It will be difficult to create a policy goal to cut poverty in half, without an accurate measurement of who is actually in poverty.  The current poverty measure just doesn’t cut it.  It has been in use since 1959 and fails to account for changing living expenses, regional differences in price, and many of the forms of income assistance that can pull people out of poverty. On June 17, 2009, Rep. McDermott (D-WA) reintroduced the Measuring American Poverty (MAP) Act of 2009, or H.R. 2909. Read more »

This January, Half in Ten joined with the National Employment Law Project,  NELP, to urge Congress to include urgent reforms to the Unemployment Insurance system in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA.  The antiquated unemployment insurance system had failed to ensure equal benefits for low-wage workers, part-time workers, workers who left work due to “compelling family reasons,” and long-term unemployed individuals.  Low-wage workers are only one-third as likely to collect unemployment benefits, even though they have double the chances of being unemployed.  For this reason, UI reform was one of the 12 steps that the Center for American Progress Task Force on Poverty identified to cut poverty in half in ten years.

Congress listened to advocates, and included unemployment reform in ARRA, allocating $7 billion for the project. And these reforms have begun to reach unemployed workers across the country.  Earlier this week, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) released a report (PDF) detailing the “unprecedented wave” of unemployment insurance reforms that has swept across the country since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) became law on February 17th, 2009.   Read more »

Press Release from ACORN, a Half in Ten partner:

ACORN Celebrates Today’s Introduction of Healthy Families Act

Low-income families, public health will benefit enormously from universal paid sick days standard

(Washington, DC) – The three in four low-wage workers and 48% of all private sector workers that lack paid sick days to take care of themselves and loved ones have reason to celebrate today, as Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Sen. Ted Kennedy are introducing the Healthy Families Act for the 111th Congress.  The HFA creates a new minimum labor standard for the 21st century by giving workers the right to accrue up to seven days of paid sick leave.  The leave can be used to care for oneself, to care for sick loved ones, or to attend court related to sexual assault or domestic violence.  107 countries worldwide provide a universal paid sick leave standard, and the United States lags far behind all other industrialized nations. 

Read more »

From Coalition on Human Needs, a Half in Ten partner:

When Congress passed its Budget Resolution on April 27, it generally endorsed the President’s priorities.  The Budget Resolution only answers some of the year’s policy-making questions:  what, and, at least as far as the annual appropriations bottom line is concerned, how much.  Advocates were pleased with the “what” answers:  Congress committed to grapple with comprehensive health care reform and climate change, two of the President’s top priorities.  The Budget Resolution also commits Congress to many other legislative tasks, including reauthorizing child nutrition programs, making student loans cheaper by reducing the role of private lenders, and creating a home visiting programfor new parents, as the President proposed. 

Read more »

Building efficiency retrofits serve the triple benefits of mitigating global warming emissions, reducing energy bills, and creating good, local jobs. Residential buildings alone account for 21percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and substantial efficiency savings are obtainable through easy and proven techniques. Yet if energy-efficiency retrofits offer such obvious environmental, economic, and employment benefits, why have they been so slow to materialize? The answer lies in a host of market failures, and developing viable, scalable solutions has proven challenging—until now.

On Friday, May 15, Half in Ten joined the Center for American Progress and the Center for Working Families to release a report that provides a policy roadmap for New York State to achieve mass-scale, energy-efficiency retrofits of 1 million housing units over the next five years.

Download the report (pdf)

Download the executive summary (pdf)

Watch the event

Rabbi Steve Gutow and Melissa Boteach of the Jewish Council of Public Affairs wrote for the Washington Post’s On Faith section on the religious importance of gaining an accurate picture of poverty.

Our ability to gauge how many people are really left behind in our society is reduced to a simple and outdated statistic. This would not do if we looked at people as they are and not as they were… if we put faces to our numbers… if we followed the message of the book of Numbers.

While the inadequacies of the federal poverty measure may seem like a technical and wonky issue, how we determine the factors of poverty will wind up enabling us to conquer the reality of poverty. 

Read more here

In her May 7th column, “Essential Legal Services“, Joy Moses - a policy analyst with the Center for American Progress - highlights the legal challenges poor and lower-income families face in a recession, among these being foreclosure, landlord-tenant disputes, and government assistance eligibility. Unemployment projections due out later this week are expected to be the worst since this recession began in 2007. As such, she argues, the Obama administration and Congress must take appropriate steps to ensure the Legal Services Corporation has adequate funding this year and going forward. State and federal authorities looking to ‘trim the fat’ ought to be chastened by the fact that recessions tend to affect these two groups disproportionately and therefore, cuts to legal programs would merely exacerbate the effects of hard times on the hard-hit.

Half in Ten partner and Executive Director at the Center for Human Needs, Deborah Weinstein, participated in a recent event hosted by The New School, where poverty experts squared off, debating the merits of President Obama’s efforts - namely, the ARRA and his 2010 budget proposal - to curb and eventually reduce poverty in the long run.  Although the event was largely focused on poverty initiatives in New York City, panelists were urged to consider their applicability nationwide. Weinstein’s daughter - a professional animator and audience member - has an amusing take on the discussion. Click here to see it.

In accordance with federal standards, Kansas has just passed into law SB 160, raising the minimum wage - formerly the lowest in the country - from $2.65 an hour to $7.25. The wage increase goes into effect January 1, 2010. To read more about this and reactions from the Governor’s and State Minority Leader’s offices, click here.

As poverty in the United States continues to affect millions of people across the nation, city and state governments are finding themselves in an ongoing battle trying to unearth the right answer to an already growing problem. One city’s initiative to create new, and innovative antipoverty projects that will help its residents, can serve as a model not only to other urban areas across the country trying to fight poverty, but the nation as a whole. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg examined the city’s efforts in establishing programs designed to combat poverty at a recent event hosted by the Center for American Progress.

New York City’s Crusade Against Poverty