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 »

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

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

Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) has introduced the Measuring American Poverty Act of 2008 (H.R. 6941), which would update the federal government’s standard for calculating poverty. Read more »

Americans increasingly face financial uncertainty as they struggle to make ends meet during a period of rising food and fuel prices, a continuing mortgage crisis, and an overall economic downturn. Yet even before these latest challenges, a growing number of state and local governments launched comprehensive anti-poverty initiatives. These include special legislative caucuses, poverty reduction targets, and information-sharing summits.
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The New York City Coalition Against Hunger, World Hunger Year, the Food Bank for New York City, and City Council member Bill de Blasio joined Half in Ten at the Yorkville Common Pantry in Harlem on July 9. The Yorkville Common Pantry is one of the 1,200 food pantries and soup kitchens in the City that serve 1.3 million New Yorkers each year. Joel Berg, the Executive Director of the NYCCAH, told the Epoch Times, “Poverty in the U.S. and New York are unacceptable…In a society with as much wealth as modern America, hunger should be doubly unacceptable. Read more »