9to5, National Association of Working Women hosted a meeting of the Colorado Half in Ten statewide coalition this month to share the campaign’s top policy priorities and begin discussing ways Colorado can build out the movement to end poverty in the state.

Those attending the meeting included representatives from a wide and diverse group: service providers who run food and shelter programs, employment specialists, mental health counselors, economic justice activists, and faith leaders. They agreed to focus on three main concerns:

• Incorporating current actions and advocacy efforts into a broader campaign to cut poverty in half in Colorado during the next decade
• Developing a plan to reach even more community leaders with the coalition’s antipoverty message
• Reframing poverty by talking about how many issues intersect, including hunger, home foreclosure, faith, child care, education, and jobs

The coalition will soon begin to conduct an online and social media marketing campaign around raising awareness of the Half in 10 work in Colorado.
To get involved, email [email protected].

The U.S. Census Bureau announced that it will be developing an alternative way to measure poverty. This new method will better reflect the realities facing struggling families and ways in which current government programs can help them to get back on their feet. Unlike the traditional poverty measure, which is based in a 1960s reality, this supplemental measure will provide a more accurate accounting of household budgets and better determination of whether a family has enough resources to meet its most basic needs.

A majority of Americans polled in 2008 by the Half in Ten Campaign knew of a family member who was experiencing poverty. The situation has since worsened, with unemployment near double digits and data revealing one in six Americans living in a household struggling against hunger. These circumstances demand congressional action.

As we develop policies to promote economic recovery and create jobs, it is essential that we recognize the hard truth about poverty in so many of our nation’s communities. That is why I hope you can attend the first in the Half in Ten campaign’s briefing series, “Restoring Economic Opportunity: The Need for a Recovery that Cuts Poverty in Half in Ten Years”

The first briefing in the series is entitled “The Starting Line: Poverty and Economic Opportunity Before, During, and After the Recession.” At the briefing, Center for American Progress Action Fund economist Heather Boushey will discuss how the recession has brought economic hardship to many American families, the labor market problems underscoring this hardship, and policy solutions to help jumpstart job creation. She will be joined by Dr. Deborah A. Frank of Boston Medical Center’s Grow Clinic for Children, who will describe the long-term health effects on children of growing up with hunger and poverty and federal programs that can help in mitigating some of these effects. Finally, Kelly Dolberry, a resident of DC’s Park Road Family Shelter, will discuss how the recession has affected her family.

Date: March 12, 2010

Time: 11:00 AM -12:30 PM

Room: Capitol Visitors Center, Room HVC-200, Washington DC

Heather Boushey, Senior Economist, Center for American Progress Action Fund

Kelly Dolberry, Resident, Park Road Family Shelter

Dr. Deborah A. Frank, Director, Boston Medical Center’s Grow Clinic for Children

Moderated by Wade Henderson, President and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and Half in Ten partner.

Please RSVP to [email protected].

And save the date for the next briefing in our series, which will be held on April 9!

The Half in Ten Campaign believes that any strategy to cut the U.S. poverty rate in half over the next 10 years must be based on four fundamental principles: promoting decent work, ensuring economic security, providing opportunity for all, and helping people build wealth. The president’s budget released earlier this week reflects those same principles by laying out an agenda for job creation, investing in income and work supports even in the context of a discretionary spending freeze, offering an education and workforce agenda that promotes opportunity, and championing policies that will allow Americans to save and build for the future. Half in Ten urges Congress to pass a budget resolution that adopts and builds on these investments with special emphasis on job creation for low-income and minority communities.

Here’s a closer look at how the president’s budget request matches up with Half in Ten’s principles.
Read more »

Half in Ten is co-sponsoring a webinar on what the federal government can do to address the jobs crisis on Thursday, January 28th at 3:00 pm EST.

Click here to register and hear from the experts on what steps Congress can take to create employment opportunities in low-income and minority communities.

Speakers

• Larry Mishel, President, Economic Policy Institute
• Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director, Center for Community Change
• Alan Charney, Campaign Director, Jobs for America Now
• Deborah Weinstein, Executive Director, Coalition on Human Needs, Moderator

There are 6.4 jobseekers for every unfilled job - and that gap is growing. Two-thirds of Americans are close to someone who is out of work. And joblessness is worst for communities of color, youth, and women who head households. The private sector does not have the capacity to rebuild employment on its own. While the investments made through the federal economic recovery legislation have created or saved over 1 million jobs so far, the recession is so deep that more federal action is urgently needed.

Congress and the Obama Administration are working on job creation plans. What should they do? How can we build support for job creation that does not leave the poorest people behind? Register for the webinar and find out.

Thanksgiving for All Americans In light of the latest data on poverty and food insecurity in the country, Melissa Boteach of the Half in Ten Campaign and Jim Weill of the Food Research and Action Center call on Congress and the President to act by investing in nutrition assistance and job creation. Read more and download the memo »

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 »

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

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

On December 9 from 10 am-12 pm, the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution will hold a forum to discuss a new paper by Rebecca M. Blank of the Brookings Institution and Mark H. Greenberg of Georgetown University and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, proposing a new poverty measure that better reflects the actual economic conditions of low-income Americans.
Read more »