Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families is excited to be part of the Half in Ten family. With the New Year well on its way, new opportunities to cut poverty in half by 2020 have taken flight in Arkansas. AACF will launch a plan to educate policy makers, service providers and the public on the importance of knowing the facts about poverty and how we can work together to reduce poverty. This three- prong plan will include:

• Hosting regional meetings that will educate participants on the facts of poverty and the policies that help and hinder our most vulnerable populations.
• Holding advocacy academies to equip local advocates with the knowledge on the methods of effective advocacy.
• Empowering locally trained advocates to host round table discussions with candidates and elected officials to share what they have learned and how they can work together to abolish poverty in our state and country.

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families is also creating a candidate’s guide that will be used in this training. This guide will outline our different issue areas and encourage local advocates to become active in the electoral process by questioning potential candidates on the issues that affect so many working families in Arkansas.
Finally, we are working with local partners to bring the Community Action Poverty Simulation (CAPS) to Arkansas. This tool was created by the Missouri Association for Community Action to educate policymakers and community leaders about the day to day realities of life with a shortage of money and an abundance of stress. Several local partners and staff members of AACF have been trained to facilitate the poverty simulation. We hope to offer this unique opportunity by mid-March. For more information and description of the poverty simulation

The future is filled with opportunities, as are looking forward to working together with dedicated advocates, concerned lawmakers and the faith community to cut poverty in half by 2020 in Arkansas and the United States overall.

Email Pat Bodenhamer at pbodenhamer@aradvocates.org to get involved

The Half in Ten campaign recognizes that we won’t cut poverty in half by 2020 without grassroots activists across the country calling for change. With that in mind, we are working with coalitions in several states to make the half in ten goal a reality.

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families has teamed up with the Half in Ten campaign to lead efforts in reducing poverty in our state. The Arkansas legislature has taken a step forward in addressing this issue by establishing the Poverty Task Force to look at public programs and policies that have the potential to reduce poverty. By building a statewide network and coalition through the Half in Ten campaign, we hope to work with elected officials to reduce the number of Arkansas children and families that live in poverty. We have partnered with other advocacy agencies to provide education opportunities to leaders in our state by helping them understand the plight of low-income families through the poverty simulation. During the simulation, participants experience the situations that families living in poverty go through every day.

We will work very closely with the Poverty Task Force and other low-income advocates to focus on legislation to improve the lives of Arkansans living in poverty. One such piece of legislation will be enacting a state Earned Income Tax Credit. We will also equip the faith community to be advocates for the poor on a state and national level. Our outreach director for the project is staff member Pat Bodenhamer, an ordained Methodist minister, who will continue to work with faith leaders across the state. We will also use our existing Moving Families Forward network made up of individuals and organizations around the state to work with their local elected officials.

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 »