Hunger
Renewing our Communities Through Service
Published July 27, 2009 @ 06:01PM PT
[Chris Golden and Nick Troiano are co-founders of myImpact.org, an emerging online platform for young people in full and part time national and community service programs.]
President Obama and the First Lady launched “United We Serve” last month, a 12-week summer of service initiative whose goal is to engage all Americans in service projects, so that we may all be a part of the solution to our country’s most pressing challenges.
Last week, the issues of hunger, homelessness and poverty were themes during an emphasis on “Community Renewal.” (This week, attention turns to another important issue: education). In the midst of a prolonged economic recession that began with a foreclosure and credit crisis and as local governments make difficult choices as a result of tightening municipal budgets; the need for renewing our communities could never be clearer. At the same time, there is a resounding belief that government cannot fix these problems alone and that citizens must come together, to take ownership of our communities again, working together to improve and renew them.
We believe that the power of online social media, including technology that is still evolving, can make it even easier to serve and, moreover, can enhance and extend the service experience.
Suggestions for the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act
Published July 23, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
When Congress finally gets around to discussing the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act this fall (if they ever get this pesky health care reform thing out of the way), I'll have a few suggestions for how to make school nutrition programs more effective at providing healthy meals to the nation's children.
Before I go into the specifics, here's a little background on the importance of this legislation:
Every five years the window of opportunity opens on Capitol Hill as lawmakers and their staff work together to improve, tweak and reauthorize the federal Child Nutrition Programs....The School Breakfast Program and the National School Lunch Program are permanently authorized. However the other child nutrition programs that affect school nutrition operators must be reauthorized every five years. The Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), State Administrative Expenses (SAE), the Special Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and other smaller pieces of the complete package of child nutrition programs must be renewed because they have actual expiration dates.
As you can see, proper attention must be paid to this reauthorization because it includes provisions for some of the most important supplemental nutrition programs we have in this country. With the economy still sputtering and demand at food pantries and soup kitchens continuing to climb, it is of the utmost importance to strengthen these programs and provide them with adequate funding.
R.I.P. Frank McCourt
Published July 20, 2009 @ 05:16AM PT
"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."
Frank McCourt wrote this in the second paragraph of his award-winning bestselling memoir, Angela's Ashes - a chronicle of his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland. McCourt died this weekend from cancer; he was 78.
I read Angela's Ashes and loved it. I was in my 20s, living comfortably in NYC, pursuing a Master's degree and after that, working full-time. Life was good and plentiful.
But there was something about Angela's Ashes, cultural, I suppose, to which I could strongly relate, and my mom felt the same. It was odd, we thought, how much a story about extreme poverty in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s could resonate with our own Irish-Catholic experiences in Boston.
Such poverty, or even a slightly less desperate, modern American version, I'd barely felt it growing up, but seen my cousins struggle with it in Boston, and knew my parents had experienced it as well. Again, not to the depths that McCourt described, but the alcoholism; the cold, condemning shoulder of the Church even as it fed and clothed families; the concept of living "on the dole" as my father still quips today whenever my material needs become parasitic - all of these I know from experience or family history, passed down through the generations. And of course, what continues through my generation: tough exteriors and a distrust of emotionalism, the joking and heckling to get through tough times.
“I think there’s something about the Irish experience — that we had to have a sense of humor or die,” Mr. McCourt once told an interviewer. “That’s what kept us going — a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.
Yep. Rest in Peace, Frank, and may you have them in empathetic stitches wherever you're headed.
More on McCourt here, here, and here.
(Photo of Frank McCourt by David Shankbone)
Privatizing Welfare
Published July 17, 2009 @ 12:30PM PT
Or so Schwarzenegger proposes (I swear, this guy'll do anything to keep himself in the PiA headlines!):
A proposal that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been pushing in closed-door budget talks would tie the state, with little oversight or review, into a multibillion-dollar computer system likely to be run by the private sector to enroll low-income Californians in welfare, food stamp and healthcare programs.
The concern laid out in the bulk of the article is the Governator's attempt in times of crisis to ram through a pet project that has not been fully vetted. The Administration makes the usual argument that cost savings lie ahead in a centralized system. Critics point to the disastrous results from other states' attempts to privatize and centralize public assistance admin. And as you might imagine, these enormously expensive investments in system-wide changes can be difficult to undo.
In principle, I am generally supportive of centralized systems, but they present their own set of problems as they tend not to acknowledge or be able to respond to the specifics of certain populations, regions, etc. (A national federal poverty line that doesn't reflect regional costs of living is a good example.) Of greater concern to me here is the privatization piece. Privatization also has its place, but there's a few too many big stories of awarding funds to private contractors on the assumption that they can run programs and services more effectively than the government only to have them completely botch the job. I find this is particularly likely when for-profit contractors enter the sensitive or "niche" space like working with people suffering from economic hardship.
This strikes me as a pursuit on purely ideological grounds - or to benefit cronies. Forgive me for not finding these answers before pontificating, but what exactly are Schwarzenegger's reasons for wanting to privatize public assistance? Beyond the speculative cost savings? What's the problem with the decentralized, county-based system? Are so many recipients so frequently moving around the state that too much data is getting lost in the system? What successes of the existing system would he seek to preserve? How much disruption in service could recipients feasibly expect?
These are just a few of endless questions we should be asking about this dubious proposal. With California, the drama just does not end. And the poorest among us are paying the price.
"Urban" Woes Hit the Suburbs and Rural America
Published July 12, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
Quick, lock those gates!
As we've "revitalized" cities to attract the middle-class, our gentrification efforts have pushed working-class and low-income families beyond the city limits, to aging housing stock in older inner-ring suburbs and distant exurbs far from job centers. Over time, the suburbs have become home to a higher number of people living in poverty, even though cities remain home to a higher concentration of poor residents overall. So it should come as no surprise now:
Rural and suburban homeless make up about 1/3 of the overall homeless population, compared to less than 25% in 2007. West Coast states have the highest proportion of homeless residents, due to the foreclosure crisis.
Tellingly, a report from UNH found that children living in rural, cohabiting households almost doubled since 2000, whereas in cities the growth has been about 1% (the percentage of kids in cohabiting houses overall is quite small). Study authors think this is an "economic survival strategy" by single, rural mothers:
"We think that growing economic stress in rural America is in part driving this rapid increase of cohabiting in rural households," says report author William O'Hare, a Carsey Institute policy fellow and senior fellow at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. "The jump in the share of rural children living in cohabiting households has occurred since 2000, when economic conditions in rural America began to deteriorate."
O'Hare and his co-authors Wendy Manning, Meredith Porter and Heidi Lyons state that for single rural women with children, joining a household with a man may be an economic survival strategy. While cohabiting families have poverty rates double those of married-couple households, they are less than half those for single-mother households.
The first step in warding off homelessness, perhaps?
(Photo of an abandoned farm by James Jordan)
Food Deserts Benefit From Farmers Markets
Published July 09, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Many have come to realize that the problem of food deserts is not that there is no food to eat at all, but rather, that fresh, affordable and healthy food are much harder to come by than the fried chicken and Big Mac's found on nearly every street corner. It is a problem of access and affordability more than anything else.
With the knowledge that Tennessee is one of the most food insecure states (particularly in regard to children) in the entire country, Vanderbilt University graduate student Darcy Freedman decided to conduct research to determine how to address issues of childhood obesity, family nutrition and food security issues in four of Nashville's underserved communities.
What she found was that families do not only need help accessing fresh food, they also need help learning how to eat healthy and understanding why it is so important to their health. And thus, the Veggie Project was born.
On Economic Mobility & Poverty Thresholds
Published July 02, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Following up on my earlier post on downward economic mobility and rising economic insecurity, new data, described below, shows just how economically vulnerable the majority of middle-class households are in the U.S. Once again I wonder, will this trigger us to do something about how we measure poverty in the U.S., now that so many of us hover at its door? Knowing our national myths of a bootstrapping, classless society, we'll probably just redefine it down even further to renew the distance between ourselves and our poorer neighbors! After all we've vilified them so much, we certainly don't want to become one of them now!
But we really need to come to grips with how few of us can afford what should be basic rights for all of us: housing, education, and a livable wage and healthy work-life balance. I add that "balance" because the right to work shouldn't be backbreaking, enslaving, or heart-attack inducing - especially since we're working harder and harder for less and less money. As the middle-class disappears, we need to confront the poverty they - we - face in this country.
