, schools that have adopted community eligibility report administrative savings from streamlining their meals programs.  Those savings, combined with the drop in per-meal costs when more children eat, help to cover the costs of providing meals to more students.
• It promotes opportunity.  Eating breakfast and lunch helps children start the school day ready to learn and remain focused throughout the day.  Schools that have taken steps to increase school breakfast participation, for example, report that discipline referrals and behavior problems went down and student attentiveness and attendance went up.

The national debate on poverty will continue, but let’s take this practical next step right now:  encourage the schools and districts in your state that are eligible for community eligibility to take the option.

Connecting low-income children to good nutrition to help them grow, learn, and thrive is something we all ought to be able to agree on.