Last Friday, April 9, the Half-in-Ten Campaign’s briefing on Capitol Hill shed light on the rural, suburban, and urban faces of poverty and illuminated place-based strategies to combat poverty in every type of district. Not all communities experience poverty in the same way, and so it is essential to recognize the particular challenges experienced within different regions in order to create more effective policy solutions.

Listen to a podcast featuring anti-poverty experts Beth Mattingly, Elizabeth Kneebone, and Daniel Dodd, as well as Half in Ten Campaign Manager Melissa Boteach.

View the slides presented by Beth Mattingly, Elizabeth Kneebone, and Daniel Dodd at the April 9 briefing.

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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 »