Democrats Must Listen to Workers

Donald Trump is tanking in the polls. But that public dissatisfaction hasn’t translated into working-class people trusting Democrats to have their backs.

When it comes to either party addressing their concerns about grocery bills, rent checks, pay stubs, retirement, their children’s education—the kinds of things keeping people up at night—working-class voters are still taking a “lesser of two evils” approach.

Having spent the last 14 years reporting on, visiting, or advocating for working-class communities in every region, this status quo doesn’t surprise me. Traveling the country you will hear a consistent message: “They [politicians] don’t care about me”; or “They only come around at election time.”

Above all else, winning people’s trust involves sitting down with them and listening—to their challenges, their ambitions, their ideas… their stories. It takes a certain intimacy to achieve that.

That’s why in the wake of the 2024 election, when a stream of punditry and post-mortems asked how can Democrats reconnect with the working class?—a coalition of state and national organizations (including my current employer, EPIC)—launched the #Listen2Workers campaign.

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The campaign is built on a simple premise: Bring workers together with elected officials—local, state, and federal—and have authentic conversations. Ask workers about their lives, what is most pressing, their ideas for change. Listen, and then have a back and forth (no speeches) about what the legislator is hearing—about policy ideas, commitments, remaining questions, how they can work together.

Afterward, a coalition of organizations can help the legislator show their work—through social-media-friendly clips—so the public can see the commitment to working people in action, rather than political leaders simply talking about their commitment. If the party wants to shake the narrative among working-class people that they aren’t committed, they must show the evidence. It comes down to the old adage, Show, don’t tell—if you want it to stick.

Recently, Georgia House minority leader Carolyn Hugley hosted a #Listen2Workers forum in Macon, moderated by Stacey Abrams.

A group of about 25 racially diverse, union, and, importantly, nonunion workers, from both urban and rural communities, talked about wages that no longer cover rent, even for full-time workers. A retired law enforcement officer who had no union said that his wage after 26 years was the same as the entry wage for NYPD officers, despite both risking their lives. A union leader talked about the absurdity of a $7.25 hourly minimum wage, and parents having to work multiple jobs, so they don’t have the time they want and need for their kids.

Others spoke about the quiet devastation of disinvestment. A second-generation brick mason described how vocational programs were stripped from high schools, hollowing out both opportunity for young people and the skilled labor pipeline communities need. Many spoke of homes and lots that stand vacant, abandoned, while evictions rise. A gig worker explained that his “boss is AI,” with no job protections or recourse, and constant fear of being deactivated without explanation. A bartender said plainly, “I don’t want three jobs. I want one job. I want to live—not just survive.” The workers explored policy solutions ranging from rent stabilization to local banks providing entrepreneurs access to capital, to career pathways for young people, to tax revenues, to legislators showing up regularly, and much more.

What tied these stories together wasn’t ideology. It was lived experience—and a shared sense that too many political conversations happen without the people most affected being in the room.

As Abrams reflected afterwards, “People are hungry for solutions.… They are smart. They have clever, doable ideas. What they desperately need is someone who can listen to those ideas and help make them manifest.”

State legislators across 11 states have now pledged to take part in the campaign. In California, more than a dozen are sitting down for one-on-one conversations with workers in their districts—care workers, gig workers, security workers, trade workers, and more.

Imagine if Democrats in red, blue, and purple districts across the country committed to doing this and explicitly tying a #Listen2Workers policy agenda to the stories they heard—shaped by the very people bearing the brunt of policy decisions every day. That kind of politics wouldn’t just move polls, it would help rebuild trust.

But it all starts with listening to the stories. Those are the receipts—for what people want, and how Democrats are responding to what they hear.

The 2020 Democratic presidential campaign has been surprisingly promising when it comes to addressing poverty. Candidates have offered a host of ideas that would have a significant anti-poverty effect, from universal health care to debt-free college, a living wage, housing for all, universal child care, and more. They have also pledged to push for a debate focused exclusively on the issue—a promise they still need to make good on. But one region that hasn’t received the attention it needs in this or previous elections is the rural Black Belt, specifically the persistently poor counties in 11 Southern states that are home to more than half of the nation’s non-metro poor.

The name “Black Belt” originally referred to the region’s dark, clay soil, before eventually coming to signify its high population of African Americans as well. Today, the region’s roughly 300 rural counties—in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia—each have populations that are between 30 and 80 percent African American. As of 2008, the Black Belt was home to 83 percent of African Americans living outside metropolitan areas. We’re just two weeks away from the South Carolina Democratic primary, on February 29; six more Black Belt states will vote on March 3. It’s time for a presidential candidate to not only engage with the needs of people living in this region but also begin to rectify a history of exploitation and neglect.

There is precedent for it: then-Senator John F. Kennedy’s visit to West Virginia during the 1960 Democratic primary. As Ronald D. Eller describes in his 2008 book Uneven Ground, Kennedy was “genuinely stunned” at the mass poverty he saw, particularly that of unemployed coal miners. He pledged on camera to introduce an aid program for the state if elected—and, after he was, he created a presidential task force to explore a unique federal-state-local partnership for regional development in Appalachia. The task force outlined a program that would support highway construction, health care facilities, land stabilization, timber development, water facilities and sewer treatment, and vocational training. But it would take until 1965 for President Lyndon B. Johnson to succeed in pushing it through Congress, establishing the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC).

Since then, the ARC has received a total of $38 billion in federal funding (adjusted for inflation), benefiting counties across 13 states. While Appalachia still faces challenges such as labor force participation and poor access to health care, the ARC has contributed to largely eliminating the gap between the region’s rates of high school graduation and unemployment and those found nationally. It has helped both to cut Appalachian poverty from 31 to around 17 percent, and to lower the number of high-poverty counties in the region, from 295 to 107.

The idea for a corresponding regional development program in the Black Belt isn’t a new one. Scholars at Southern universities and some politicians—including Democratic US Representative (2003–11) Artur Davis of Alabama and the late Senator (2000–05) Zell Miller of Georgia—have pushed for it since the 1990s. The black rural South’s current unemployment rate of approximately 14 percent and child poverty rate of 51 percent are double those found in rural counties included in the ARC, according to a forthcoming paper from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

“I’ve heard it my whole life: ‘There’s nothing in the Black Belt.’ Are you kidding me?” says Dr. Veronica Womack, a Black Belt native and executive director of the Rural Studies Institute at Georgia College and State University. “This is a region where the people have always made a way out of no way. You can’t find any more hardworking, caring people—people who have continued to raise families, build community, go to church on Sundays, in spite of all of the challenges that have been put in place.” What has been lacking, Womack says, is a commitment to the region so people can “operate at their fullest potential.”

There have been piecemeal legislative efforts to increase the flow of investment to parts of the Black Belt. But none include all 11 states, focus exclusively on Black Belt counties, or—critically—prioritize community participation in designing and leading a commission to address the Black Belt’s unique challenges. “If you understand the tenacity and the resilience of the people who live there, then you understand the importance of them being a part of whatever solutions you have,” Womack says. “The commission has to know the history—the social, political, and economic dynamics of the place and space.”

In 2000, the Delta Regional Authority (DRA) was created as a state-federal partnership that is presided over by eight Southern state governors and a federal cochair. It includes some counties in five Black Belt states and received $25 million for fiscal year 2019. Seventy-five percent of the moneys are supposed to go to distressed counties, and half of those are required to be used on transportation and infrastructure. However, it does not include most of the Black Belt, and none of its board members are African American. It also lacks the community participation and leadership element that Womack says is key.

Arguably the most promising effort was the Southeast Crescent Regional Commission (SCRC), created under the 2008 Farm Bill. Modeled after the ARC, it encompassed counties within seven Black Belt states, and was intended to focus on funding distressed communities for transportation, infrastructure, job training and entrepreneurial development, telecommunications, and sustainable energy solutions. However, while the SCRC was authorized to receive at least $30 million every year through 2019, it was never appropriated more than $250,000 at a time, and “does not appear to be active” as of March 2019, according to the Congressional Research Service. In contrast, the Northern Border Regional Commission—created in the same Farm Bill to address economic hardship in the primarily white populations of northern Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York—has received steady funding, including $10 million to $20 million in each of the past three fiscal years.

The SCRC was championed by the Democratic Representatives Hank Johnson of Georgia and Elaine Luria of Virginia, as well as majority whip James Clyburn, of South Carolina. “Congressman Clyburn has been committed to the SCRC since its inception,” says Hope Derrick, his communications director. “[He] is ready to fight for more funding when the administration appoints a federal cochair, the last hurdle in standing up the commission.”

Womack isn’t surprised by the lack of urgency the SCRC or Black Belt Commission proposals have received from most of the political elite. “When you start talking about policy that will be interpreted as benefiting a region significantly [comprising] black people, then where is the will to actually get that done?” she says. “Even though the Black Belt has all kinds of people in it, there is also a particular combination that our country has had a great difficulty addressing: poor people, and then poor people of color, and then poor black people.”

he need for a commission focused exclusively on the rural Black Belt is most apparent in places like Lowndes County, Alabama, where people are living with raw sewage in their yards.

Lowndes County is located between Selma and Montgomery, and every year tourists pass through, following the route of the historic 1965 civil rights march led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Mostly made up of small rural communities, it has a declining population of under 10,000 people, of whom more than 72 percent are African American. Residents here struggle against the soil that gave the Black Belt its name and made Alabama’s cotton king: Water can’t percolate smoothly through the chalky clay. Traditional septic tanks don’t work there; plumbing backs up when it rains, sending wastewater back into homes through sinks, tubs, and toilets.

The median household income in Lowndes County is $28,000 a year—and the kind of tank that residents would need can cost up to $30,000 for purchase and installation. Some residents resort to “straight piping,” which involves running a PVC pipe away from the home and into the yard, where it discharges untreated waste. As a result of not having affordable waste treatment, families have no choice but to contaminate their own properties. A 2017 study of Lowndes County residents by the Baylor College of Medicine found that 34.5 percent tested positive for hookworm, an intestinal parasite associated with the developing world. After the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty visited homes in Lowndes County and nearby Butler County, he described the waste crisis as “very uncommon in the first world…. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this.”

“You can say all day long that [people] ought to just move, but [they] are born and raised here,” says Lenice Emanuel, executive director of the nonprofit organization Alabama Institute for Social Justice, who has worked with residents on this issue. “They don’t have the money to just uproot their lives and move to Montgomery 25 miles away. Then you have a transportation issue too—getting back and forth to their jobs,” since many work in the community. She also notes that there are businesses—most of which, advocates say, are white-owned—that do have the necessary infrastructure in place to treat their waste, just a half-mile away from homes dealing with raw sewage. Engineers say that simply expanding municipal sewer lines could help solve the problem for some Black Belt homes. For that, the County would need funding.

According to Emanuel, when county residents have invited state officials to come and witness the conditions firsthand, they have been subjected to “intimidation tactics” such as being threatened with arrest warrants, or even fined for lacking septic tanks they could not afford. These reactions from the state have also made it more difficult for residents to feel sufficiently safe to organize and advocate for change. While Alabama says it stopped issuing arrest warrants for sewage in 2002, a black pastor was arrested as recently as 2014 because a septic tank failed and his church wasn’t able to deal with the overflow. Emanuel says that the damage of past warrants is already done: Many people who received them now have a criminal record, and some have lost or can’t find jobs as a result.

Emanuel draws an analogy between the way people are being treated over the waste issue and the KKK’s showing up in their communities—“I liken it to that kind of terror.” She says it leaves people feeling “helpless” and “at the mercy of the institutions and power structures in the community. And it’s similar all over [Alabama’s] Black Belt counties.”

Alabama Democratic representative Terri Sewell sponsored the Rural Septic Tank Access Act—which passed in the 2018 Farm Bill—to help her constituents in Lowndes County and other rural areas access grants of up to $15,000 to install or maintain wastewater systems. This is still significantly lower than the cost of appropriate septic tanks in many homes. An aide to Sewell says she is working to increase the resources devoted to the issue, including the maximum allowable grant.

It can also be difficult for Black Belt communities to navigate the federal protocols to obtain funds—in part, Womack says, because these local governments just don’t have the staff to work on chasing grants. Case in point: Lowndes County is actually eligible for Delta Regional Authority funding, but if you look at the DRA’s most recent grants for infrastructure in Alabama Black Belt communities, the county with sanitation conditions comparable to the Third World is nowhere to be found. In contrast, the DRA did provide $509,000 to extend an industrial park’s water and sewer system to serve Enviva, the world’s largest wood pellet producer.

hen Kennedy visited West Virginia in 1960, poverty in the region was stark: 33 percent of Appalachian families lived in poverty, compared to a national poverty rate of 20 percent; unemployment was 40 percent higher than the US average. Many more workers had given up on finding a job and left the workforce. That year, the Conference of Appalachian Governors declared that underdevelopment had meant that people in the region were “denied reasonable economic and cultural opportunities through no fault of their own.” Moreover, inadequate infrastructure for things like “transportation and water resources [had] hindered the local ability to support necessary public services and private enterprise.”

“The ARC is reparations,” says Spencer Overton, the president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. He says that in the coming months, the Joint Center will release a proposal for a Black Belt Regional Commission, hoping to address “an area of our country that once required a large number of people to work there. Those places became automated over time, but large populations are still there and there are fewer jobs. And so we have to come up with policy solutions. That’s the case when we talk about Appalachia; that’s the case when we talk about the Black Belt.”

Kennedy may have advocated for the ARC, in part, because he needed to win over West Virginia voters in the primary. As Michael Bradshaw describes in his 1992 book about the ARC, the senator’s visit to Appalachia came at a key moment in the campaign, when his challenger already had the support of organized labor. Kennedy announced his pledge for a state development program on the day before the vote. He had discussed black Southerners’ struggles during his campaign, but the fact that Appalachia was associated with white poverty made the program politically palatable to white voters and politicians.

Overton points to Appalachia and the Black Belt’s parallel histories of exploitation and resource extraction. In the case of the Black Belt, he says, it has been about “profiting off of cheap labor—whether that is slavery, Jim Crow, or the factories with low taxes, cheap wages, and no unions. Recognizing the unique history and consequent struggles in Appalachia, but not in the Black Belt, is like saying we’re going to treat the opioid crisis as a health epidemic, but we’re going to use the criminal code to deal with the crack epidemic.”

Andy Brack, former press secretary for the late South Carolina Democratic Senator Ernest Hollings and a longtime journalist and editor covering Southern politics, has no doubt as to the root of the structural inequality we see in the Black Belt today. In a 2013 piece, he compared a map showing deep poverty rates with a map of slavery in 1860: “With the blink of an eye, it’s easy to see that these areas easily correlate with where enslaved people lived in 1860. The [Black Belt] is a remnant of plantation life…. One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, it’s time that this area starts receiving the same attention that Appalachia did.”

esearchers with the Southern Economic Advancement Project (SEAP)—an initiative founded by Stacey Abrams that focuses on policy solutions and capacity-building for vulnerable populations in the South—recently embarked on a listening tour in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina. (SEAP is a fiscally sponsored project of the Roosevelt Institute, where I am a journalist-in-residence.) As they spoke with nonprofits and grassroots groups to get a better sense of local challenges, there were some consistent concerns, including a lack of access to transportation, struggles with raw sewage and other environmental issues, and lack of investment from banks. One participant noted the “weight of racism”—as seen in housing separated by race, resegregated schools, and uneven development between predominately white and predominately black areas. Multiple groups cited the challenge of stigma, from outsiders who viewed their communities as hopeless and lacking potential.

Dr. Sarah Beth Gehl, SEAP’s research director, says that in western North Carolina and northern Alabama, which both have ARC funding-eligible counties, the local-state-federal partnership came up repeatedly—for example, for supporting children’s services, local government capacity-building, and transportation for those in addiction recovery. But when SEAP traveled to south Georgia or south Alabama, where counties aren’t covered by the ARC, the conversations were very different. “It was a lot about a lack of resources and a lack of attention,” says Gehl. “The infrastructure needed to take some innovative approaches to tackling deep challenges in these Black Belt communities—that piece was missing.” Moreover, when it came to what some people on the tour called “the basics needed for a dignified life”—like a grocery store, transportation, housing stock, or medical facilities—the resources just weren’t there.

“Economic progress for the Black Belt requires innovation and deep commitment, which means providing consistent investment to address the interconnected issues that hinder growth and block equity,” says Abrams in a statement to The Nation. “Funding the Black Belt Regional Commission would be a declaration of real intent to finally serve this Southern arc, and it is long overdue.”

It is easy to imagine the arguments against a Black Belt Regional Commission that would be loosely based on the ARC. If there is still extensive poverty in Appalachia, why would we repeat the model? But the ARC has had an enormous impact. In the 2018 fiscal year alone, it reported that its investments would create or help retain more than 26,600 jobs, and train and educate more than 34,000 students and workers. The ARC’s $125 million investment was matched by $188.7 million in public and other moneys, and is expected to attract over $1 billion in private investments.

There are ways too that a Black Belt Commission could be done differently. The ARC covers a huge region, including areas that do not suffer from persistent widespread poverty; funds are weighted toward distressed areas, but the appropriated money is inadequate to cover that expanse. A Black Belt Commission could focus exclusively on distressed communities. Also, much of the early ARC money was spent on highway construction through Appalachia—which, as Michael Bradshaw writes, the original ARC director felt was necessary in order to connect poorer economies with wealthier ones. (He also thought it would show legislators “results.”) While infrastructure is vital, a Black Belt Regional Commission could equally emphasize investment in people—their health, education, training, and the creation of jobs that would allow for upward mobility.

Dr. Veronica Womack says she would start with education—from early childhood to higher education—as well as infrastructure development, including for broadband Internet access, investment in start-ups and rural entrepreneurships, and rural health services for people who currently live in “health care deserts.”

“That’s just a start. Because if you’re not healthy, or you don’t have the proper education and training, the likelihood of you being successful in the 21st century is very small,” she says.

Spencer agrees. “Too often, there has been the notion that economic development is attracting a poultry processing plant—very hard, low-wage, unattractive work without a lot of prospects for growth,” he says. “We need to invest in human beings. It gets back to the concept of Black Lives Matter: We really want to recognize the humanity of people, and invest in people so they can achieve their potential.”

In addition to having local elected officials at the table, Womack says a commission should include community-based organizations that have been working in the region for decades, such as the Black Belt Community Foundation, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Southwest Georgia Project, and other similarly focused organizations “connected to agriculture and the land—a big piece of how we can be sustainable.” She would also want to invite historically black colleges and universities, technical and community colleges, and land grant and rural institutions such as Georgia College and State University that “understand rural places and are working in the region already.” Crucially, the commission should also hear from activists who are not attached to any particular organization, Womack says, because “the people in their community look to them and their leadership.”

“These folks can tell you exactly where the hiccups are—where the challenges and barriers lie in their being able to develop their communities,” says Womack. “And so, if we are going to hit the mark, it’s going to require us to do a different type of policy and a different type of policy implementation that doesn’t block off people from even being able to participate in the decision-making.”

Yet none of this will be possible without presidential leadership—the kind Kennedy embraced when he visited poverty-stricken areas in West Virginia.

Bernie Sanders, who has called poverty a death sentence, visited Lowndes County last May and pledged to a resident, “This is just the beginning. We have to get attention to the issue, and then we’ll do something about it.” That resident, Pamela Rush, also spoke at a forum on poverty convened by Elijah Cummings and Elizabeth Warren in 2018. Pete Buttigieg noted at one of the debates that poverty hadn’t come up, and that “it deserves a lot of attention”; both he and Amy Klobuchar have struggled to win over black voters. And while Joe Biden has touted his poll numbers with African Americans, he has struggled to connect with younger generations, many of whom feel he falls short in addressing systemic issues.

If any of these or other candidates spend more time in the Black Belt, will they offer so bold a proposal as a Black Belt Regional Commission? Or will they ignore the generational poverty and continued isolation of the region?

Lenice Emanuel says that elected leaders need to take stock of how they are serving, or failing to serve, the people of the region. “We have got to look inward at our own culpability in maintaining these systems of inequity,” she says. “We have to be real with ourselves about that. That’s where the answer lies.”

National policy proposals for fighting poverty are not usually drafted by the people who most urgently need them. At best, poor and working-class people may be brought in to a forum or legislative hearing to testify in support of a policy when it’s nearly fully baked, and has already been delivered by elites.

In September, People’s Action, a national network of state and local grassroots power-building organizations, launched a “Homes Guarantee” campaign that it hopes will dramatically change housing policy and the national conversation about it. It calls for major reforms at the federal, state, and local levels—including everything from the construction of millions of units of social housing to national rent control—and is taking aim at the platforms of both presidential and down-ballot candidates. What’s also notable is the way the policy proposal was generated: by a group of directly impacted people from across the country.

This group, whom People’s Action have deemed their “grassroots leaders,” includes people who have experienced homelessness, live in public housing, rent from corporate landlords, or own mobile homes. In a series of discussions, they determined priorities that were then shaped into a policy proposal—with their consultation. Now, the same people are helping to lead the effort to garner support among policy-makers and voters. It’s an approach to policy-making that centers and responds to people’s lived experiences, one rarely used when it comes to antipoverty policy (with some notable exceptions).

Grassroots leader Linda Armitage, age 77, previously faced eviction when her NGO-owned building for seniors was almost sold to a for-profit developer. She says being able to talk about one’s personal connection to a proposal makes all the difference between policy’s being “impersonal” and its being about “humanity.”

Armitage had the opportunity to present the Homes Guarantee to lawmakers on the Hill in April. “It’s interesting to see people’s faces when listening to real stories from real people,” she says. “It’s like, ‘This goes on in this country?’ A think tank can come up with wonderful things, but if it’s not backed up by real people’s experiences… That’s what we were trying to communicate to the representatives.”

The need for a dramatic shift in housing policy is clear: There are 43 million renter households in the United States—nearly half of whom spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Approximately 3 million people experience homelessness every year. There is no county in the nation where a full-time worker earning the minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment. And the wealth of the average black American is just 10 cents on the dollar compared to the wealth of the average white American—in part because public and private-sector policies have promoted white homeownership, while excluding people of color and extracting wealth from their communities.

People’s Action’s Homes Guarantee proposes building 12 million units of social housing—a number meant to cover all US renter households spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing—as well as national rent control, a tenant bill of rights, reinvestment in public housing, the construction of 600,000 units of Permanent Supportive Housing with wraparound services for chronically homeless people, and reparations for those who have been affected by the United States’ long history of racist housing policies. (Variations on these policies have been pursued by tenant rights organizations across the nation, proponents of the anti-homelessness policy Housing First, and other housing advocates.)

“The idea is very simple,” says Tara Raghuveer, housing campaign director at People’s Action and founder of KC Tenants and the Kansas City Eviction Project. “We live in the richest country in history, and we can and must guarantee that everyone has a home.”

The organization arrived at this vision last July, when 10 People’s Action organizers met with about 40 grassroots leaders to devise a new national campaign. (All were leaders in local housing committees within People’s Action member groups.) They are racially diverse and traveled to the meeting in upstate New York from Washington state, California, Wisconsin, Ohio, New York, Illinois, and Nevada.

Among the stories they shared with one another were their struggles in a housing market rampant with discrimination, or with corrupt landlords and indifferent management companies. They also talked about the tenant rights organizing now happening across the country. After these discussions, the People’s Action organizers put forward several campaign proposals that focused on single aspects of the housing problem—campaigns that seemed winnable, such as a ban on developer contributions in elections, or organizing public housing residents and registering them to vote. But the grassroots leaders staged what Raghuveer happily calls “a coup.”

“It started to dawn on everybody,” says Armitage. “‘How can we choose a campaign just on rent control, or reparations, or homelessness? This isn’t really going to solve the problems. Why not be radical and pushy and everything else? Why not guarantee a home for everybody?’”

They began to outline their policy priorities, and in April 2019, grassroots leaders and organizers briefed members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and staff members. They both presented their ideas and told their stories: of living in public housing with mold, undrinkable water, and broken elevators; private landlords who evicted tenants after they complained of safety violations; the search for affordable and accessible housing as a person with disabilities; being homeless and in shelters, separated from family.

Members of the caucus seemed to be on board, but, according to Raghuveer, there was just one problem: “We were like, shit, we don’t actually have a proposal written.” She says People’s Action then reached out to a group of policy experts “who understood that they were working in service of a grassroots vision, not vice versa.” Those experts spent the summer drafting and redrafting a proposal, collaborating with the grassroots leaders at every step.

These leaders were able to draw on their own experiences to help shape the policies. Armitage says she has found for-profit management in senior public housing to be “incompetent, condescending, and mean”—focused solely on rent collection and “making sure the building doesn’t fall down.” In part because of her input, Homes Guarantee proposes to end for-profit management of public housing and allow tenant associations in privately owned buildings the right to a cooperative management structure.

Another grassroots leader, David Zoltan, was involved in making sure the proposal would include affordable housing for people with disabilities. Zoltan, who has also experienced homelessness, lost his left leg below the knee because of an injury from a manual labor job in 2016; he says that, after the accident, it took a year of searching to find an accessible home. When he finally found one, monthly rent was $1,050, consuming his monthly disability check of $950. He notes that less than 1 percent of all apartments in Chicago, where he lives, are both accessible and affordable.

In Homes Guarantee, new social housing units would have to meet accessibility specifications, such as doors that are wide enough to enter in a wheelchair, or rooms with sufficient space to turn—as Zoltan puts it, “things that can’t easily be altered after construction.” Homes Guarantee also stipulates that landlords would be required to meet a tenant’s changing accessibility needs, such as by installing grab bars or a tub that is wheelchair-accessible if it became necessary. “If this becomes the standard, we will start to chip away at how little accessibility there is in the housing market,” says Zoltan.

When the proposal was released on September 5, it quickly found champions on the Hill. In conjunction with the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), People’s Action is now working with six progressive legislators—Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Chuy García, and Pramila Jayapal—on a package of bills enacting many of the Homes Guarantee policies. Raghuveer expects that the package will be introduced soon, and says People’s Action and CPD “will make sure this is understood to be the people’s housing agenda—the new standard for progressive housing policy.

It may have already had an impact on at least one presidential campaign: in September, Bernie Sanders—who previously held a meeting with People’s Action about their proposal—announced that his own Housing for All plan would include many of the same priorities, such as funding for more than 9 million social and affordable housing units, $70 billion to repair public housing stock, and national rent control. Grassroots leaders with the Homes Guarantee campaign said that they were disappointed when Elizabeth Warren would not commit to backing Homes Guarantee explicitly at an Iowa presidential forum that same month. (Sources close to Warren’s campaign said she will be coming out with a revised housing proposal.)

Of course, the big question—as is always the case with bold progressive proposals—will be: How much would this cost, and what would it do to the economy? Mark Paul, an assistant professor at New College of Florida and a fellow with the Roosevelt Institute (where I am a journalist in residence), is on the Homes Guarantee policy team. He was charged with helping to ensure that the proposal is economically sound.

Paul says the biggest obstacle to implementation of these policies is “the current obsession with ‘pay-fors’ across the political spectrum”—the idea that any new spending must be offset by equal spending cuts or new revenues. He also notes that when private markets fail to fulfill the public’s basic needs, the stakes are literally life or death. In these cases, the government should intervene to establish a floor—a public option that directly competes with the private sector to provide essential goods and services—and better regulate private actors.

“We need to think much more seriously about the role of the federal government in ensuring that everybody has basic needs met,” says Paul. “It’s a policy choice to allow things like poverty, unemployment, and homelessness to be persistent features of our society, and we can choose otherwise.”

Everyone involved in the Homes Guarantee knows that some elements are more immediately attainable than others. Rent control, for example, wouldn’t require any public spending, and there have already been key wins this year in New York and California—both of which were powered by grassroots tenant organizations. But what has already transpired for this proposal is significant: A vision was created by directly impacted people, and a policy community is working in support of that vision. “We are reimagining housing,” says Armitage. “‘Housing as a human right’—it’s a wonderful value, but by golly, we’ve got to put some teeth in it.”

Ever since 2014, when the number of unaccompanied children arriving at the US-Mexico border surged, federal officials have struggled to adequately care for them. One of the most controversial practices has been the use of temporary shelters, some on military bases, to house children while they waited to be placed in state-licensed facilities funded by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Officials in both the Obama and Trump administrations have argued for an increase in the number of permanent shelters, where children can live until sponsors for them are located and vetted.

But in the Trump era, advocates have become increasingly wary about plans to expand the shelter network, given the administration’s horrific treatment of migrant children, its assertion of a right to detain children indefinitely, and the chilling effect its immigration policies have had on potential sponsors coming forward. The issue became particularly controversial in the Washington, DC region this summer, when HHS awarded a $20.5 million grant to private contractor Dynamic Service Solutions (DSS) for a new, permanent co-ed shelter housing up to 440 immigrant children ages 12 to 17.

First, the agency tried to locate the facility in Northern Virginia, but was stymied by bipartisan opposition based on issues ranging from not wanting to enable an administration more focused on warehousing children than reuniting them with their families, to concerns about the size of the facility and potential for abuse, to unwarranted fears of communicable diseases. After rebranding the project as ChildrenFirst DC and downsizing the proposal to 200 beds, DSS applied for a license to open the shelter in the Takoma neighborhood of Washington, DC, a sanctuary city.

The reaction was swift. Local advocates opposed the facility on account of its size, which they said would retraumatize children and be ripe for abuse, and also because the contractor is a for-profit company with little to no experience working with children. The contractor’s website says that it was “established to provide exceptional engineering, and staffing services to support critical operations and support innovative technology,” and lists training Iraqis on “electrical transformer maintenance equipment” in its recent news. In 2017 DSS received $8.7 million from HHS for “shelter care for unaccompanied children,” and posted jobs to work with “unaccompanied alien children” in Homestead, Florida, home of an infamous detention center for immigrant children run by another private contractor. (HHS and DSS did not respond to questions about the details this contract or the company’s experience working with children.)

In response to public outcry, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser issued emergency regulations declaring that the City would not provide a license to any facility housing more than 15 people. Most local advocates celebrated the outcome. But others expressed concern that an opportunity was missed to house the children in a city where local NGOs could provide services, monitor the children, and more readily find them sponsors.

As the Trump administration continues to weigh its options in the District, advocates on both sides of this issue are raising a vital question: In the age of Trump, how should the government care for immigrant children who are now alone in the United States?

n the wake of Mayor Bowser’s opposition to the shelter proposal, six former Obama administration officials—current DC residents who had helped run the UC program—wrote a letter urging the mayor to reconsider her position.

The group described the Trump administration’s policies as “appalling, cruel, and inhumane” and wrote that “we are called upon to oppose those policies through any means available.” However, they argued that opposition to the shelter could result in harm to more children, “forcing longer stays in crowded Customs and Border Protection facilities or in massive temporary shelters” that are unlicensed by state or local child welfare agencies—the kinds of facilities, the letter’s authors wrote, that are the source of “many of the disturbing pictures and stories of children being held behind bars without clean clothes, enough food, or even toothbrushes.” At an HHS facility, they argued, the District could use the licensing process “to ensure that any shelters meet the highest child welfare standards for care and safety.”

Local advocates who are opposed to the shelter panned the letter. “I believe the Obama people have their heart in right place,” said Maria Gomez, the founder and chief executive officer of Mary’s Center, which has provided health care, education, and social services to the Latino community in DC for 31 years. “But what they need to be putting their energy into is to stop this nonsense—stop housing children, stop detaining children—protect them, give them refugee status, and put them with their families or people who will care for them.”

Sharon Murphy is cofounder and program director of Mary House, a community-based organization that provides shelter and support services to immigrant and refugee families. (I serve on the board of Mary House.) She too feels that the Obama officials’ position enables an immoral detention system to continue. “Let’s start with the first issue, which is we are arresting children and holding them indefinitely,” said Murphy. “Stop normalizing the incarceration of children. Then we can move away from this capacity-building question to insisting that children 17 and younger be granted temporary political asylum which would make them immediately eligible for social services.”

Advocates also take issue with federal money going to a private contractor. Both Gomez and Murphy feel it would be more prudent, effective, and in the interest of the children for resources to go to an organization such as Catholic Charities that has a proven track record serving children, and that the nonprofit entity could in turn contract with service providers that have experience running smaller family shelters and finding sponsors for the children, including foster families, so the children can live in communities while awaiting their immigration proceedings.

“A private contractor is not going to answer to the District of Columbia,” said Murphy. “It will be accountable only to an administration that recently lost an appeal to deny children soap, toothpaste, and toothbrushes, refuses to provide flu shots, wants to hold children indefinitely, fingerprints families that would take the children and turns those over to ICE, sends kids to adult detention centers for deportation when they turn 18, and now wants to collect immigrants’ DNA.”

Gomez said that the letter also fails to take into account the health impacts of detaining children, which include untreated illnesses, lack of appetite and weight loss, suicidal ideation and chronic depression, and the long-term effects of toxic stress and repeated traumas to cognitive, physical, and mental health. According to the Center for American Progress, “Research has shown that even spending less than two weeks in detention can be detrimental to children’s mental, physical, and emotional health, and development.”

“At the end of the day this is about humanity,” said Gomez. “You are doing such harm to children who will grow up with tremendous scars because no one reached out to give them a hand at the moment that they needed it.”

he Obama administration also faced public opposition in 2014 when it tried to expand the shelter network, said Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute who was then the acting assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) which oversees the Unaccompanied Children’s (UC) program. “It was often based on things like, ‘The children will bring disease, they will be in gangs, they will be a burden on the community,’” said Greenberg. “There is opposition now [too], but from very different groups for very different reasons.”

Jeff Hild and Kate Wolff, two of the former Obama administration officials who signed the letter to Mayor Bowser, said that the signatories share many of the concerns of the local advocates, and that an opportunity was missed to address them. They told The Nation that issues such as the size of the facility, children’s having access to legal, educational, health, and other services, and the record of the private contractor all could have been explored during the DC licensure process.

“These questions and more could have been part of this discussion if it hadn’t been just cut off at the start,” said Hild, who served from 2014 to 2017 as chief of staff for ACF. “You could have required any shelter to meet the highest standards of care, and [mandated] services for the children provided by District-based organizations.”

Wolff, who worked on the UC program from 2014 to 2016, agreed. “State licensed shelters are the best option we have available given the current legal framework for unaccompanied kids,” she argued. At the large temporary facilities where most of the horrific treatment is occurring, “There’s nobody who can go in and say, ‘We’re revoking your license because you are not meeting all of these requirements’.” She noted that “seasonal waves” of unaccompanied immigrant children will continue, “So a decision at the local policy level to not even consider having a state-licensed shelter will have ripple effects down the system for the next kids who will be coming from Central America next spring.”

As of September 16, a record 67,000 unaccompanied had arrived in the United States so far this year. Greenberg said when there are sharp increases in the numbers of arriving immigrants, “You just can’t fully accommodate the needs with 24-bed shelters.”

ast week it was reported that HHS has scrapped its effort to build a facility in Virginia. Instead, it will look to open new shelters in Arizona and Texas, and expand an existing one in Texas as well. But the status of the DC proposal remains unclear. (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

“It’s unfortunate that there’s been categorical opposition to efforts to expand shelters in communities outside border areas,” said Greenberg. “It’d be better for children and their parents and relatives if children could be placed in shelters closer to where their families are.” He noted that over the past five years, DC, Maryland, and Virginia combined had more unaccompanied children released to sponsors than in any single state, and three of the top 10 counties in the nation with unaccompanied minors released to sponsors were in the Washington metropolitan area.

But to Murphy, the latest news about Virginia is evidence that “the campaign to shut down the incarceration of children—whose only sin is that they fled for their lives—can be successful.” She said, however, that such a campaign can’t be solely about stopping detentions in urban areas where there are the resources and infrastructure to organize opposition.

“It becomes ‘Not in My Backyard’ when those of us who have the capacity to organize now move on to the next thing in front of us,” she said. “We need to mobilize in these other areas—particularly rural areas and areas where there is high unemployment—we need the interfaith community and other NGOs that are watching to respond with numbers and money. And we need to pressure politicians to hold hearings on this, and remind them that while they are in impeachment mode they need to be paying attention to this continuing crisis of normalizing the detention of children.”

Every September the US Census Bureau releases new data on the state of poverty in America. On that day, the issue receives more attention from the media than it does throughout the rest of the year. Did the poverty rate rise or fall? What do the numbers say about the current administration or Congress? What do policy experts believe are the implications of the data?

But no matter what the Census data reveals—and yesterday we learned, for example, that in 2018 the number of uninsured people rose by nearly 2 million and median incomes stagnated, while 27 million people were lifted out of poverty by Social Security—what is really needed to make dramatic progress towards the elimination of poverty remains unchanged, as it has for the past 40 or so years: a mass movement led by directly impacted people who will organize, take direct action, and create the political will necessary to embrace available solutions.

I’ve written or spoken some version of that sentence so many times over the past decade that it brings to mind the iconic typewriter scene in The Shining, in which Wendy Torrance discovers that the novel her husband has been working on is just reams of paper with a single sentence written over and over. Similarly, reading the responses to the Census data from many policy experts and elected officials year in, year out can produce a somewhat maddening effect. In our conversations about poverty we are nipping at the edges, participating in the chatter, and missing the elephant in the room: People are poor because our system is structured not only to produce poor people but to keep them divided. Schools are separate and unequal; jobs don’t pay enough to cover basics like housing; health care is a privilege; profits are hoarded at the top; voting rights are denied; the judicial system refuses poor people fair representation and targets people of color. The list goes on.

So it was a great surprise that I had a feeling of hope, when—one day prior to the Census data release—I attended a press conference for the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. The campaign, including organizers from more than 20 states, was there to announce a nine-month, 22-state tour to mobilize, organize, register voters, and educate people about poverty and solutions to it—the campaign is calling it the “We Must Do M.O.R.E. Tour.” It will culminate in a June 2020 mass mobilization in the nation’s capital “to demonstrate [the campaign’s] power.”

Part of my optimism is based on the campaign’s track record. In just over a year, it has established itself in 43 states and the District of Columbia. It is led by people directly impacted by poverty. It claimed the largest wave of civil disobedience in history in state capitals across the country in June 2018—more than 200 actions over 40 days and thousands of people arrested. Along with the Institute for Policy Studies, the campaign released a budget to show how the government could pay for the campaign’s demands for things like guaranteed health care, free public college, universal child care, and addressing climate change. And it got every major Democratic presidential candidate to discuss poverty as a group in Washington, DC, responding to questions from directly impacted people in a way that no one has ever done before. The campaign also obtained a commitment from each candidate to push for a presidential debate focused exclusively on poverty.

My optimism is also based on the campaign’s steadfast refusal to silo issues impacting the approximately 140 million poor and low-wealth people who make up more than 40 percent of the population of the United States. Normally, anti-poverty advocates focus on food, or wages, or health care, or discrimination, or voting rights—the idea being that it takes so much work to win on any of those fronts, and a victory can make an important difference in people’s lives. That’s reasonable, but it means we are working on the symptoms rather than the disease itself.

In contrast, the Poor People’s Campaign talks about “five interlocking injustices” that create and sustain poverty: systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation (think climate change and pollution), the war economy (think budget and militarism), and our distorted moral narrative (think blaming the poor, and race-baiting). It also notes that the political and religious leaders who are doing harm to low-wealth people are the same people doing harm to people of color, the LGBTQ community, workers, teachers, the environment, poor white people, a struggling middle class, immigrants, and others who are oppressed. The campaign therefore organizes across constituencies, pushing people out of silos—the only way to take on an opposition that is remarkably unified and clear in its mission to gut taxes, gut regulation, and protect profits and privilege.

Finally, my optimism is based on the timing and the strategy of the campaign’s current effort. The campaign has already been organizing, and mobilizing, and registering—so what is different about this moment? Campaign cochair the Rev. Dr. William Barber II said the campaign has spent the past two to three years “waking people up to the stories and facts about 140 million poor and low wealth people…. But it’s not the waking, it’s the rising. It’s not enough to be woke, because you can be woke but still in bed.”

The campaign will now target voter registration in districts where, according to Barber, “if just two percent of poor and low wealth people and their allies are organized,” it could change electoral outcomes. “We know where those pockets are, and we know where we can make a huge electoral difference,” Barber said. According to Pew, 40 percent of eligible voters didn’t vote in 2016; more than half of them had family incomes under $30,000 and 42 percent were nonwhite and without a college degree. The campaign also has a goal to train 30,000 more directly impacted people at which point it will be comprised of more than one million people. On June 20, 2020—after the major primaries and before the party conventions—the campaign will mobilize a mass assembly and march on Washington, DC, with the intent to reveal “a movement that votes.”

Campaign co-chair the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis said the 25-state tour is about “bringing the solutions and building the power to enact those solutions.” She said it will “put a face, put names, put places” on injustice, and show that solutions are readily available in the very places where people are suffering. We need that—fewer numbers about poverty in the abstract, more stories and getting to know people in their own words.

While a movement can be built whether or not the media is covering it, I hope that reporters interested in inequality and an economy that works will visit the places and hear the stories where people in poverty are organizing for change (one of the greatest stories about poverty is that its existence and persistence—even when the data suggests myriad solutions—hasn’t really been considered a story). As for anti-poverty advocates who have been doing underappreciated work for decades, I would respectfully offer that there is no new set of talking points, no new numbers, and no new policy paper that will create the real change you seek. We know from our nation’s history how transformative change happens—it’s time to engage with, and be led by, people who are poor.

There is a feel-good aspect to the story of Michael Tubbs, the 29-year-old mayor of Stockton, California. A native of the city, he grew up in poverty and is a product of its public schools. He ran for the City Council in his senior year at Stanford and won at the age of 22. According to the City’s website, Tubbs is “the youngest mayor in the history of the nation” to represent a town with a population of more than 100,000 residents. (Stockton’s population is over 310,000 people.)

One of Tubb’s priorities is confronting the structures that he believes create poverty. It’s a steep challenge with high stakes, given Stockton’s 23 percent poverty rate. One radical way his administration is attempting to change the status quo is through a basic income pilot program. I spoke to him about how the pilot has fared since its launch six months ago, his take on the structural drivers of poverty, and how growing up in poverty informs his work as an elected official. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Greg Kaufmann: You are running the largest basic income project in America—125 families, $500 a month for 18 months, no strings attached, in a city that in the past has been known for poverty, the foreclosure crisis, and bankruptcy. How did this happen in Stockton?

Mayor Michael Tubbs: When I was elected mayor in 2017, I had a team of policy fellows who researched policy questions I had. After looking at our past, and issues of violence, and crime, and other issues, I realized that the core of all of these issues was really poverty—the fact that so many Stocktonians were in poverty, and so many others were one incident or one or two paychecks away from poverty.

So I asked my team to research the most radical interventions to eliminate poverty, and they came back with the idea of a basic income. And I remembered reading about a guaranteed income in college in Dr. King’s Where Do We Go from Here? and that this idea is not really talked about as part of King’s legacy. So I told them to find the barriers, why people aren’t doing it in the States—since research says that giving money really works—and let’s figure out how we pay for it. But then, being a pragmatist, I thought to myself, 2017—“First year as mayor, don’t want it to be my last year as mayor. Let’s table this and have it as a North Star goal if we ever find the money.”

But the next week Natalie Foster from the Economic Security Project approached me and said they were looking for a city to pilot a basic income project. I became very bullish on the idea, because I recognized the opportunity to not just tell a story of basic income but also a story of Stockton that was nuanced and rooted in the folks who make our community—the folks who are working, the working poor; and folks who aren’t working—folks who are disabled, and others. I thought having Stockton centered for once as a possible solution would be inspiring for the city and also for the nation—because there are so many cities like Stockton, and so many families and people like the people of Stockton.

GK: I had the opportunity to interview about 15 participants this week, and many talked about the ability to “breathe” with this extra income. Some talked about the ability to think and plan because they aren’t overwhelmed moment to moment. They talked about the improvement of their marriages, and relationships with their children and others. Do these kinds of stories and feelings resonate with you personally when you reflect on your own experiences?

MT: Absolutely. Because of how foundational cash is in our society, poverty or not having enough to cover the basics does make it hard for people to breathe and to think and to plan. There is research that says that poverty impairs decision making because your brain is constrained and the cortisol levels are activated because you’re in constant fight-or-flight mode, which shortens life expectancy, changes behavior. And personally, watching my mom as a single mother, struggle and be anxious and sometimes lash out, or be depressed because she knew she had two kids to take care of and wasn’t sure how the bills were going to be paid every month, and she had to figure out creative ways—from borrowing from people, to working extra hours… she was always working overtime, always working on the weekend, just always working—literally every single day—and it still wasn’t enough.

I remember [going to] the check cashing places, and how upset she was when we walked out, knowing she had to pay massive interest—but I was also relieved because she could actually pay for things. So, absolutely, when we talk about basic income, it’s not some theoretical concept. We’re talking about people’s lives, and the dignity that people deserve. The fact that folks are saying that something as small as $500 a month is enough for them to breathe, and to plan, and to be a good partner or parent—I think it’s an indictment on all of us. I don’t want to live in a world where folks aren’t able to do those things that are foundational to a civilized society just because they don’t have enough money.

GK: On the one hand, it’s got to be incredibly gratifying to help constituents who are having experiences similar to those of people you were close to growing up. On the other hand, I imagine it can make you feel pretty angry to see this continuing to happen in our society.

MT: Absolutely. I absolutely hate poverty, I find it abhorrent and evil and antiquated and immoral, and it just shouldn’t exist. I don’t see how anyone benefits from poverty. I’m not sure how poverty is aligned with our values, or how poverty makes us safer, better, more just. It does the opposite of all those things and the fact that it still exists is something I’m very, very upset about.

GK: Has the pilot already had the inspirational effect you hoped it would in terms of telling a new story about Stockton?

MT: I think so, because now when you mention Stockton people say, “Oh, the city that is doing basic income,” which is a much better designation than the city that is miserable or bankrupt. And we’ve had presidential candidates come to Stockton. Particularly with 2020 approaching, there is going to be a conversation about how you make the economy work for the people who make the economy work. And Stockton will always be part of that conversation. And to have people asking, “What’s Stockton doing? How are those little infusions of cash making a difference for people?” And that will be discussed on presidential debate stages—that’s also incredibly powerful.

GK: When the pilot concludes 12 months from now, do you have certain hopes about what Stockton and the nation will learn from it?

MT: My biggest hope has already begun to manifest in that we’re seeing people seriously contend not just with the idea of middle-class America, which is important, but there’s more people in the working poor or poverty than there are in the middle class or upper middle class. A lot of people who think they are middle class are actually working poor. Having conversations focused on solutions for those folks, and also having conversations about people who aren’t working, or who are doing caregiving, or doing domestic work, as being worthy of dignity and the ability to provide basic needs—that has been incredibly gratifying.

GK: You just used the word “worthy,” and we have a whole history in this country of judging who is worthy and who is unworthy of public assistance. So part of the work you are doing is policy implementation, but isn’t part of the work also about narrative change and creating space for these kinds of policies to emerge?

MT: Yes, I would argue that the biggest part of the work is the narrative work. Because if data were all we needed, our world would look a lot different—we would have solutions to climate change, we would have smart gun laws… But politics is not always logical, it’s emotional. So, part of it is capturing the public imagination, expanding what’s possible—and challenging norms and ideologies that people hold to be true, but aren’t really held up by anything once you challenge them.

An example of that in this project has been the ways we’ve had to continuously confront this notion that dignity is attached to work. When we first announced the pilot, one established politician said that he doesn’t believe in basic income because he believes that dignity is attached to work. And I’m sure working with an elected official title, making good money—he feels dignity from his work. But for people who are doing jobs that a lot of people don’t want to do, like my constituents who work in the fields, for example—the way they are treated without collective-bargaining power, being exposed to pesticides—that’s not dignified. Or working two jobs, 16-hour days, and still can’t pay the bills and are stressed and anxious—that’s inherently undignified. And not because they are undignified, but the work they do isn’t treated in a dignified way by society.

Women who are caregiving, or watching kids, or doing domestic labor and not being paid—they don’t have dignity because they don’t get a paycheck? The notion is ridiculous. Our dignity has to be attached to our personhood.

GK: The way most assistance programs are constructed really grows out of a lack of trust for people with low incomes—you have to jump through hoops and bureaucracies, you are told how you can and can’t spend money, you are asked invasive questions about your private life. The approach of this pilot is exactly the opposite—it says, here’s the money, we trust you to know what you need to do with it. What do you say to people who say this approach is too unstructured and too trusting?

MT: I say that I actually started there as well. And then I looked in the mirror and realized that no one tells me how to spend my check every month—what I need to spend money on, I spend money on. And sometimes, if I have some left over, it’s what I want to spend money on. And I also thought of folks I grew up with who would sell their food stamps—not because they didn’t need food, but maybe some months food is not the most pressing need. Maybe it’s the car battery, or rent, or maybe the kid got sick. There is no government leader or policy person who is smart enough to come up with every single reason why on a month-to-month basis someone may need $500 and how they should spend it. Especially because income is so volatile—needs really do change every month. Think about the fact that 40 percent of Americans are one missed paycheck away from poverty.

GK: How do your experiences growing up continue to inform not only this basic income effort but your efforts more broadly as mayor?

MT: I think growing up poor, and black, in South Stockton, with a mother who had me when she was a teenager, an incarcerated father, definitely permeates all the work that I do. It’s the reason why I’m in government, because I realized—particularly when I was at Stanford—that people with means could sometimes opt out of government and go to private sources, like private school, private security, private, private, private…

But it’s folks who are not wealthy, who aren’t dependent on government but need government to deliver, because they can’t opt into a private anything—this is what they have, this is the chance they get. And I think having lived through those experiences before studying them gives me the fire and passion and willingness to take more risks. I’m not taking risks for some group I feel sorry for. I’m taking risks for myself, my neighborhood, my city, my family. And understanding that we are wasting so much potential in this country. Folks I went to school with in Stockton were brilliant! And they would have done well if they had gone to a place like Stanford. We’re not as great as we can be as a nation because we’re not seeing, investing in, and valuing everyone.

I also think my experiences inform real empathy—like radical empathy. I don’t have to be an immigrant, or a child of immigrants, or undocumented to understand what it’s like to feel othered, or discounted, or to feel like you don’t belong, or you’re not important, or you’re a nuisance. Radical empathy allows me to really argue that no, we need to protect everyone.

GK: You have said, and I’m paraphrasing, that you have hope that each generation will move our nation in a better direction, extending the social contract. Yet the Trump administration threatens all of the values you talk about and the potential you hope we reach. Isn’t this actually a perilous moment and we could quite easily go backwards dramatically?

MT: It’s perilous, but we’ve been here before. This is not the first time we’ve had a white supremacist or a misogynist in the White House, but we can make sure it’s the last. But I would say what’s most terrifying about this moment is the vigilante violence attached to it, and the blatant authoritarianism, and fascism, and white supremacy. I never imagined in my life I would see a crowd of people chanting “Send her back!” to a sitting member of Congress.

But we’ve been there before, and the only way we move forward is by being just as bold, courageous, and sacrificial as all the people before us… like, people were radical—when you think of the civil rights movement and the violence they encountered. And I don’t think we yet understand it’s going take more than tweets, more than platitudes, and more than rallies to get us out of this perilous moment. There’s no app to end white supremacy and misogyny and homophobia, sorry. It’s going to take real sacrifice, real organizing, and real people power.

I remember being in high school and studying the American Revolution, the Civil War, the civil rights movement, and wondering if I’d been alive, what would I be doing? Would I be like one of the people I read about? Today is the answer to that question. Whatever you’re doing today during the rise of Donald Trump, you would have been doing with George Wallace, Andrew Jackson, or during the Civil War. Everyone has to ask themselves, “What role do I play in making this country a better place?” As a voter, donor, constituent, organizer, as an elected official, as a parent, a volunteer… The current moment demands that we all do more. This is our moment.

On Tuesday, at a House Budget Committee hearing entitled “Poverty in America: Economic Realities of Struggling Families,” 10 Republican congressmen participated—all men, all white. A few of them shared their own stories of rising from poverty, including Ohio’s Bill Johnson, who said he was born on a mule farm with no indoor plumbing. His family went to the store once a month “to get sugar and salt—if we had the money to do it. Everything else came from the sweat of our brow and the toil of our hands.” His mother worked “three or four jobs.” His father was an alcoholic, he said, so they moved a lot—wherever his mother could find work—and Johnson attended 13 schools in 12 years.

Then Johnson pivoted to challenge the testimony of two of the hearing’s witnesses, the Reverend Drs. William Barber II and Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, who’d called on the committee to tackle poverty as a moral imperative. “I been a Christian since I was 10 years old,” Johnson responded. “I don’t find anywhere in the scripture where Jesus said that it was Caesar’s job to feed the poor, and to clothe the widows, and take care of the orphans. It’s the church’s responsibility, the community’s responsibility, your neighbor’s responsibility, it’s your responsibility to do those things.”

Reverend Barber shook his head and closed his eyes.

Johnson then turned to Republican witness, Pastor David Mahan, founder of Frontline Youth Communications, and asked him to testify about the effect a strong father figure can have on a youth’s ability to overcome poverty and succeed.

It was a pattern that would repeat itself during the three-hour hearing. A Republican congressman would talk about his own success in overcoming poverty, and then question whether people understood the value of hard work, or the need for father figures, or were corrupted by the “well-intentioned” War on Poverty that to their mind had failed—though research indicates the poverty rate would be about twice as high today without the safety net. Ultimately, the hearing featured a tired argument about whether the government had a role to play in addressing economic insecurity, or if that was the responsibility of individuals and private organizations. Reverend Barber would later tell The Nation, “I [wept] for the nation when I came out of this hearing today. You can bring in a plan, let people know that they have millions of people in their own state who are poor, and they still see through a racial lens, and they still resist addressing it, and they still tell the same old lie that if people just work harder…”

Later in the hearing, Reverend Barber took on Johnson’s assertion about Christian teachings as well as his framing. “First of all, it’s interesting that you would define yourself as Caesar,” he said. “Next, you haven’t read the 2,000 scriptures in the Bible that talk about how societies are supposed to treat the poor, the immigrant, the least of these. And you don’t know that Jesus started his first sermon with the Good News to the ptochos—a Greek word that means ‘those who have been made poor by economic systems’…. It is bothersome that in the 21st century we still have these weak, tired old mythologies. See the people [in poverty]! Stop just talking about how you know poverty and hear what these folks are saying, and put together a full plan to deal with this issue.”

That, in fact, was exactly what the Poor People’s Campaign had come to the hearing to do—to deliver a budget proposal laying out how the nation can afford to meet the needs of the 140 million people who are living in poverty or one emergency away from poverty. The hearing also gave lawmakers the opportunity to hear testimony from Poor People’s Campaign members Callie Greer, Kenia Alcocer, and Savannah Kinsey, who spoke about their personal experiences of poverty.

The conclusions these three witnesses drew from their own history differed significantly from those of Republican committee members like Johnson. Greer spoke of watching her daughter deteriorate and eventually die of breast cancer with no health insurance in Alabama, one of the 14 states that have refused to expand Medicaid. “How much would you pay to have your baby saved?” she asked. She noted that the federal cost of expanding Medicaid in the 14 states would be approximately $25 billion in the first year, “about the same amount the Pentagon hands over to Boeing every year.”

Alcocer spoke of her life as an undocumented immigrant who came to the United States when she was 5 years old. She now lives in Los Angeles with the fear that “immigration officers might come and take me away, and that my child will be ripped from my arms.” She urged the members of the Budget Committee to use their “tremendous power to shift US priorities.” She hoped they might decide that “it’s more important to put children into Head Start than into detention centers.” She noted that a corporation last year got $234 million for beds for children in detention centers, enough “to fund Head Start for more than 26,000 children.” She said that while President Trump claims immigrants “steal jobs and public-assistance money,” the Congressional Budget Office found that accepting more immigrants and creating a path for undocumented people to get legal status would result in benefits that outweigh costs by $20 billion annually.

Finally, 22-year-old Savannah Kinsey talked of the loss of jobs in her hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and the overdose epidemic that has taken the lives of a few of her friends. She said one of her friends was in and out of jail because of drug use but was never able to obtain treatment. She died two years ago at age 26, leaving behind a 4-year-old daughter. Kinsey is now focused on fighting for universal health care with an advocacy organization called Put People First! PA. She noted that while Conemaugh Hospital in Johnstown got a one-out-of-five star rating from Medicare.gov, the CEO of the corporation that owns it made more than $13 million in 2017. “Nobody should get that rich off a health-care system that is not even working,” she said.

After more than two hours of testimony and five rounds of questions from members on both sides of the aisle, Reverend Theoharis admonished both parties for not asking these three witnesses any questions. “I’m stunned,” she said. “We’ve pulled a group of testifiers who are deeply, personally impacted by these problems, they are in the room, and people are not talking to them. People are not asking questions about how are we going to solve this problem? And then people are being blamed for the problems that society has caused. It feels very important to me to say that we need a real serious conversation in this country, led by those who are most impacted.”

Congressman Kevin Hern (R-OK) then proceeded to tell his story of growing up in “extraordinary poverty” and finding “that the only way out was to work my tail off.”

After the hearing, Kinsey told The Nation, “I wish they had asked me about the hospital system in our area. Because that really is a ‘profits over people’ situation. And I wanted to talk about how you shouldn’t be ashamed to be poor, or to need public assistance. I kind of expected them not to ask us questions though, because they don’t want to hear about poverty.”

In August 2012, The Nation launched a blog series called #TalkPoverty to “help push the issue of poverty into the mainstream political debate.” Each week we profiled advocates, scholars, and people in poverty who asked questions of President Barack Obama and the Republican challenger, then-Governor Mitt Romney. Obama responded to a final questionnaire; Romney took a pass. Still, there were no questions directly about poverty in any of the presidential debates.

Seven years later, for candidates to discuss poverty, be asked about poverty, or speak directly to people in poverty—is still rare. As the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, pointed out last week, “During the 2016 Presidential primaries and campaign, there were 26 televised debates, but not a single hour was devoted to how candidates would address America’s poverty. Republicans talk about the economy, while Democrats speak of the middle class. Nobody talks about the poor. The Poor People’s Campaign is organizing across lines created to divide us and we’re forcing those in power to listen.”

Monday marked a major step forward for pushing a conversation about poverty into presidential politics. The Poor People’s Campaign held a historic forum featuring nine Democratic presidential candidates who gathered to explicitly discuss the issue. Attendees included Vice President Joe Biden and Senators Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. (Invitations were sent to the Republican National Committee and Donald Trump. but neither replied.)

One important outcome of the forum was that Reverend Barber obtained a commitment from each and every candidate to push for a presidential debate focused exclusively on poverty and what the Poor People’s Campaign views as the interlocking issues that create and sustain poverty—systemic racism, ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative often promoted by religious extremists that focuses on issues like abortion, rolling back gay rights, and inserting prayer in school instead of the suffering of the marginalized. Should the campaign ever need to remind the candidates of their pledges, it can put together a great montage of each one promising to fight for that debate.

As for policy, there was quite a bit that the candidates agreed on: a restoration and expansion of the Voting Rights Act; universal pre-K and affordable childcare; a $15 minimum wage; health care as a right; repealing the Trump tax cut for the wealthy; bringing the troops home from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and reallocating those billions of dollars domestically; making college affordable or free. There was also a shared sense that scarcity of resources is a myth—the United States has plenty of money to do big things. Candidates also seemed to agree broadly that Democrats must respond to the right’s attempts to use race to pit poor people against one another by investing time and energy in building a multiracial coalition.

Moderator and MSNBC host Joy Reid pushed the candidates on how they would make their policy proposals a reality in a world in which Mitch McConnell and the Republicans either control the Senate or have the power of the filibuster. Most said it would take a sustained movement to create the kinds of policies they were discussing—that it wouldn’t be enough to “win and go home” in 2020. “Let’s be clear, if we’re in the majority and Mitch McConnell wants to block us on the kinds of things our country needs and the kinds of things they elected me and other people to enact, then I’m all for getting rid of the filibuster,” said Senator Warren, distinguishing herself as the only candidate at the forum to embrace that procedural change. “We cannot let [McConnell] block things the way he did during the Obama administration.” Biden alone seemed to put faith in his persuasive abilities with Congress, touting the three Republican votes obtained to pass the Recovery Act in the wake of the financial crisis in 2009.

Some other key differences included Andrew Yang’s call for a universal basic income of $1,000 per month. (Strangely, that was just about all he talked about during his 27 minutes of time.) Marianne Williamson endorsed reparations for slavery and the Poor People Campaign’s call for $350 billion in annual military-spending cuts, and she spoke about the trauma of child poverty, which she said has been shown to be equal to that of returning veterans. Senator Michael Bennet touted his American Family Act which he said would cut child poverty by 40 percent. Senator Harris said she would get rid of private prisons and private detention centers. Biden’s goals on health care and post-secondary education were more modest than those of the other candidates, proposing that every person have access to Medicaid—a vague statement that his campaign indicated meant a kind of public option—and making sure every “qualified” person can attend community college for free by closing a tax loophole on inherited wealth. (He said that would raise $17 billion annually, $6 billion of which would pay for free community college.)

Reverend Barber, campaign co-chair the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, and poor people in the campaign also had the opportunity to ask questions. Reverend Barber pushed the candidates to pledge to organize in Southern “red states” that he said were actually “unorganized” states—where conservatives use racist voter suppression and gerrymandering to get elected and then pass laws that hurt poor whites more than anyone else, in terms of sheer numbers. He said they needed to organize not just in states where polls say they have a shot at winning—like North Carolina or Virginia—but in the 13 former Confederate states that control 26 seats in the Senate, 31 percent of the House, and 170 electoral votes, and represent about one-third of all poor people. He again obtained promises from each candidate to do so in an effort to fight for a new electorate.

There were other important advances from the perspective of the Poor People’s Campaign. They have a central goal of changing the narrative on poverty—“because if you’re not in the narrative, you’re never going to be in the policy,” Reverend Barber said. To that end they were able to impress upon the candidates and viewers that the official measure of 40 million people in poverty doesn’t even begin to capture who is poor in this country. Instead, using the more accurate supplemental-poverty measure, we see that 140 million people—more than 43 percent of the population—are poor or low-wealth, meaning one emergency away from poverty. That figure includes 9 million children, 74 million women, 26 million black people, 38 million Latinx people, 8 million Asian people, 2.14 million Native and Indigenous people, and 66 million white people. It’s consistent with findings that about 40 percent of the country can’t afford an unexpected $400 expense.

I would have liked to see Reverends Barber and Theoharis challenge the candidates a little more directly on the findings of the campaign’s “moral budget” that was released just prior to the forum. It shows how the campaign’s demands—the things politicians often deem unaffordable, like public support for food, housing, health care, college, and income security for all—could be paid for. For example, beyond ending wars overseas, what cuts to our $716 billion military budget (more than the next seven countries combined) would the candidates be willing to support? Tomorrow, a House Budget Committee hearing will take a deeper dive into that budget and hopefully it, too, will become part of the presidential conversation.

But for those of us who have been covering poverty and for advocates—and especially poor people—who have been waiting on the issue to get some traction in the presidential campaigns, yesterday was an important and hopeful day. It took a national campaign led by poor people in 41 states to make it happen, but frankly, that’s how it should be. Because when voters speak, politicians are forced to listen. And if poor people start coming together and voting together, well, in Washington parlance—that’s a game changer.

People in poverty are used to being treated as “less than.”

They are used to others assuming the worst about their character. They are used to being judged—to their motives being questioned. And they are used to their behavior being surveilled—by the state, by the media, and by strangers—for what they eat, who they love, how they parent, how they enjoy themselves, anything: What’s in her groceries? How can they afford that? Why doesn’t he have a job?

Donald Trump proposes to take this hostility to a new level by simply redefining people in poverty out of existence. This week, the White House Office of Management and Budget proposed a change to the way the government calculates poverty. The result? Millions of working-poor people would no longer be counted as poor. Trump could claim credit as the president who reduced poverty and, more significantly, eventually millions of people would no longer qualify for the assistance programs they need. It’s not only people currently below the poverty line who could be thrown out of programs like food stamps and Medicaid, but also people just above it—like children who qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school.

Already, our commitment to helping people in poverty is a pretty bad joke. We established a standard by which people should get help with housing, but only 1 in 4 households eligible for federal rental assistance actually receives it. We say we want people to be able to work and so established a standard for providing child-care assistance, but then only about one in six eligible children receives it. We say no one should be hungry, and that every child should be able to eat so they are ready to learn, and then we stick to a food-assistance plan that the United States Department of Agriculture described all the way back in 1933 as designed for “restricted diets for emergency use.” As a result, the average benefit is just $1.40 per person, per meal. And perhaps most obviously damning, we maintain a federal minimum wage that is a poverty wage, telling people that no matter how much we need their labor, no matter how much their employer profits—this crap wage is enough for you. And this is just how we treat any poor person; it doesn’t even begin to capture how we treat people of color, and particularly women of color.

Still, this hostility doesn’t suffice for Trump. From the start, his administration has sent a clear signal to people who are struggling: If you need health care, or food, or housing, it’s because you don’t know the value of work. And so the administration has pushed states to add new work requirements and time limits to safety-net programs, putting the little assistance people are able to receive in jeopardy. Around 20,000 people in Arkansas recently lost Medicaid because of the state’s new work requirements, and up to 183,000 are expected to lose coverage under a new plan in Michigan. More than 13,000 people in Kentucky lost food assistance. Then there’s a new administration proposal to evict undocumented immigrants from public housing, which could displace more than 55,000 children, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But the proposal on how to calculate poverty itself would go further still. In effect, it’s a verdict that says: You are no longer in poverty. You don’t need any help. You are off the radar.

If there is a silver lining—and there really isn’t if this proposal goes through—it would be that this move should awaken in many people an awareness of what a responsible change in how we respond to poverty might look like. At a minimum, we should live up to the standards we’ve set on necessities like housing and child care so that eligible people actually receive assistance. But why not go further than that? Why not insist that we end the poverty wage now? Why not examine the proliferation of low-wage jobs, and look at job quality and insist on standards for humane practices like paid leave and fair schedules, and enforce labor standards? How about refusing to accept public schools that are separate and unequal, segregated by race, class, and quality? Why not put an end to the dumping of toxics in poor communities and end policies that isolate them through zoning codes, disinvestment, and a lack of transportation? Why not declare, at long last, that everyone in a nation as obscenely rich as ours should have a right to health care, food, housing, income security, education—the things we all need to survive and thrive?

Why not insist that everyone has a right to live—visibly and without shame?

Across the country, a growing number of local policymakers are realizing that a rising tide does not in fact lift all boats and that economic policy focused on the middle class and the wealthy will not suffice to build a fair and inclusive economy. Only targeted investments that reflect an understanding of historical—and persistent—barriers will reach people who are continually marginalized. To that end, more than 80 jurisdictions are part of the Government Alliance on Racial Equity (GARE), a network that is working to change the policies, programs, and practices that sustain and deepen racial inequities in education, health, employment, criminal justice, and more. The idea is that by taking on systems that oppress people of color, outcomes will improve for all people. Cities like Philadelphia, Minneapolis, New York, Dallas, Oakland, and Austin are testing new approaches to train government workers on racial equity, involve the community in design and implementation of this work, and use tools to assess the racial effects of proposed policies.

One of the newer members of GARE is the Council of the District of Columbia. The city joined in 2018 through an effort led by Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, who this year introduced a bill that would require the city to include racial equity in its performance evaluations of agencies and programs. More than 80 people signed up to testify at a hearing on the bill in late April.

While most witnesses had praise for the legislation and suggestions for improvements, many also urged the council not to wait for its passage to get to work on racial equity. They pointed to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2020 budget proposal as an opportunity to reverse what has been gradual but steady disinvestment in DC’s black communities. As Ed Lazere, the executive director of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute (DCFPI) testified, “Our analysis shows that the proposed budget would maintain and even exacerbate many racial inequities.”

Perhaps the most egregious example of black disinvestment in Bowser’s budget, according to Lazere and other witnesses, is the proposed cuts to DC Public Schools. Twenty schools are slated for cuts of 5 percent or more, and 17 of those are in Ward 7 and Ward 8. These wards are predominantly black and poor, with child-poverty rates of approximately 40 percent and 48 percent, respectively. Nearly half of the city’s public-school students reside in this area.

The school allocations are based on a formula that funds individual schools, primarily tied to enrollment. Taken at face value, that might seem fair; having fewer students means less money, and having more students equals more money. However, as the DCFPI points out in its report, “Treating everyone the same—what some call equality—ignores the need to focus on communities facing the greatest barriers.”

In the case of black families in Wards 7 and 8, schools in more affluent neighborhoods “are inaccessible to many due to policies that led to residential segregation,” the DCFPI asserts. At the hearing, Kilolo Kijakazi, a fellow at the Urban Institute, named some of those policies and practices, including restrictive racial covenants, redlining, and more recently, banks steering borrowers of color to subprime loans when they should have qualified for prime.

Today, declining enrollment in Wards 7 and 8 schools can likely be explained in part by black displacement due to gentrification and by the rise in public charter and magnet schools. But the DCFPI notes that students aren’t guaranteed slots in these newer schools, so neighborhood schools remain “the foundation of [the] school system.” As funds are slashed, it gets increasingly difficult for the schools to provide a quality education. As one elementary school teacher told The Washington Post, “The budget gets cut; people are let go; we are expected to do the same with less.” Markus Batchelor, Ward 8 representative for the DC State Board of Education, said, “Enough is enough of the disinvestment in kids who need it the most.”

The budget cuts are compounded by the fact that DC is not living up to its stated commitment to school equity. Supplemental funds targeting poor students for needed services are 40 percent below what is necessary for an adequate education, according to a study commissioned by the DC government. Moreover, these funds have been diverted to cover basic costs like teachers’ salaries instead of funding tutors, counselors, extracurricular activities, and other needed services in high-poverty schools as intended. According to the Post, Bowser and DC Public Schools Chancellor Lewis Ferebee “insisted the budget is equitable. They said…increased investments in mental health services and support staff funded through the school system’s central office will help these campuses.”

The needs of DC’s lower-income and primarily black residents are also overlooked in the housing section of the mayor’s proposed budget. When it comes to black displacement due to gentrification, two recent studies have found Washington to be the worst city in the nation or among the worst. Nevertheless, as Lazere testified, the mayor’s budget doesn’t address this issue; instead, it would create a new “workforce housing” program for residents with annual incomes of $70,000 to $140,000 “while putting almost no new resources into addressing the housing needs of extremely low-income households.” (Median black household income in DC is about $42,000.) This new housing program won’t reach workers in “the most common service sector jobs [which] pay between $20,000 and $40,000 and disproportionately are held by black and Latinx residents,” according to the DCFPI. Meanwhile, some 40,000 families remain on a wait list for rental assistance, and there is a backlog of $340 million in needed repairs to health and safety hazards in “the one-third of [public housing] units that are approaching uninhabitability.”

At the hearing on McDuffie’s proposed racial-equity legislation, one of the most common suggestions for how to improve the bill was to add a requirement for a racial-equity impact analysis of all proposed legislation, just as the city requires an analysis of each bill’s fiscal impact. That kind of rule would make plain how even noncontroversial proposals like Bowser’s budget can perpetuate or deepen inequities.

After all, a budget is more than the allocation of money; it’s also a statement of priorities and vision. As George Jones, the CEO of Bread for the City, an antipoverty organization that provides food, clothing, and medical, legal, and social services to over 5,000 DC households every month, put it, “This is the time for councilmembers who know what racial equity is to begin to make sure that how we budget, the things we prioritize really show that we are looking at how to affect the communities in a positive way that have been disadvantaged by systemic racism.”

It is no small task to tell the story of how the nation arrived at this moment of extreme concentration of wealth and political power. It’s even more difficult to explain what, specifically, can be done to reclaim the economy and democracy for the benefit of the public.

But the Roosevelt Institute has attempted to do just that with its new report, “New Rules for the 21st Century: Corporate Power, Public Power and the Future of the American Economy.” It is a report, ultimately, about power—who has it, who should have it, and what hangs in the balance as the fight for power is waged.

At an event in Washington, DC, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams praised the report for “showing” how we can achieve transformational change, rather than simply calling for it. “We have to start demanding that every candidate talks about how change will come,” she said. “Don’t tell me what you want, show me how you plan to get us there. When we show and don’t simply tell we can create change.”

How did we get here?

The report’s authors argue that in order to create an agenda that will both respond to the demands of this political moment and also gain public support, one must first accurately diagnose and effectively communicate what brought us here.

Over the past 50 years, according to the report, free marketeers—including neoliberal policy-makers who believe that free markets produce just outcomes—created today’s inequities in wealth, opportunity, and power through a “calculated one-two punch.” The first punch concentrated corporate power through “regulatory, tax, and procurement” policies that allowed financial and political elites to reap the benefits of a very intentionally designed system. The second punch weakened public power by framing government spending as “inherently inefficient” in contrast to a “free market” that was fair, neutral, and rewarded a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” work ethic.

To sell the first set of policies, the public was told that by reducing top marginal tax rates and taxes on capital gains, deregulating corporations, weakening unions, and generally doing whatever is possible to create unfettered markets, we would all share in the wealth through job creation, higher wages, and increased opportunity. (In other words, that wealth would “trickle down.”) The result? The top .01 percent (about 200,000 households) now own the same wealth as the bottom 90 percent of all Americans while wages have remained fairly flat since the 1970s and the racial wealth gap has widened. Moreover, with the injection of more money in politics through campaign contributions and federal lobbying ($3.5 billion annually), financial elites have increased their access to policy-makers and consequent ability to write rules that buoy the continued concentration of wealth and power.

Key to the strategy of the second punch, as report coauthor and Roosevelt fellow Darrick Hamilton noted, was employing dog-whistle politics to portray those who benefited from public spending as black and brown people who were “lazy, unvirtuous and underserving welfare queens.” Spending on public programs was rolled back—the US now ranks 10th lowest of 38 industrialized nations on social expenditures as a percentage of GDP—and as trust in government eroded, power was ceded to the private sector in the form of subsidies, tax credits, contracting, and more. We see the results throughout our economy and society—in the privatization of prisons and immigration-detention centers, core defense services, and janitorial and clerical staff at federal agencies; crumbling infrastructure; a lack of access to essential services like childcare, health care, and higher education; and constant attacks on a public sector that used to be a source of good jobs and opportunities for marginalized communities.

Where do we go from here?

The report argues that progressives (and small-d democrats) must counter with a one-two punch of their own in order to course-correct our politics and build a more inclusive, dynamic economy—first, curbing corporate economic and political power; and second, reimagining the ways that public power can be used to serve public interests.

Some of the ideas around limiting corporate power are fairly intuitive, including “enhanced antitrust enforcement, higher taxes on wealth and excess income, corporate governance reform, and more expansive labor laws.” The report calls for reforms like curbing or banning stock buybacks so that profits are reinvested in workers; a new standard for merger review that considers risks of consolidation to suppliers and workers; making unionization and bargaining easier, including through default unionization unless a majority votes otherwise; adding workers and other non-shareholder stakeholders to corporate boards; and breaking up “too big to fail” financial institutions.

One proposal for curbing corporate influence is to empower small campaign donors by providing public funds to candidates who reach a certain threshold. Critically, this approach would enable more working-class people—who currently represent less than 2 percent of federal legislators—to run for office. The report notes that our current system results in Congress spending “only 1 to 2 percent of its time on poverty-related matters,” and generally being quite uninformed about how their decisions impact people in poverty. Other key voting reforms include a new Voting Rights Act to counter voter suppression and gerrymandering, both of which dilute the voice of those suffering under our corporatized government. The coauthors also call for ensuring voting representation in Congress for nearly 6 million Americans in Washington, DC, and in Puerto Rico and other US overseas territories, and at-large House and Senate seats for Native Americans to begin to make amends for treaty violations.

With regard to reimagining public power, one of the most compelling recommendations—particularly for people who have experienced poverty—is that government “should ensure universal access to goods and services that are essential to self-determination” such as housing, health care, childcare, education, broadband, and other basic needs. The authors suggest that one way to do that is by providing a “public option” for a variety of services, to ensure a basic level of quantity, quality, and access. While a public option has been widely discussed in the context of health care, the report suggests it could also be used to achieve universal access for higher education (including through investment in historically black universities and tribal colleges); housing, such as “subsidized owner-occupied housing” and “specific quotas to ensure a more equitable distribution of public housing units”; and a federal job guarantee that sets a floor for wages, benefits, and working conditions, and “literally end[s] voluntary unemployment and working poverty.”

The authors argue that public power should also be used to “achieve transformational economic and national goals” that markets cannot address. The most urgent example arguably is responding to climate change. As report coauthor and Roosevelt Vice President of Policy and Strategy Nell Abernathy told The Nation, “Market-based approaches like carbon taxes are woefully insufficient to meet our climate goals. We should combine them with policies that leverage government’s unique power to shift labor and capital in ways that not only solve our country’s pressing challenges, but also build a stronger, more inclusive economy.”

Telling the Story in 2020

Donald Trump certainly recognizes the urgency people feel for a new approach to our economy and governing. He exploits it by blaming immigrants, stoking white fear, and employing a 24-7 fact-free propaganda campaign.

Stacey Abrams offered a counter-approach: “You can have conversations with everyone. You can tell a common story but still see the differences.” Abrams said that when she ran for governor in Georgia in 2018 she talked about language barriers facing Latinos, access barriers for people with disabilities, workplace protections needed for LGBT people, health and incarceration disparities for African Americans, and the loss of hospitals for rural white people because the state refused to expand Medicaid.

The result? She received half of the vote in a deep-red state and might have won if voting rights had been respected and protected. Her campaign tripled Latino and Asian Pacific Islander election participation. Youth participation increased by 139 percent. African-American participation increased by 40 percent. She noted that many people argued that her approach would “lose white voters, scare them away.” In fact, she “increased white participation rates for the first time in a generation.”

Abrams did it by telling a story of economic opportunity and public power that countered the now-exposed false narrative that people get what they deserve in our so-called free-market economy. She ran fearlessly, listening to people’s struggles, diagnosing why those struggles exist, and telling them what she would do about it.

That fearless approach to running and truth-telling is one that more progressives and small-d democrats need to embrace. The Roosevelt Institute has offered a resource that should help any candidate who wants to stop treating issues as siloed and unrelated, and instead confront the root problem of concentrated wealth and political power. It’s a unifying story that needs to be told over and over again, along with an inspiring and achievable plan of what can come next.

Only about one in six children who are eligible for childcare assistance in America actually receive it. In most states, childcare costs more than tuition at a four-year public university. And more than 50 percent of neighborhoods in America have a demand for childcare that exceeds supply.

But the Child Care for Working Families Act, reintroduced last month by Senator Patty Murray and Representative Bobby Scott and largely overlooked by the media, aims to change that. The legislation, which has been endorsed by all of the Democratic presidential candidates who are in Congress, would reach three in four children under age 13 by making quality childcare affordable for every low- and middle-income family who needs it. It would also provide a living wage to teachers, the majority of whom are low-income women of color. Childcare workers earn an average of $22,310 annually, and over 75 percent of them earn less than a living wage.

“This legislation not only provides an economic support for families so they can go to work; it’s also an antipoverty tool, and should be part of any economic justice agenda,” said Hannah Matthews, deputy executive director for policy at the Center for Law and Social Policy.

The system is currently funded through the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), and because resources are so inadequate, the concurrent needs to serve more children, ensure the safety and quality of the facilities, and raise the pay of teachers are always pitted against each other. For example, in Mississippi, the state will pay a higher reimbursement rate to childcare centers serving voucher recipients if they are able to meet new quality standards. However, a study found that the improvements are cost-prohibitive for many centers serving low-income communities, averaging $11,475 per classroom. Without more resources, these centers would either opt out of a voluntary system, serve fewer children, or even shut down if unable to pay for mandatory improvements.

By contrast, the Child Care for Working Families Act would provide the funding necessary to meet quality standards, ensure that children receive the care they need, and provide teachers with a living wage. It establishes a sliding fee for services: free for lower-income families, and no family would pay more than 7 percent of their household income. (The 7 percent limit is the same one used under a similar proposal from Senator Elizabeth Warren, and is based on the federal benchmark for childcare affordability.) This is particularly significant for families below the poverty level—they spend an average of approximately 30 percent of their household income on childcare compared to 8 percent for higher-income families. Moreover, the federal government would pick up about 90 percent of the cost of infant-toddler care.

“Infant-toddler is the most expensive care,” said Matthews. “It’s where we need the biggest investment in terms of increasing quality and expanding access, since quality infant-toddler care is really impossible to find in most places in this country and critically important to children’s early development.”

The bill also helps teachers pursue credentials and degrees by providing money for states to expand or establish scholarships; counseling; and compensation initiatives that cover tuition, fees, materials, and transportation. It creates pay parity for childcare workers who have the same credentials as elementary-school teachers.

The education assistance is critical, since those teachers are barely scraping by as it is. “Early-childhood educators make so little money [that many] need food stamps or other government supports to get by,” said Marisol Bello, spokeswoman for Community Change Action, which is working to mobilize grassroots support for universal childcare.

Additionally, the legislation aims to expand the number of high-quality childcare providers that serve children with disabilities, including through increased funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. It helps address the disparities in summer learning between low-income students and wealthier children by providing funding so that Head Start programs can offer full-year, all-day programming. And it makes resources available for homecare at family, friend, and neighbor providers, including for training, business development, mentoring, licensing assistance, and home visits.The bill has 116 cosponsors in the House and 34 in the Senate, all Democrats. But Republicans, too, seem to at least recognize their constituents want action to address a crisis in childcare affordability and availability. The Trump administration recently touted its plan for a one-time investment of $1 billion spread over five years to increase childcare availability, with the money going to states that are “removing unnecessary regulations.” But those funds are insufficient to move the needle significantly, and deregulation is a non-starter for most childcare experts and for parents who are concerned about little perks like the health and safety of their children. More promising was bipartisan action last year to pass the largest ever one-year increase in federal funding for the CCDBG, $2.4 billion.

“That was important progress,” said Matthews. “But even with that amount, there is no way states can raise the quality [of the facilities], increase pay for teachers, and dramatically expand access to childcare. The needs are too great. Ultimately, we need to move away from these incremental increases in funding and move towards a system that is funded at a level where families can easily access the quality childcare they need.”

Senator Murray told The Nation that last year’s funding increase never would have happened “without the moms and dads who called their representatives, came to their offices, and never gave up.” Now, she and Representative Scott are working with parent advocacy groups, labor unions, early-childhood-education groups, and others to push for this legislation. For the senator, this is personal, and reminiscent of her early career. “I got my start in politics by fighting to save my own kids’ preschool program. After being told by a state senator [that] I couldn’t make a difference because I was ‘just a mom in tennis shoes,’ I mobilized 13,000 parents to speak out and convince our state legislature that this program was worth saving. I saw the power of organized and passionate parents who were fighting for their children’s futures, and I’m seeing it again.”

That was more than 30 years ago, and now Senator Murray believes we are “in a transformative moment in American politics.” She attributes the attention being paid to childcare to “to the record number of women who ran for office last year, including many young moms.”

“More women, more people of color, more people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds are running for office, and it’s changing the way Congress talks about economic issues,” she said. “As our government continues to look more like the American people and people continue to speak out, I’m confident that issues impacting working families’ bottom lines—like childcare, paid leave, and wage discrimination—will continue to get attention and the urgency they deserve.”

While the Child Care for Working Families Act won’t get through a Republican senate nor gain the support of the current White House, voters can demand that all 2020 candidates share how they will respond to this very basic, unmet need in America.

In 2008, economist Harry Holzer estimated that child poverty was costing the United States more than $500 billion annually, because of increased health-care costs and criminal-justice expenditures, along with lost economic productivity when children in poverty reach adulthood. No one disputed the findings, but there was no groundswell of support for a legislative response, either.

In 2015, policy analyst Rachel West put the annual cost at $672 billion. Despite clear policy options by that point to better address the problem, there was once again no significant increase in legislative activity around child poverty.

Now, a two-year study by the nonpartisan National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) finds the annual cost of child poverty is $800 billion to $1.1 trillion, or 4 to 5.4 percent of the US gross domestic product. Equally important, the authors demonstrate that income poverty causes great harm to children and adults, particularly when it “occurs in early childhood or persists throughout a large portion of childhood.” That harm includes changes in brain structure, lower educational attainment, reduced adult earnings, and greater need for public assistance.

Congress instructed NAS to find a way to reduce child poverty by half over 10 years, and the policy options outlined in this report do just that. But do people care enough to respond?

If presidential candidates are looking for big ideas to take on economic inequality, they would be hard-pressed to find a more useful goal than cutting child poverty in half. A recently launched advocacy campaign is already laying the groundwork for action around the NAS proposal as well.

Through sophisticated modeling, the NAS authors considered the impacts of an assortment of 20 policy and program options, examining them individually and in combination with one another. The baseline assumption of the report is that more than 9.6 million children were living in poverty in 2015 (the latest year they could use to generate accurate estimates), which is equal to 13 percent of the nation’s children. More than 2 million children were living in “deep poverty,” defined as living below half of the poverty line. The authors used the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which takes into account the benefits some families receive such as tax credits and food stamps, and costs such as childcare and regional differences in housing. Under the SPM, the poverty line for a two-parent, two-child family in 2015 was about $26,000 in annual income.

The United States ranks 32nd of 38 industrialized nations on child poverty, according to the OECD. Climbing up the list shouldn’t be hard: The report notes the United Kingdom set its sights on cutting child poverty in half and did it in seven years between 2000 and 2008; Canada is on track to do it even more quickly since creating its child benefit in 2016. In the United States, child poverty was cut nearly in half between 1970 and 2016 through some of the very same policies that the report now recommends strengthening.

The authors discovered two “packages” of policies and programs that would meet the goal of cutting child poverty and deep poverty in half over 10 years—one they call the “means-tested supports and work package,” the other the “universal supports and work package.” The annual tab comes to about $91 billion and $109 billion, respectively—a wise investment when one considers that the status quo costs $1 trillion annually, or that trillions in revenues could be restored by reversing the Trump tax cuts.

Both packages combine policies that boost employment and reduce poverty. The “means-tested supports and work package” expands both the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) along with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and housing voucher programs. At a cost of $90.7 billion per year, it would also add 400,000 people to the workforce and generate $2.2 billion in additional earnings.

The “universal supports and work package” adds a monthly child allowance, which most industrialized nations have, of $225 per month to families of all children under age 17, and a new child-support assurance program of $100 per child per month if a parent isn’t paying child support. The package also expands the EITC and CDCTC, concentrating benefits of the latter on the lowest incomes with the youngest children, while increasing the minimum wage to $10.75 and indexing it to inflation. (This wage level was chosen because there is more research around its effects than for example, a $15 an hour wage.) The package also restores benefit eligibility to documented immigrants who were barred from SNAP, Medicaid, SSI, and other means-tested federal programs under the Clinton-Gingrich welfare bill in 1996. At $108.8 billion per year, this package would add 600,000 jobs to the economy and increase earnings by $13.4 billion.

The authors also found that “work requirements”—the kind currently being pushed by conservatives for Medicaid and SNAP—“are at least as likely to increase as to decrease poverty.” Moreover, the marriage-promotion efforts that design programs to encourage two-parent families—such as those implemented during the George W. Bush administration—“failed to boost marriage rates [or] achieve most of their other longer-run goals” such as strengthening child well-being.

The report unfortunately does not examine how the recommended policy reforms would impact American Indian and Alaska Native children, whose poverty rates are very high, or children in Puerto Rico and other territories. The authors were not able to include them because of the limited sample size of current data, which they say needs to be expanded and better collected with improved coordination between agencies.

“It’s worrisome, since the child poverty rate in Puerto Rico is about twice the rate of any state in the US,” noted Cara Baldari, vice president of family economics, housing, and homelessness at First Focus, a bipartisan children’s-advocacy organization. “And that’s in part because they have limited access to our public-assistance programs—they’re capped, or they’re not eligible at all.”

But Baldari praised the report for showing a clear and cost-effective path for cutting poverty in half and improving child and adult outcomes for millions of Americans. First Focus, along with more than 20 other similar groups, have now launched a campaign to establish a target to cut child poverty in half within a decade and to eliminate it within 20 years. The coalition is currently focused on creating resources for individuals advocating on behalf of children on their own time, and also for state and local organizations that are working on the ground in almost every state.

In Congress, the Child Poverty Reduction Act also aims to meet the child-poverty-reduction target called for in the report, and the legislation will likely be unveiled within the next few months. The bill will also highlight the report’s findings and make recommendations on how to measure progress at the local, state, and federal levels. Also this week, Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) are expected to introduce their bills to establish an even more generous benefit for parents than the child allowance called for in the report.

And as the 2020 presidential candidates pursue big ideas—to make college affordable or free for everyone, establish universal childcare, or create a single-payer health-care system—why not adopt this course laid out by some of the best (and bipartisan) antipoverty researchers in the nation? Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) is one logical possibility, given his “baby bonds” proposal that would help low-income children build wealth for adulthood, and his emphasis on “civic grace” and “courageous empathy.” What could be a clearer sign of grace and empathy than bringing attention to the struggles of children in poverty and leading a nation to respond?

You can check out the impact the proposed policy packages would have on your state here.

In January, shortly after Chair of the Council of the District of Columbia Phil Mendelson was reelected, he wrote a curious newsletter to constituents, pushing back against “progressives who say [city leaders] are not doing enough” to deal with poverty and justice issues in DC. In it, he asserted that education is “the solution to our social justice ills” and that the city is “undeniably progressive.”

“There is very little that divides us,” Mendelson wrote. “The business community wants to eradicate poverty. Developers want to provide affordable housing.… We are blessed with elected leadership that [is] committed to equality and justice for all citizens.”

It was a strangely rosy portrayal of a city that is home to the worst income inequality in the nation, where the average wealth of white households is 81 times the average wealth of black households. Fourteen percent of children in the district live in extreme poverty—a tie with Louisiana for the highest rate in the nation—and the overall child-poverty rate is nearly 26 percent; only three states are doing worse. When it comes to shelter, 27,000 low-income renters spend at least half of their income on housing and, according to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, the city has “only funded about 3,000 new rentals for these residents since 2015.” The most recent data indicate that 75,000 households needed food assistance (SNAP) in fiscal year 2016 and 22,000 of those households had no cash income. As Business Insider recently reported, “When it comes to the overall share of homeless residents, no state can compare to Washington, DC.”

Mendelson closed his newsletter with a request to his constituents: “I ask you to hold us accountable.” So, on Valentine’s Day, which is also Frederick Douglass’s birthday, about 50 activists with the DC chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival showed up at City Hall to do that. The group included individuals whose families had lived in the city for generations, as well as residents affiliated with about a dozen local labor, faith, health, education, and other community organizations. They named a number of ways the city could address its deep inequities, and they called the continuing failure to do so “a moral crisis.”

At a brief press conference, the group laid out some of its key asks, including: moratoriums on public-housing demolition and 0n redevelopment, which the campaign views as “a giveaway to developers,” and a focus instead on rehabbing or repairing public-housing units; placing vacant properties in a trust for affordable housing rather than auctioning them off; doing more to protect undocumented immigrants from federal authorities; fully funding the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results (NEAR) Act, a comprehensive approach to reducing police violence and violent crime at its root causes through counseling, mentorship, violence interruption, bias training, and other programs; implementation of a higher minimum-wage increase for tipped workers, which DC voters resoundingly approved last June, only to have the vote overridden by the city council; greater interaction with the citizens of Wards 7 and 8 in assessing public-health needs, including a proposed new hospital; and making the same quality of education available to all public schools across the city.

The group embarked on walking the five floors of City Hall to visit every council member, with the intention of giving each a rose, a Valentine’s Day card made by a local kindergarten class, and a copy of the campaign’s local and national demands. “When we don’t have input, then people are able to put into place policies that affect us negatively and there is no accountability,” said the Rev. Graylan Hagler, senior pastor of Plymouth United Church of Christ. “We need to start calling these folks out by name.” Approaching the office of Councilman Jack Evans, he told the group, “This council member has represented every business interest, often negating the public interest. Let us remember that as we go in there, and sing extra loud.”

One of the most contentious and pressing issues the activists wanted to bring to the attention of Evans and other council members was the repeal of Ballot Initiative 77—the public’s vote to raise the minimum wage for tipped employees, who are among the city’s most vulnerable workers. Seventy percent of the district’s tipped workers are people of color; in Wards 7 and 8, where approximately 90 percent of the residents are African American, more than 60 percent voted in support of 77. For the activists, the action to overturn the vote by Mayor Muriel Bowser and an 8-5 majority in the DC council seemed to represent the denial of their political voice as much as any other.

The group filed into Evans’s office with a boisterous rendition of a song penned during a coal-ash protest in North Carolina that is now used throughout the 42 states of the Poor People’s Campaign: “Somebody’s hurting our people, and it’s gone on far too long, and we won’t be silent anymore.” The walls in Evans’s reception area were almost entirely covered with photographs of the council member pictured alongside high-profile individuals—Obama, Trump, Mayor Bowser, Trump again, Tom Cruise. Gazing over the photos, Pastor Delonte Gholston, senior pastor of Peace Fellowship Church, said, “Jesus teaches us that we ought to love the least of these. As I look upon [these] walls, I don’t see the least of these represented.”

Evans came out of his office, smiling, and greeted the group warmly. The activists reciprocated, but the mood quickly shifted when the discussion turned to Initiative 77. Hagler told Evans that it is hypocritical for local elected leaders to constantly rail against Congress for overriding the will of DC residents but then do the very same thing on this referendum. “I agree,” Evans replied. “But on 77 I just don’t agree.”

Hagler frowned. Some in the group snickered. One resident asked, “What’s the point of us voting if you’re just going to turn it around?”

Gholston changed the subject. “As we gather on Frederick Douglass’s birthday—who taught us that power concedes nothing without demand—we demand that you give a full hearing to the list of demands we’ve given you.”

“Absolutely,” Evans promised.

Later, the group had a tense exchange in the office of Councilman David Grosso, another legislator who voted to overturn Initiative 77. Among his responsibilities, Grosso has oversight of more than $100 million in public-school funding for supplemental programming that targets poor students. Tens of millions of those monies were used to cover basic costs like teachers’ salaries instead of funding tutors, counselors, extracurricular activities, and other needed services in high-poverty schools. As the group presented a staff member with a rose and their demands, Hagler and a few others saw the council member close a door, refusing to great them. “Another thing I want you to relay,” Hagler said to the staffer, “I’m sick and tired of him not meeting with the people and just closing the door right now, and separating himself from us, okay?”

Walking the corridors afterward, Gholston echoed this sentiment. “We are the inheritors of a great civil-rights movement, yet some of our elected leaders are so bothered by our presence here. It’s tragic,” he said. At one point a security guard told the group that anyone who continued to carry signs in the building would have to leave. That was problematic, since each activist carried a sign with a message, including Systemic Poverty Is Immoral; We are a New Unsetting Force; Polluted Drinking Water Is Violence; Fight Poverty Not the Poor. A quiet conversation ensued. A supervisor came over and interceded, permitting the group to continue onward with its signs. “It’s called the First Amendment,” Gholston said quietly to himself as they walked away.

Over the course of a few hours, the group visited every other council member or a staff representative, and briefly disrupted two hearings to present their demands to the presiding council members, Mary Cheh and Brandon Todd. They thanked Ward 8 Councilman Trayon White for his leadership with anti-violence community walks. They asked him to work to increase funding for the NEAR Act, which Gholston said is currently “a pittance” compared to funding for similar violence-prevention programs in other cities. They also called White out for voting to overturn Initiative 77.

The activists closed the day at the office of Chair Mendelson, who was unavailable to see them. Hagler told a staff member that the chairman had “led” on denying people a voice when he overturned Initiative 77. The chairman also shot down a compromise bill offered by Councilwoman Elissa Silverman that would have raised wages for parking-lot attendants, hotel workers, busboys, and other low-wage workers, saying, “I don’t see the principle behind it.”

“We’re going to come back here and hold him accountable,” said Hagler.

Before the activists parted ways, Zillah Wesley, the lead organizer for the event and a tri-chair of the campaign, gathered them together. Wesley is a 36-year-old, third-generation Washingtonian who has seen many friends and family forced out of the city due to the rising cost of living. “It looks like we’re irritating them, and they need to be irritated,” she said of the council members. “We vote these people in to work for the people, and they stopped believing that. So we’re showing them. And we’re just going to grow from here.”

With more than 40 million people in the country struggling with hunger, anti-hunger advocates in the United States have their work cut out for them. In 2017, nearly 12 percent of all US households were food insecure—meaning they didn’t have access to enough food for all household members to lead active, healthy lives. Food insecurity is stratified across racial lines, affecting less than 9 percent of white households in America, but nearly 22 percent of black households and 18 percent of Latinx households.

That racial disparity suggests that something more than poverty causes hunger. So what else is driving it? According to Dr. Mariana Chilton, a professor of public health at Drexel University who has worked for 18 years toward eradicating hunger and poverty, one answer is racism itself.

In a new report, “From Disparities to Discrimination: Getting at the Roots of Food Insecurity in America,” Chilton and co-authors from Children’s HealthWatch, a pediatric research organization, and the Center for Hunger-Free Communities at Drexel, examine the relationship between food insecurity in Philadelphia and racial and ethnic discrimination that people face in their daily lives. It found that people who experience discrimination are almost twice as likely as others to struggle with hunger.

“You cannot take on poverty and hunger without taking on historical and contemporary discrimination,” Chilton told The Nation. “If we are just fighting to strengthen SNAP [formerly food stamps], or for better jobs and higher wages—we’ll make little progress. We have to go deeper to the root causes.”

To get at the roots of the racial disparities Chilton’s team interviewed 669 mothers whose young children were patients at a hospital in Philadelphia. They used an Experiences of Discrimination questionnaire developed by Dr. Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at Harvard, which defines discrimination as “experiences of being prevented from doing something, being hassled, or made to feel inferior due to race, ethnicity, or color.” Subjects were asked questions like: How many times have you experienced discrimination…at school? While getting hired or getting a job? At work? While getting housing? “What I like about this questionnaire is that it taps into all different types of systems: health care, public assistance, police, education, on the streets,” said Chilton. “It’s trying to get at systemic racism.”

About half of the people interviewed reported that they had experienced discrimination at least once in their lifetimes. Discrimination in school, hiring, at work, in public settings, and in interactions with law enforcement were all associated with household food insecurity. Experiences of discrimination in housing, public assistance, and medical care had adverse associations on children’s food insecurity. According to the report, “The magnitude of child food insecurity also appeared to increase as [the number of] caregivers’ experiences of discrimination increase.”

In addition to the data collected from interviews with mothers, the report examines the impacts of historic discrimination on food access. For example, housing discrimination has led to a concentration of affordable housing in high-poverty areas, while discriminatory policies like redlining or steering borrowers of color to subprime mortgages have denied wealth-building opportunities to generations of people of color. These policies impact people in terms of deteriorated quality of life; lack of access to good schools, jobs, grocery stores and transportation; exposure to adverse environmental conditions; even shortened life expectancy. And all of these factors make it harder for families to secure food.

The criminal-justice system is another nexus where race and food insecurity collide. In one study, 91 percent of formerly incarcerated people reported that they were food insecure shortly after release. Because of bias in the criminal justice system, a disproportionate number of people who experience hunger post-incarceration are likely to be black,  For instance, blacks are imprisoned for drug offenses at almost six times the rate of whites, though they have similar drug-use rates. Children of color are also disproportionately impacted: The report coauthors note that having an incarcerated parent is associated with a young person’s development of depression, anxiety, PTSD, asthma, and other health struggles—and, not surprisingly, food insecurity.

As previous research has shown, the experience of racial or ethnic discrimination is traumatic, and the impacts of that trauma—“a burdened nervous system, organ damage, and sleeplessness,” said Chilton—find their way into a family’s ability to obtain adequate food. “If a person is anxious and depressed and has disordered sleep, they are less likely to be able to find and keep a job, or find a job that pays an adequate living,” said Chilton. “Sleep disorders affect one’s ability to focus or concentrate, to make plans for the future, and can further truncate [one’s] abilities to earn enough money for food.”

Chilton acknowledges that none of her data are proof that racism causes food insecurity; they only demonstrate an association between the two. However, her ongoing research now numbers 1,600 caregiver interviews and shows a remarkable correlation. “I’ve controlled for everything—employment, marital status, education level, whether someone is on public benefits. None of those things attenuate the strong relationship between racism and hunger, and [the correlation with] child hunger is especially high,” she said.

The report offers numerous policy solutions that the authors believe anti-hunger advocates should integrate into their work, including: strengthening and enforcing the Fair Housing Act, as well as consumer protections and anti-discrimination policies for bank loans and access to mortgages; training health professionals in implicit bias; ending the criminalization of minor offenses often used to police people of color, such as marijuana possession, loitering, and jaywalking; instituting full funding formulas in all states so schools have the resources they need; requiring school systems to consider alternatives to suspension and expulsion; ensuring that hiring practices focus on fair processes and equal pay for men and women; and supporting Black Lives Matter, which promotes the health and wellness of communities of color.

Jessica Bartholow, a poverty-and-hunger advocate with the Western Center on Law and Poverty, agrees that national hunger organizations need to bring a robust racial analysis to their work, particularly with regard to how racist and oppressive systems are impacting efforts to end hunger among people of color. “If you’re not asking how race impacts outcomes in 2019, then you missed something really important about this country,” she said. “We can have the best school-meal program in the world, but if black girls are getting pushed out of school due to racism, they’re not going to get that meal anyway.”

But she also raised a concern about capacity, citing a daunting agenda for anti-hunger organizations that includes background work on racial equity in partnership with poverty-law centers. Many of these groups are already overwhelmed by relentless political attacks on safety-net programs, such as during the recent legislative fight over the Farm Bill, which includes the SNAP program. Initially, conservatives wanted to block grant SNAP and add new, onerous work requirements, all of which would have denied millions of people food assistance. But in the end, “by putting up a huge fight,” Bartholow said advocates were able to prevent any significant changes to the program. She wondered what would have happened if that work had been “diluted” because people had to focus on other issues where they didn’t have the same expertise.

To Chilton, the research indicates that policy-makers trying to tackle hunger have to consider racism and discrimination in all of their decision-making writ large. For example, according to Chilton, Philadelphia has made great strides in reducing its prison population over the past two years and is using a racial-equity lens in its workforce strategy, but its approach to equity is too piecemeal. She pointed to Seattle, Boston, and St. Louis as cities that are working towards using a racial equity lens to examine all of their programming and budgeting proposals (albeit with mixed results). “We need Philadelphia and every city to do that as they determine funding for schools, housing, public health—everything,” she said.

Chilton and report coauthor Sherita Mouzon, a founding member of Witnesses to Hunger, presented the report’s findings to Philadelphia officials representing criminal-justice, education, workforce, and other agencies. Eva Gladstein, deputy managing director for Health and Human Services, attended the meeting and said that the Kenney administration agrees with Chilton’s goal. “The mayor has talked about equity and opportunity from day one and has embedded that principle within virtually all of our work,” she said. She said that all of the people at the top levels of the administration have been trained in implicit bias, and she pointed to the use of a racial-equity lens in a number of projects including the creation of new apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs for civil-service positions, a new transportation plan, and a gun-violence-prevention program.

According to Chilton, consistent use of a race-and-equity lens could open the door to new coalitions, tactics, energy, and, most importantly, better results in reducing poverty and hunger. “All efforts to address food insecurity and poverty should also seek to dismantle racism and discrimination,” the report concludes. “We ask colleagues, friends, policy makers, and community leaders to join us in calling out and eradicating the racism that drives hardship and poor health in our country.”

On New Year’s Eve, Reverend Drs. Liz Theoharis and William Barber II, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, laid out the campaign’s plans for 2019. The Poor People’s Campaign will continue its pursuit of an audacious agenda: eradicating poverty and systemic racism; addressing ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy; and changing the narrative about poverty in this country from one that demonizes the poor to one which recognizes their strengths and vision while questioning the morality of current public policy.

Now established in 40 states and the District of Columbia, the Poor People’s Campaign is focused on changing electoral politics by targeting districts where poor and low-wealth people who are less likely to vote could potentially swing elections. The Nation spoke with Rev. Theoharis about this work and more broadly the campaign’s approach to working with “poor people as agents of change.”

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Greg Kaufmann: On New Years Eve, in commemoration with Watch Night, you and Rev. Barber laid out the plans for the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. What was the significance of that timing?

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis: Watch Night [commemorates New Years Eve], 1862. Slaves, free blacks, white abolitionists and black abolitionists gathered together not knowing whether Abraham Lincoln was actually going to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, and [knowing] that even if he did, there would be a lot of people not covered. So the work to liberate those who were still enslaved would continue. The Emancipation Proclamation was an extension of what slaves had already been doing. There were 50,000 to 100,000 slaves who freed themselves on the Underground Railroad. And in moving from an enslaved state to a free one, they challenged the immorality of slavery. And so the Emancipation Proclamation is about really expanding that; it’s a law coming out of what slaves were doing for liberation. So Watch Night is about people preparing to continue to act in the face of injustice for liberation. While times and conditions are different than in 1862, we still have people needing to get together to liberate people and achieve freedom.

GK: Is that how you view the work of the Poor People’s Campaign—as liberating people to achieve freedom?

RLT: Yes, we have put out a set of demands that are about liberation and freedom—freedom from poverty, freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from homelessness, freedom from the suppression of your vote, freedom to have clean water and clean air. The very principles upon which this nation was founded are freedom and justice and that is still not achieved—especially when you have 140 million poor and low-income people, when you have fewer voting rights in this past election than we did 53 years ago. There surely have been powerful and important movements that have arisen between abolition and today, but people are not living the lives that God’s children are meant to live and we could do so much better.

GK: One criticism the campaign has faced is that your agenda is too broad—that you should narrow your focus, get some victories, and build momentum that way. Why does the campaign feel the agenda needs to be as broad as it is?

RLT: If you talk about someone who is struggling around living wages, that person is also likely having problems with healthcare [and] housing, [and] most likely has kids going to schools that are underfunded. You can’t just focus on living wages, or housing, because the way they play out in people’s lives—it’s all mixed together. When we were trying to identify the places where we should focus the Poor People’s Campaign, we did a mapping process. We started with the issue of voter suppression and saw—which states had enacted voter suppression laws? What states are appointing emergency managers or other kinds of attacks on democracy? We found that those same states that are suppressing votes, that are harming democracy, have the highest poverty, the highest child poverty, the lowest wages, the least protections for LGBTQ folks, the most discrimination against immigrants, the least environmental protection. So what also became clear to us is that we have to look at these issues as they are linked because those who we are up against are doing that.

GK: So when you go into new communities and approach people who haven’t been politically engaged in the past—does this agenda energize them or do they feel overwhelmed by it?

RLT: Our experience has been that people are very excited to have an agenda that speaks to all of these issues—for one, because that agenda comes out of actual consultation with poor people who come up with the proposals. What we have found is people who are impacted by these injustices are very empowered by the fact that they are not alone in their struggle, and that there are people willing to come together to fight. It raises the imagination that things don’t have to be this way. I remember Mashyla Buckmaster out of Grays Harbor, Washington, standing on stage [on the National Mall] on June 23 and talking about how her involvement in this work has helped to give her life meaning, but has also instilled in her peers—other millennials, others who are homeless millennials—that they can do something about it. She talked a lot about how people have been so beaten down, and so having people fighting every day to enact this agenda—that becomes empowering to people.

GK: Some poor people have told me that due to stigma, the process of publicly admitting they were poor and taking political action was really difficult. In the campaign’s organizing efforts, is stigma a significant issue and, if so, how are you all overcoming it?

RLT: For so long, the word “poor” became like a four-letter word in our society. For about 50 years, no one talked about poor people, and if they did it was to blame folks as lazy, crazy, and stupid. If you look at our political rhetoric today, still, it’s about the middle class, [or those] striving to be in the middle class. And yet, currently, 140 million people are poor or low-income. So for decades, to not have any real discussion or debate, or real proactive solutions coming forward to address the problems that the poor face—it’s led to people really blaming themselves for problems that they are having.

What we’re seeing is that when people come together and start organizing, then so many other people come forward too. In the banding together of clergy and activists, and poor people, therein lies the solutions to the problems that people are having; not that we’re waiting for one more policy, or one more program, or one more great person to be elected—but that by building power, shifting the narrative, and by organizing, organizing, organizing—we’re going to be able to change things to make sure that people have a right to thrive, not just barely survive. 

GK: In terms of changing things, on Watch Night Rev. Barber said that part of that work is focusing on connecting with districts where if even 10 percent of currently non-voting poor people voted, they could swing an election. As he put it, “We’re getting ready for a new electorate to change America’s history.” How do you identify those districts and what does that engagement look like?

RLT: Throughout last summer and fall and into this winter [we have been] registering people for a movement that votes. So what that looks like is going into communities in all 40 states—and going door to door, holding barbecues and meetings, holding hearings. We’ve had some help in terms of identifying where to go. The coordinating committees of these state campaigns are made up of a real diversity of people who are deeply engaged in their states and communities. Some of the identifying is also through statisticians and others who help us map out where there are high numbers of people who are living under poverty, who are qualifying for SNAP, who are experiencing wage cuts, and bring that together with an analysis of where are there communities where people have not been voting. In many cases [it’s] because the folks running, and the policies that they are proposing, don’t speak at all to the issues that are facing people.

GK: Rev. Barber mentioned that he wants every state to sign up 30,000 people that they can go to for actions at any time. Is there any particular thinking behind that goal of 30,000?

It’s about a critical mass. What we’ve heard from people throughout history and from policy folks today, when you get to a certain number of folks you can impact elections, impact policies, and you can build a power to not be messed with. Like this week we still have a shut-down government. We have 800,000 federal workers who aren’t receiving a paycheck, and a lot of those workers are just a paycheck—this paycheck—away from economic insecurity. The shutdown is making schools on Native American reservations close; it’s threatening SNAP and other benefits of many, many poor people across the country. And so, [we want to have] a base of people that can be activated and mobilized when these kinds of things happen.

On a state level—Arkansas recently attached work requirements to Medicaid that immediately meant that basically 12,000 people were cut off of Medicaid. A lot of the power building that we are doing in these states is to develop a base of people that will be permanently organized. So if anything breaks out—to be able to respond and react [and] say, “No—not here, not us, not now.” But then also having a critical mass of people who can make our agenda, the agenda. Dr. King talked about it, saying, can we amass the power to make the power structure in this nation say yes when they really are desirous of saying no? That’s what power building is.

GK: In terms of making your agenda the agenda, another way you all are trying to do that is to show what your demands would cost at the state and federal levels. Can you talk about that work?

RLT: Yes, likely in March, we will unveil a budget analysis of [our] demands to show that it is possible and how we would do it. It doesn’t mean completely defunding the military, and it doesn’t mean raising taxes on everybody.… It’s really important to show that this idea that we can’t have universal health care, we can’t have a right to a job with a living wage, we can’t house everybody, we can’t actually educate everybody including through college and universities for free—that these are just lies. It’s not that we can’t do it, it’s that we don’t have the will to do it. We’re building that will through the power of the people.

GK: The states are also organizing poverty bus tours with members of the media. Is that part of the effort of showing, as you put it on Watch Night, that “poor people are agents of change rather than objects of history”?

RLT: The states will determine what kind of communities we should be visiting. In some cases it will be communities that have been deeply engaged in the campaign but are still these forgotten places. If you look at a state like Pennsylvania, they are organized in like seven counties across the state—with really strong campaign committees in each: in Altoona, Lancaster, Johnstown…. For example, some of the best organizing in the whole country is happening in Johnstown amongst poor white moms, who are in connection to poor Latinos and poor black moms as well.

They will also make sure to show the realities of some of the issues that we’ve raised: go[ing] to some of these indigenous burial sites that are being completely attacked because of copper mining in Oak Flats, Arizona; or to visit Flint where people today, still, are without water; but then visit a number of other communities across Michigan who all have similar conditions. And it’s not just about water. The reality is just the piling up of oppression. Not only is your water poisoned, not only are emergency managers in charge and democracy is squashed, but the education system is terrible, the immigration policies are terrible, your health care is abominable.

[This is] not a tour to “look at these sad poor people”—but to see that it’s these very poor people who are rising up to change society. These bus tours are also about deepening and broadening the organizing that folks are doing, and getting ready for the [Poor People’s] Congress that we are planning to hold in June 2019 in Washington, DC—spreading the word that there is this campaign, that we have these demands.

GK: Anything else you want readers to know about how the campaign is mobilizing people and communities as agents of change?

RLT: If you look at how change has happened in US history—it’s slaves and freed slaves who helped lead the abolitionist movement. Similarly with women’s suffrage, the industrial union movement, the civil-rights movement—those who are most impacted by the problems we’re trying to solve have to be in the leadership, coming up with the solutions, the strategic analysis, the actions.

I’m not saying that the Poor People’s Campaign is only made up of people who are currently experiencing poverty and homelessness. What’s also true is that you have to have a broad movement. And these issues do impact people of all walks of life—some materially, some morally. But I think in our day and age, often the notion that poor people can lead something flies in the face of what people think. Many people in society, whether it’s faith leaders, politicians, or leaders of NGOs, often have an aversion to the leadership and agency of the poor.

This campaign is saying we need everyone—we need rich people, doctors, lawyers, business people—but we’re working with the poor, not for the poor. Because we’re serious about actually addressing these issues and to do that effectively we have to recognize the leadership of those whose kids are dying, whose moms are dying, whose houses are being burned, and who face this kind of injustice right now.

When people think of hotbeds of political creativity and cutting-edge progressive policy ideas, Mississippi is not often the place that comes to mind. But last week, 16 women in public housing in Jackson, Mississippi, each received a check for $1,000—the first of 12 monthly payments they’ll receive through a guaranteed-income pilot project called the Magnolia Mothers Trust. The project is a direct refutation of America’s punitive approach to welfare policy and the racialized narratives that created and sustain it.

Jackson is also home to Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who, following his election in June 2017, famously promised to take on oppression in ways that will make Jackson “the most radical city on the planet.” In a city that is more than 80 percent African-American, with a poverty rate near 30 percent as well as a shrunken tax base and limited state support, Lumumba has his work cut out for him.

Last week I was in the city to meet the participants in the pilot project, and to speak with the mayor. We discussed his views on guaranteed income, poverty, race, and his assessment of his job a year and a half into his first term. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Greg Kaufmann: In discussing the new guaranteed income pilot in Jackson, you recently told Essence magazine that “poverty is the worst form of violence” and “we cannot afford to recycle the same economies of humiliation.” Can you talk a little bit about these two ideas?

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba: Poverty being the worst form of violence is ultimately the place that Martin Luther King Jr. came to when he saw that a lot of his efforts towards addressing social issues were limited in that we weren’t talking about how people share goods, resources, and power. If you can’t really get to that place, then ultimately [solutions are going to come up short]. On issues of race, for example, it’s more than a question of color—it’s a question of ideas. What are the worst ideas and what are the best ideas? And one of the worst ideas is that you can be exploitative of anyone. The result is that we have mothers, for example, who can’t accommodate their and their children’s basic needs, and this leads to these cycles of humiliation where you see poverty, you see blighted communities, you see a high crime rate, poor-performing education—you see all of these things that stack one on top of another and lead to depressed communities.

GK: In contrast to economies of humiliation, you’ve talked about building a “dignity economy.” What is a dignity economy?

CAL: A “dignity economy” is an economy that focuses on the inherent dignity of everyone. This discussion about guaranteed income is not new to me, and I was delighted to see that Springboard to Opportunities was bringing it to [Jackson]. It is something that has been explored in other countries, and there has been some demonstrated success, and where we see glaring inequity in our society we would be foolish not to find every possible mechanism to address it. But this is just one mechanism, and I am not ignorant of the limitations that exist there. Ultimately, we want people to be able to live the self-determined lives that they want and need. How do we become more self-determined, more self-sufficient? How can we control our education, control the infrastructure problems in our community, support our parents and our mothers and children in every possible way?

I had a discussion at a convening of mayors from around the world. It was about what is leading to the growing inequity in our society. So we talked about issues like the minimum wage, innovation versus workforce. But I felt we were looking at this problem in our nation from the wrong angle. As I see it, we hadn’t taken a “wrong turn.” I don’t see a system that has gone wrong, I see a system that is working in the way it was always intended to, and probably over-performing. What we’re finding out is that the system as is simply doesn’t work for us. It’s not failing, it just wasn’t designed to work for us. And so we have to be willing to make the appropriate adjustments. A guaranteed-income idea is not unlike many of the policies and programs that have been established in this nation over time. We have Social Security, for example, because we recognize that there is a need to support elders who have given their time and made the sacrifices; and we have to recognize where these other gaps exist within our society, because we have so many with so little and so few with so much, and we have to address that.

GK: So if a guaranteed income is one idea of how we go about addressing these gaps or revamping a system that is performing exactly as designed, what are some of the other ideas you are most passionate about?

CAL: The dignity economy is a multi-front approach—we’re looking to address everything from the health of citizens, to affordable housing in safe communities, to education and work opportunities, to giving more voice to citizens. We work with organizers in the community to hold People’s Assemblies, for example. The people should have voice, and we should be accountable to the people—give them information and also learn from the community what their needs are. I believe that everyone may not be an expert on economic development, or infrastructure, or education, but everyone is an expert on the conditions in which they live. Everyone knows what has made life hard, or what they would like to see. And so we need to listen to people. So how do we give them more access to their governance than has taken place in the past? Part of that is also looking at a participatory budgeting model—so that instead of finding value in what we’re funding, we begin to fund what we collectively value.

There are a number of other things we are pursuing. Universal pre-K, we’re on the precipice of being able to provide that. When we talk about poverty and the correlation between the gaps in education and the gap between haves and have-nots, education plays a significant role in that. But to say that is the only reason is reductive. I have a school system here in Jackson where last winter we had to close schools for about two weeks because we had a water crisis—pipes had burst all around the city. And then we see all of the children who are unable to eat, because the only meal that they get is the meal during school. And when I say all of the things that stack on top of one another and lead to depressed communities—when we talk about crime, economic development, the lack of opportunity—and you have on the most basic level children who are not eating [except] in school, what does that say to me? That’s a child who is not going to perform in school. That’s a child who’s going to miss opportunity in life. That’s an economy for this city that won’t [benefit from that child].

And so instead of looking at issues like crime on the back end and saying, “Well, we just need more police”—the reality is you can’t out-police crime. The reality is we live in a nation that has more police than any other nation in the world. And we have more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world. And still we have more crime than any other nation in the world. If it was simply about how we over-incarcerate our society and that leads to safer communities, then we’d be living in the safest place on the planet. But that isn’t it. And so what are the programmatic solutions that other countries and other spaces are pursuing that are leading to the decline and eradication of the things which lead to crime? That are eradicating the issues that lead to poverty?

GK: You did human-rights work as an attorney. When you think about the things we all need that would help eradicate poverty—like food, housing, health care, education, retirement—do you look at access to these basic necessities as human rights and is part of the solution for America to start thinking of these things as human rights?

CAL: I would 100 percent agree with that. Many of the struggles that we have participated in have been struggles that ultimately were a microcosm of a bigger issue, and the macro issue is the human rights. When we talk about a civil-rights movement, a civil-rights movement is a movement based on those things you can change through civil means—through a court system, through the structure that is in place. It’s clear that we don’t have a mere civil-rights problem in this nation, we have a human-rights problem. There are things that people should have a right to by being human—you should have a right to basic necessities to take care of your family, to feed your children, to have clean water and not lead within our systems, and so on and so forth. And so I see these as human rights struggles that we need to be a part of.

I have an analogy that really shows how people have not been given their basic human rights and their basic right to self-determination. Here in Jackson the things that our citizens are most concerned with are our infrastructure woes. We have a $2.5 billion infrastructure problem. It didn’t take you long riding into the city to see all the potholes, right? Ultimately, there is a “pothole to pothole” analysis: We have to connect pothole to pothole, and community to community, so that people in Jackson, Mississippi, can see that there’s a community that looks just like theirs in Gary, Indiana, in Chicago, Illinois, in Washington, DC, and so on and so forth. And ultimately what you learn is that your problem isn’t simply just a problem with a pothole, your problem is that you have no control over the decision-making process that leads to a pothole being fixed. Your problem is that you have no control over the decision-making process that leads to more equitable housing, better school systems, opportunities for mothers.

I don’t think we should see this merely across political lines. Whether you’re Democrat or Republican, in Mississippi you live in the poorest state. Whether you voted for Donald Trump this time or Obama last time, you’ve lived in the poorest state regardless. People asked me how did I feel after Donald Trump was elected; I said, “the Wednesday after Donald Trump was elected, I woke up in Mississippi.” We’re talking about Mississippi issues. We’re talking about how do we begin to recognize the conditions that people live in and not be caught up in the fictitious divisions amongst us? How do we demonstrate operational unity that allows us to move forward based on our common ends and objectives rather than the mere differences we see?

GK: But in order to be able to move forward with our common objectives, how much do we have to openly confront and work through issues around race and racism? I mean, in your “pothole-to-pothole” analogy you are talking about primarily black and brown communities.

CAL: I think the notion that you could act as if racism doesn’t exist; the notion that we could somehow close our eyes and get to work without confronting these issues—that’s a farce. Now, I think there are some things that we can achieve through operational unity where we focus more on the objective than on the differences, but you know the hardest thing to confront is yourself, and if you love someone or something enough, then you have to be honest in your assessment of them so that they can correct that behavior. So I think we have to be honest that America suffers from a disease called racism. And then we have to confront and make it personal to every individual.

If we take the institution of slavery, the truth is that a slim minority of white folks owned slaves. A slim minority could afford to own slaves. And the institution of slavery was obviously oppressive to people of African descent. But you know who else suffered at the hands of slavery? Poor white people. Because if your labor policy is free labor, then who aren’t you paying for the labor they are doing work for?

When you think about people who are proud of that history and that legacy, they were some of the victims of it as well. The best job you could hope for during a time of slavery was a job as an overseer of a plantation—if the slaves themselves hadn’t become the overseers. And now, when we talk about building walls instead of building bridges of opportunity—and saying stuff like “we have people coming from other countries and taking our jobs”—well, we need to start confronting the fact that if it was your job, no one could take it in the first place. You need to start confronting the horrible labor practices that allow for the exploitation and demand that you pay any and everybody who is working, and that will lead to a better condition for us all. Then we’d see less issues of poverty for mothers and their children, and less of these cycles of humiliation.

GK: You are now a little less than a year and a half into your administration. What’s your assessment of where you are in your overall effort to create a dignity economy—what, for example, were some challenges you might not have been able to anticipate? And what do you still hope to accomplish before the end of this term?

CAL: We’ve been very excited about some early wins and things that we’ve been able to accomplish and we remain excited about the direction that this administration, the city of Jackson and the people of Jackson are moving into. We feel that we are putting the building blocks in place to create the radical city that we desire. Some of the challenges have been some of the basic functions of city government and the great deficit that we discovered when we came into office. We discovered that [the] city was in financial strain and so we had to work to fill a $6 million hole and we have now created a $19 million surplus. We found city employees on furlough [who have] not received a raise in more than a decade. We were able to end the furlough and also provide a small cost of living adjustment; a small 2 percent raise and we look to do more. We found a city that has struggled for quite some time just to bring in the receivables that a city needs in order to function, in order to address the basic needs and necessities of communities. And so, a lot of our work has been focused not only on our radical agenda, but making sure we provide efficient, effective, and collective governance.

On the heels of the recent election, which saw voters in deep red Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah pass ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid, and Arkansans and Missourians vote to raise the minimum wage, it is clear that commonsense policies that decrease poverty and expand opportunity enjoy bipartisan support in the nation, if not in Congress.

In that context, the new Democratic House has an opportunity to show voters what a broad anti-poverty, pro-opportunity agenda looks like. There are low-hanging, no-brainer votes that should be taken on policies that are about basic economic fairness: raising the minimum wage, providing paid sick days and paid family and medical leave, and expanding affordable, quality childcare.

But beyond these basics there is much Congress can do to not only reduce poverty but also transform America’s understanding of political, financial, and social inclusion. While a lot of attention is being paid to big ideas like single-payer health care, universal basic income, a federal job guarantee, debt-free college, baby bonds, expanding affordable housing—and those efforts will continue—there are also policies receiving less attention that, taken together, would add up to dramatic progress in expanding economic justice. Here are nine such ideas or policies.

National Subsidized-Employment Program

No matter how the economy is doing, there are not enough jobs for everyone who wants to work—particularly for disadvantaged workers facing barriers to employment such as gender and racial discrimination, disability, need for childcare or transportation, a criminal record, and more. As of October 2018, 12.2 million people were unemployed, including 6.1 million officially unemployed, and 6.1 million not included in the official unemployment rate (either marginally attached to the labor marker or part-time workers who want to work full-time).

A subsidized-employment program is designed to help disadvantaged workers and others who can’t find full-time employment. Public, for-profit, and not-for-profit employers would all be eligible to receive subsidies in order to hire these workers at prevailing wages and provide them with training and job experience. The program would also offer wraparound services like childcare, mental-health and substance-use counseling, legal services, and transportation. A federal matching grant program would be available for states, but if states choose not to participate, local entities would still be able to apply through a competitive grants program. One similar piece of legislation is Representative Ro Khanna’s Job Opportunities for All Act, which would create an extensive subsidized-jobs program and target the continuing racial unemployment gap and areas of the country hit hardest by the opioid crisis.

There are more than 40 years of precedent for subsidized jobs programs. During the height of the Great Recession, the TANF Emergency Fund placed more than 260,000 in jobs. “Subsidized jobs help people with some of the toughest times in the labor market,” said Indivar Dutta-Gupta, co-executive director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality (GCPI). “It’s also an area where we have no strategy or program, so there is a real need to set one up as soon as possible—especially before the next major economic downturn when these jobs will be desperately needed by families and communities throughout the country.”

Increase Access to Collective Bargaining

Unionization is a key antipoverty strategy as it raises the wages of the typical low-wage worker by more than 20 percent (compared to 13.7 percent for the typical worker, and 6.1 percent for the typical high-wage worker). The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) notes that 60 percent of adults have a favorable view of unions—but only 10.7 percent of wage and salary workers were union members as of 2017, down from 33 percent in 1956. That’s not a surprise given the relentless attack on collective bargaining since the Reagan years. According to EPI, legislation like the Workers’ Freedom to Negotiate Act would “streamline union elections, crack down on employers who illegally deter employees from unionizing, strengthen workers’ right to strike, prevent taxpayer dollars from supporting firms that violate workers’ rights, and importantly ban class action waivers as a condition of employment.”

Automatically Clear Criminal Records for Non-Violent Offenses

Between 70 million and 100 million Americans have criminal records. Having a record—even a misdemeanor or an arrest that never led to conviction—can make it difficult throughout one’s life to get housing, a job, education, public benefits, and more. An estimated 9 in 10 employers use background check systems, for example, and applicants with a record are half as likely to get a call back as someone without a record. Moreover, nearly half of all children in America have at least one parent with a criminal record, and the resulting hardship impacts their short- and long-term outcomes as well.

While tens of millions of Americans are legally eligible to have their records cleared, the current petition-based process is onerous, costly, and often requires an attorney. Many people don’t even know they are eligible. A “Clean Slate” policy would use technology to automatically clear certain records after someone completed their sentence and remained crime-free for a set period of a time. It was recently signed into law in Pennsylvania and is gaining traction in other states as well. Bipartisan legislation in the House would automatically clear records for marijuana possession and many other non-violent offenses, and would also create a user-friendly system for people who were convicted on other charges to petition the courts to have their records cleared, excluding violent crimes and sex offenses.

Increase Economic Security and Inclusion of People with Disabilities

More than 1 in 4 people with a disability live in poverty—more than two and a half times the poverty rate for people without a disability. Many public policies exacerbate this hardship. Supplemental Security Income provides needed income support to people with severe disabilities but the program has limits on assets for participants that are nearly the same as in 1972, at $2,000 for an individual and $3,000 for a couple. Current minimum wage law permits employers to pay people with disabilities a subminimum wage below $7.25 an hour. And for many people with disabilities healthcare continues to be the largest expense.

We need an expansion of the Medicaid Buy-In program to allow people with disabilities to purchase the healthcare they need without being hampered by the program’s typical limits. “A legislative package addressing the subminimum wage and the connection between assets and healthcare would be pretty momentous in moving us towards the goals of the Americans with Disabilities Act around economic self-sufficiency and independent living,” said Rebecca Cokley, director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

Pass Legislation To Allow Immigrants to Come Out of the Shadows

Poverty and immigration policy are “intimately connected, particularly for families—since about one-quarter of all children and one-third of low-income children are children of immigrants,” said Olivia Golden, executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy. The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrant communities, including its “public charge proposal” which would deny green cards to families turning to public assistance, may be deepening hardship for families by discouraging them from seeking assistance, and making it harder for immigrants to find work. (Submit a comment opposing the public charge proposal through December 10 here.)

The Trump administration is also trying to end DACA—which gives “Dreamers” who were brought to the United States as children a temporary reprieve from deportation—and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Sudan, and Haiti, among others, who have been living and working legally in the country for decades. The House must lead in passing a new Dream Act that also provides permanent protections and a pathway to citizenship for people with TPS. According to Philip Wolgin, managing director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, such a bill would offer more than 3.5 million immigrants a path to citizenship.

Protect and Clean-Up Low-income Communities Impacted by Climate Change and Pollution

Between 1980 and 2017, 238 weather and climate disasters in the United States each caused at least $1 billion in damages each. In the past five years, the number of such events nearly doubled, to more than 11 per year. While everyone is affected by this surge in climate disasters, low-income communities are least able to prepare or recover from these events.

As the House pushes for a sane energy policy, it can also take action to make disadvantaged communities more resilient. One way to do that is via State Future Funds, federally supported low-interest or no-interest loans and loan guarantees that, according to the Center for American Progress (CAP), would be combined with state, local, and private-sector dollars to “encourage innovative transportation systems, energy infrastructure, and flood protections in areas that need them the most, including low-income areas and communities of color.”

The House also should take action to protect 53 million people who live within three miles of the nation’s 1,836 Superfund sites. They are disproportionately low-income people of color whose communities have been targeted to receive the nation’s waste for generations because of racism. CAP notes that through 1995 the federal government was permitted to fine polluters to fund Superfund-site cleanup “when responsible parties were unwilling or unable to pay.” Since that authority ended, the Superfund budget has been cut nearly in half, resulting in cleanup delays. The House should move to reinstate “polluter pays” authority and also increase funds for the EPA’s Superfund Emergency Response and Removal program, “which helps to protect communities from oil spills and sudden releases of toxic substances before, during, and after natural disasters.”

Create a Monthly Child Allowance

With the gutting of cash assistance in the United States, and nearly one in five children in America living in poverty—including 3 million on less than $2 per day—it is imperative that we immediately find new ways to assist children, especially in their early years during their most rapid brain development, when poverty takes a profound toll. Representative Rosa DeLauro’s Young Child Tax Credit would provide families with children under age 3 with an additional $1,500 refundable tax credit per child, and even those with no income would receive the assistance. The moneys would be made available on a monthly basis, rather than forcing families to wait until tax season. This legislation is especially critical for cash-poor families struggling to afford things like diapers, hygiene products, and other basic necessities, and it provides income that is needed to help these families stabilize. Moreover, additional income assistance for families with young children has been shown to go a long way in boosting children’s long-term education and earnings outcomes.

Address Racist Gerrymandering and Racist Voter Suppression that Harm All Poor People

Racist gerrymandering and voter suppression are used not only to deny the vote to people of color and people in poverty, but to support political candidates whose policies—like weakening the safety net, denying health care, and refusing to raise the minimum wage—harm people struggling with low or moderate incomes. The Rev. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, calls the failure of Congress to address the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) more than five years ago “one of the most racist, underreported acts that we have seen.”

Fortunately, House Democrats look poised to take action. According to National Public Radio, its first bill will include provisions to establish automatic voter registration and require that independent commissions rather than state legislatures handle redistricting. Representative Terri Sewell’s (D-AL) Voting Rights Advancement Act would also ensure that the VRA complies with the Supreme Court ruling while creating a new system that would require states with a recent history of voter discrimination to receive federal clearance for any changes in voting laws.

Change the Narrative

As long as conservatives continue to push a false narrative that portrays people in poverty as lazy or gaming the system—and that narrative goes unchallenged—we will be unsuccessful in attempts to change the systems that create and perpetuate economic hardship. An intentional Change the Narrative Campaign dedicated to showing who is poor, why people are poor, and what we can do about it—while shaming those who continue to use their positions of power to demonize and bully people in poverty—would be an important step in changing the status quo. It should include regular floor speeches, e-mail blasts, town-hall events, an online Hall of Shame, and an earned-media campaign.

Additionally, any member of Congress who cares about poverty should interact regularly with the Poor People’s Campaign and other organizations that embrace the expertise low-income communities possess about their own lives. We have already succeeded in cutting poverty by half. If we are to achieve a new aggressive anti-poverty, pro-opportunity agenda to finish the job, it will be through a movement that connects citizens and elected representatives who are fearlessly committed to change.

Jahana Hayes is the first African American ever nominated to Congress by Democrats in Connecticut. Six days out from the election, the former history teacher is poised to become one of only two African Americans representing states in New England, along with Ayanna Pressley from Massachusetts.

But Hayes’s candidacy is an unusual one in another way as well: If elected, she will become one of the few members of Congress from a low-income background. Hayes grew up in poverty, living in public housing with her grandmother while her mother struggled with addiction. At the age of 17, she gave birth to her daughter.

Only 2 percent of members of Congress are working-class—an imbalance that has significant policy consequences, with studies showing clear differences in the legislative records of politicians from different class backgrounds. As a result, economic policy tends to skew toward the interests of the wealthy, while the minimum wage remains stuck at a poverty wage, health care and housing are increasingly unaffordable, and people who turn to public assistance are demonized. In this context, Hayes’s journey from single motherhood to becoming the National Teacher of the Year in 2016 to now being on the cusp of election to the House of Representatives is particularly compelling.

I spoke to Hayes about her candidacy, poverty in America, and her vision as she prepares to serve her district. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Greg Kaufmann: At a moment when we’re seeing widespread voter suppression, and a racist, sexist, and xenophobic Trump administration—what does it mean to you to be the only African American ever nominated to Congress by Connecticut Democrats and potentially the only African American representing any state in New England?

Jahana Hayes: When I entered this race, it had never crossed my mind. The first time I saw it in print, it really hit me. And as I campaigned throughout the district and state, I realized how important it is to so many people—not only African Americans, but people from Muslim, Jewish, Hispanic communities—who really believe that it’s a first step to opening the electorate. Representation matters. I don’t think that it’s reflective of the state that I live in that the Democrats have not sent an African American to Congress and we feel like we have to do better.

GK: Another thing that is unique about your candidacy is that you grew up in poverty. Talk a little about your formative experiences and how they have informed your leadership, your candidacy, and your policy ideas today.

JH: I grew up in a community where I encountered people with so many challenges but I also learned that you get to know people and you realize that their struggle or situation does not define them. And you don’t forget those things. So when people are talking about policies, I have the stories of a family playing in the back of my mind, or I know how people are affected, how families are broken apart when they can’t get access to the things they need. It has grounded my decision-making and framed everything I do because I know how bad it can be—but I also know how good it can be when people get the help that they need and work their way through their situations.

GK: You were a single mother, 17 when your daughter was born. Can you talk about what we need to do to better understand the experiences of single mothers who are routinely demonized in our politics and—along the lines of what you said—defined solely by their situation?

JH: Single mothers deserve to be represented, they deserve to have their voices heard. And what I know is that this moment is not the end of their story. There are multiple pathways to success. This idea that everything happens in perfect order and that people are perfect—I think I have showed people that it’s okay to be imperfect.

I used to say to my students—“What? So what? Now what?”—and I think too often we give up on people instead of saying, “Now what?” How do we look at this differently? What do you need to be successful? I think there are so many people in that situation right now and they can’t see the other side of it—and I represent the idea that you can change the outcome of this. In eight years, I went from being the first person in my family to graduate college to us being a second-generation college-educated family, because my daughter also got her master’s degree and is a teacher as well.

GK: With regard to education and changing outcomes—you were a teacher in high-poverty schools and recognized as the National Teacher of the Year in 2016. There are ongoing debates on how to best help students in poverty learn and thrive. As someone who has lived this experience as both a student and a teacher, what are some of the fundamental things we need to do to help students’ chances for academic and life success?

JH: One of the first things that I did is realize that this is a partnership, that my work did not end at 2 o’clock when the school day was over. I partnered with families, with communities, and really just met people where they are. I would go into the community and have an open house at the laundromat or the community center, because I recognized that many of my parents did not drive, or did not have cars. This idea that just because a parent doesn’t attend an open house they don’t care about what’s going on with their child—many of our parents don’t know how to advocate. And I remember in my own family: I struggled [as a student] with this idea that just because my mother is not here doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be successful.

One thing I did with my students is to help them realize that, even though most of them had spent most of their time on the receiving end of aid, they still had the capacity to give. I really doubled down on service projects and engaging them in their community, and teaching them that even at a young age they could be a part of the solution.

GK: And when students were engaged in that way—what did you see happen?

JH: You see them come to life and begin to experience the world differently. There is this self-motivation, and their confidence just continues to go up. There is something incredibly demeaning and devaluing when you feel like you have nothing to give. You see them find their voices and learn how to advocate and speak up for other people, and that just translates into so many different things. They become leaders in their class, and go onto college, and become very successful, because they have a sense of self-worth.

GK: And that service-learning curriculum is something you developed at your school, right?

JH: Yes, I went to my administrators and was initially told that there was no time in the day for it. So I started a club after school called the HOPE Club—which stood for Helping Out People Everywhere. You had to find a problem in the community and then we’d work together to figure out how we as a student body could address it.

I had seven students in one class who had lost a parent to cancer, including a girl who had lost her father in January and in October her mother was in hospice. So the kids started a Relay for Life team and raised over $120,000 for the American Cancer Society. I had a student whose family was living in a shelter, and that’s how we got involved with Habitat for Humanity. I wanted him to see that although your family doesn’t have a home now, we’re gonna help someone else build, and one day it will be your turn. Over eight years, we traveled all over the country building with Habitat for Humanity. We worked with the Children’s Dyslexia Center, because I had a student whose brother was diagnosed with dyslexia, and that was the project he wanted to do. We created an LLC called Citywide for Porch Cleanup, because I had a student who literally did not want to play sports and have to get rides home because she was embarrassed of where she lived. So we worked with local hardware stores and got paint and flowers and did this whole beautification where we went to different neighborhoods and just painted everybody’s porches.

GK: So conservatives might hear about this great work and say, “See, the problems in schools and communities aren’t about money.” But when we see such inequity in terms of the conditions of schools and facilities, or extracurriculars, or staffing, or teachers’ salaries—isn’t funding a key part of the conversation as well?

JH: Absolutely. We cannot ignore the fact that there are some glaring disparities—there are gaps in resources and support. Stark differences from community to community—and it takes money. That is not the only answer to the problem—we have to make sure we have the most highly qualified educators in front of young people, that they are adequately prepared to meet the challenges that they will face in the classroom; that we are providing opportunities for kids in our most challenging districts. These things do absolutely take money, and we have to look at education as an investment because everything grows out of that. And if we’re not looking at it in that way then we are doing a disservice not only to our children but also to our future.

I also recognize that for some kids, the school on the corner is their only option. Their families can’t move to a different district or transfer them to a different school, or enroll them in private boarding school. That’s their only option, so it has to be a good school.

GK: And in your experience, if there isn’t stable affordable housing, if a kid is hungry—

JH: They can’t learn. I’ve seen this so many times where kids come in and their heads are on the desk, because they have been up all night, because they don’t have stable housing. They are walking to school on the coldest day of the year and don’t have a coat. I had a kid who was hospitalized because of a toothache that got so bad that he had a blood clot in his leg and he almost had to have it amputated. We talk about having access to the Internet, but we have kids who don’t have lights at home—or who stay after school until 6, 7 at night because there is no heat in their house so they want to stay as long as they can. All of these things find their way into your classroom, and all of them are interconnected. We can’t look at them in silos—we need to look at the whole child, whole family, and whole community.

GK: Why do you think poverty and these kinds of struggles continue to not be much a part of the national conversation and what do you think we can do about that?

JH: I think one of the ways we start is looking at raising the minimum wage, paying people living wages; stable housing in communities; health care. Help people have healthy, productive lives, and that bleeds over into every part of our community. I think more importantly, it has to matter. You have to first care about people. You have to first be concerned with the fact that people are struggling. You have to have some civility, and some humanity, and some understanding that people have value. If you don’t value people from marginalized communities, then you are not going to work hard for them.

GK: On that point of valuing marginalized communities—our elected officials are mostly wealthy white men. What are some of the things that helped you to break through as a working-class candidate? Were there particular networks or mentorship?

JH: I got support from people who are not similarly situated, who do not look like me, who do not share my background or experiences. But we share a fundamental belief in the purpose of government, and the possibilities of our communities, and I think that really has propelled my candidacy. There are people in my district who, even though they are not directly affected by a lot of what is happening, they are sickened by it. There is a basic human thread that binds us together.

I really think that we have to expand our electorate. Our representation needs to more accurately reflect our communities—whether that be diversity of background, diversity of experience, of race, ethnicity, religion, culture—so that when we are having these conversations we can make sure we’re not leaving anyone out.

GK: What about the money—the costs of the campaigning. Doesn’t that prevent working-class people from running?

JH: Definitely. The amount it takes to run a campaign is obscene. I had no idea how I was going to raise the money. I said either by design or default this system eliminates someone like me. We started with small-dollar donations. As we gained momentum, we started to raise more money. But I see how it would deter many people who would be effective leaders from even attempting to do this because it’s daunting—the idea of how much it costs. And the amount of money you raise should not determine your viability as a candidate.

GK: As you potentially enter Congress, do you feel a great sense of pressure as one of the only African-American representatives from New England, and as an African-American woman? If so, what do you do with that pressure?

JH: I haven’t thought beyond the election. I do feel a great sense of pressure now because my Republican opponent and I are so fundamentally different. I feel like I have to win in order to stand up for the values that so many people in this district and in this community have told me are important to them. I think if I were to make it into Congress—I’ve spent much of my time being “the only one,” or “the first one”—the only one in my class, the only one in my family—I’m comfortable going into areas that were pretty much foreign to me, and just navigating those areas by working with people, by seeking advice, by listening to people. So that is something that I’m used to. But I also have this willingness to collaborate. We have to get our country moving forward, so whatever it takes to make that happen, I’m up for that.

Shortly after her husband was assassinated in 1968, Coretta Scott King spoke at a rally in front of tens of thousands of people, including members of the original Poor People’s Campaign. She reflected on society’s “routine” violence against people in poverty and minorities. “Starving a child is violence,” she said, and continued:

Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her child is violence. Discrimination against a workingman is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical needs is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.

Today, a revived Poor People’s Campaign is making new use of the term “policy violence” to describe the impact of legislative decisions on people living in poverty. It is part of the campaign’s effort to shift the national conversation about poverty away from one that demonizes people struggling economically to one that questions the morality of public-policy choices that sustain and deepen poverty.

“You’re not going to change the policies until you change the narrative,” the Rev. Dr. William Barber III, campaign co-chair, told The Nation at a gathering of campaign organizers this summer. At a hearing on Capitol Hill in September, Barber argued that denying Medicaid, cutting food assistance, preventing a living wage, and apathy towards poverty are all “forms of political and policy violence” that “cause violence in the lives of children,” in particular.

Policy choices indeed leave an indelible physical and social-emotional mark on people in both the near and long term—there is no shortage of studies that shine a light on that fact. Children’s HealthWatch, a network of pediatricians and public-health researchers in urban hospitals across the country, examines the impacts of policy on the health, nutrition, and development of children ages 0 to 4, and often on their caregivers too. “These policies don’t happen in a vacuum,” said Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba, executive director of the organization. “They are written on the bodies and brains of the family.”

Dr. Mariana Chilton, principal investigator for Children’s HealthWatch in Philadelphia, put it this way: “The experience of poverty in and of itself is a violent, traumatic experience, and it’s inflicted by policy-makers and our own society.”

Here are just some of the ways in which policy choices that limit access to basic necessities can physically harm children and their families.

Housing

Low wages, unpredictable work schedules, lack of paid leave, unaffordable health care and childcare, and above all, a lack of affordable housing and housing assistance—these policy choices and more contribute to homelessness and housing insecurity in America, which in turn has consequences for children’s health.

On any given night, more than 500,000 people are homeless and more than one-third of them are families with children. Some estimates indicate that 2.5 million children are homeless at some point during the year. A recent study by Children’s HealthWatch revealed that young children who experience homelessness are at an increased risk for lifetime hospitalizations, of being in poor or fair health, and having developmental delays, compared to children who don’t experience homelessness. Other research has shown the connection between homelessness and changes in the brain and body that can lead to “higher levels of stress-related chronic diseases later in life.”

In 2014, 671,000 children ages 4 and under were homeless. This led to 18,600 additional hospitalizations at a cost to the health-care system of approximately $238 million, according to Children’s HealthWatch.

Ettinger de Cuba noted that “homelessness is just the tip of the iceberg—what we see.” A study by Children’s HealthWatch earlier this year found that families behind on rent, moving at least twice in a year, or having a history of homelessness are all at risk for fair or poor child and caregiver health, maternal depressive symptoms, increased child hospitalizations, and household material hardship (including food insecurity, and being unable to pay for utilities and health-care services), compared to stably housed families. Over 10 years, the costs of housing instability are nearly $77 billion for maternal health conditions, and more than $34 billion for children under 18, including for hospitalizations, ambulatory visits, dental procedures, mental-health care, medication, and special-education services.

These health effects and their associated costs are easily avoided. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, when families receive a housing voucher, the likelihood that they will become homeless decreases nearly 75 percent and they move 35 percent less often compared to low-income families that do not receive housing assistance. Moreover, when a family receives a housing voucher, its children “are much less likely to be placed into foster care than other homeless families.” Yet only one in four families that qualify for housing assistance actually receives it, and we spend four times more on housing benefits annually for households making over $200,000 a year than on households making $20,000 a year or less.

“In some ways we don’t need more science to keep demonstrating that these programs work, we just need to fund them,” said Ettinger de Cuba. “Choose any program—Section 8, vouchers, public housing—you will find gigantic wait lists. In some cities they’ve completely closed down waiting lists, or they open them one day a year. It’s absurd when we know what incredible positive effects we could have if we just assisted people.”

Food

As with housing, the data around food insecurity and policy solutions are clear. Children who receive SNAP (food-stamp) benefits—which are $1.40 per meal for the average recipient—are less likely to be at risk of being underweight or having developmental delays than children who are eligible but not receiving food stamps. These children also have fewer hospitalizations and emergency-room visits, and less need for special education in school. Families receiving SNAP are also 28 percent more likely to be able to pay for medical expenses without having to give up necessities like food, rent, or utilities. According to one long-term study, SNAP “is linked with a lower risk of heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension in adults.”

“If a child is already developmentally delayed as a young child, they are between 8 to 12 times more likely to be unable to work as an adult,” said Chilton. “Food insecurity is a form of toxic stress, which is linked to having a smaller brain size, and it affects the organs in the body—the liver and lungs don’t function well.”

Chilton says that it’s not just Republicans with their proposals to add additional work requirements to SNAP that demonstrate a hostility towards children and low-income families. “Before the Trump administration—when Democrats had all of this information about the importance of SNAP benefits for child health and well-being—many of them voted to take money out of the SNAP program in order to fund school breakfast and school lunch. They knew that if they cut SNAP, children would be damaged. How is that not state-sanctioned violence against children?”

Income

By tracking children born in the late 1960s and early 70s and their adult outcomes, researchers have shown that for young children in low-income families, a boost of less than $4,000 in annual family income (in today’s dollars) is associated with improved academic performance, increased earnings in adulthood, and significantly increased work hours annually after age 25.

But policy-makers have made it increasingly difficult for families to access cash. The minimum wage is now a poverty wage, and cash-welfare assistance (TANF) has been so restricted that nationwide it reaches only 23 of every 100 families with children in poverty.

In Ohio, for instance, between 2010 and 2014 only 43 percent of children living in deep poverty—meaning they had an annual income of less than about $9,500 for a family of three—received TANF. Jack Frech, who was the director of the Athens County Department of Jobs and Family Services for 33 years, described it to The Nation as “state-sanctioned child abuse.” In Massachusetts, advocates are fighting a “family cap” rule that not only denies additional benefits for families receiving TANF when they have a new child, but also penalizes the family by deducting from its current benefit, pushing them deeper into poverty. The result of this policy is that 8,700 children in Massachusetts are not eligible to receive the assistance. Children’s HealthWatch found that children in families not receiving the full TANF benefit were more likely to be hospitalized and living in food insecure households than those receiving the full benefit.

Voting to End Policy Violence

Conservatives and some Democrats say that the problem with poverty is that we don’t know what to do about it—that we need to get more data and make better use of it. In fact, what we need to do is to stop ignoring the data that we have.

By using the term “policy violence,” the Poor People’s Campaign is demanding that the public and political leaders recognize the real impacts of policy choices, as well as the available alternatives. The framing is part of the 40-state voter-education and registration drive the campaign is operating in impacted communities, where many people have sat out past elections.

“We are making sure people understand what’s going on, and that they take that understanding into the voting booth,” Barber told The Nation. “So they are not voting for people, they are voting for issues.”

Obama praised the idea. Reporter Annie Lowrey and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes recently published books about it. The city of Chicago is exploring it. And the town of Stockton, California, has begun a pilot project experimenting with it. But Mississippi is arguably one of the last places you’d expect to find an effort to provide people in poverty with a guaranteed basic income. Yet, in December, 16 mothers in public housing in Jackson will begin to receive $1,000 per month for a year, no strings attached.

The new guaranteed-income initiative, the Magnolia Mothers Trust, targets an African-American community with an average annual income of $11,300. The project emerged out of Jackson native Aisha Nyandoro’s work running Springboard to Opportunities, a nonprofit serving residents in federally subsidized affordable-housing communities in Mississippi, Alabama, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Frustrated with the stubbornness of intergenerational poverty in these housing complexes, Nyandoro turned to the families living there to gather information about their experiences and needs.

The women Nyandoro spoke with consistently articulated that inadequate access to cash was a serious impediment. Without cash, “There is no breathing room. There is a constant idea that at any moment something could go wrong and knock you back—not just for that moment, but for six months or a year,” said Nyandoro. That led her and her colleagues to ask a simple question: “What if the mothers had the resources they need to breathe and think about the future and plan?” Nyandoro secured funding for the pilot from individual donors as well as the Economic Security Project, which supports initiatives that explore access to unconditional cash. In November, there will be a lottery to select the participants.

One of Nyandoro’s hypotheses is that a guaranteed, unconditional income will serve like a release valve to the constant pressures of poverty, freeing bandwidth women can use to strengthen the prospects for both their families and their communities—to work towards their own dreams and goals, and to engage and lead in their communities. Society, Nyandoro said, greatly underestimates the strengths, skills, and leadership qualities of these women.

“I see on a daily basis how they work to keep their dignity in a system and country where they are not being dignified,” said Nyandoro. “To advocate for their kids in failing school systems…for themselves in a failing economic workforce system. And somehow they still manage to show up with humor and grace and joy.”

he idea of giving poor women cash without telling them how to use it is a direct refutation of the punitive approach to antipoverty policy that has been ascendant in America since the Reagan years. As it happens, Mississippi was ground zero for that kind of approach: Before President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, which caused the number of poor families receiving cash assistance in the United States to plummet, there was a pilot program in Mississippi that was a harbinger of things to come.

Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice’s “Work First” program, which began in 1995, forced primarily African-American mothers to leave literacy programs, GED classes, and two-year associate-degree programs in order to work as security guards, shrimp pickers, fast-food workers, in poultry plants or at other low-wage jobs—often without childcare or reliable transportation—if they wanted to receive meager, but needed, cash assistance. Many women were forced out of whatever promising futures they were working towards and required to accept dead-end jobs offered by the state.

The policy reinforced the popular narrative that people in poverty—especially black women—were poor because of laziness or a lack of gumption. It also conveniently provided an ample source of cheap and monitored labor. In a 1996 report, graduate students at the University of Southern Mississippi’s School of Social Work who had tracked the Work First program concluded that the state’s punitive approach continued “to blame women on welfare for imagined deficiencies,” and that policy-makers should focus on “increasing wages, providing quality childcare, and investing in training and education [for] low-income women.”

Instead, Clinton and the Gingrich Congress followed Mississippi’s lead and passed PRWORA. That year, 68 of every 100 families with children in poverty were able to receive cash assistance, called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF); in 2016 the number was down to 23 of every 100. Because there are few federal standards for how the program should be administered, cash-assistance is now virtually nonexistent in many states. Mississippi, for example, provided TANF to fewer than seven of every 100 families with children in poverty in 2016—and six states helped an even lower percentage of poor families. The maximum benefit in Mississippi is $170 per month for a family of three, or less than $2 per person per day, the lowest in the country. In September, Census data revealed that 27 percent of children in Mississippi were in poverty in 2017, third-worst in the nation, including more than 31 percent of African-American children. Even with such widespread poverty the state approved only 1.4 percent of TANF applicants in 2016.

Gutting TANF has left many low-income mothers with little access to cash. While women represent half of the state’s workforce they are also two-thirds of its minimum-wage workers; any breadwinner earning Mississippi’s minimum wage of $7.25 an hour will likely not be able to rise out of poverty. Even if a person were able to get SNAP to help with food, or housing assistance to help make rent, or even CHIP or Medicaid, they will still be cash poor, struggling to purchase items like diapers, over-the-counter medications, hygienic products, and other household goods. Moreover, the state only serves about 10 percent of the children who qualify for childcare assistance, and childcare can cost as much as college tuition.

When Nyandoro describes the effects of being cash poor, one gets a sense of a pressure cooker with no relief. Without cash or a savings account, what would otherwise be a minor inconvenience can be crippling. Nyandoro recounted the story of a mother whose car transmission recently died, a $1,500 repair that she can’t afford. The woman is now bartering to get rides to her job, her children to extracurricular activities, and to the grocery store. She is trying to hold on until next tax season when she will receive her Earned Income Tax Credit that will supplement her low-wage earnings. Other people can be set back by something as little as a flat tire—a common occurrence in Jackson, where the streets are riddled with potholes.

yandoro’s belief in the potential of low-income women was shaped by her grandmother, the civil-rights icon LC Dorsey. Dorsey grew up a sharecropper, dropped out of high school, and married and had six kids before age 25; later she earned a GED and a masters in social work from Stony Brook University in New York before returning to the Mississippi Delta where she helped start the first federally funded rural health clinic in the United States. She also led boycotts and fights for Head Start, for job opportunities for youth and adults through community action agencies, and for prison reform at the Parchman state penitentiary. “I grew up sitting at her feet,” said Nyandoro. “Everything I know about social justice and working in community I learned firsthand from her and my mother and maternal aunts—hearing them talk, listening, and going to community meetings.”

The motto for Nyandoro’s organization—“radically resident-driven”—grew out of her grandmother’s approach to partnering with the community in order to determine the necessary work. Following that model, women in the four housing projects that Springboard serves in Jackson helped to design the Magnolia Mother’s Trust. During the year, women participating in the program will have the option for financial coaching, leadership training, monthly meetings with their peers, and counseling with a social worker for trauma and any other issues they want to discuss. The women will also lead a service project in the community, something they insisted on in order to not be viewed as “taking without giving back.” Importantly, there will be no “interventions” for how the women choose to spend their money.

“We need to get to the place where we trust poor people,” Nyandoro said. “They are all mothers who want the best for their kids, and they know what that looks like.” She challenges the notion that society can determine what is “wasteful” or “non-essential” spending. Take the use of money to get one’s nails done, which might be considered trivial: “Those two hours might be the only two hours when they are not raising their kids during the course of that month. It’s self-care.”

Over the course of the year, the Magnolia Mothers Trust will collect quantitative data such as spending patterns, ability to accomplish one’s goals, and frequency of community engagement. But it’s the qualitative data—the stories about how the women’s lives change—that could help undo the damaging narrative about people in poverty that is currently being reinforced as the Trump administration and other conservative politicians put a new emphasis on work requirements, drug testing, and race baiting. Nyandoro knows the women enrolled in the pilot may face obstacles—for example, the participants will lose some public benefits as a result of the additional income—but she believes that a clearer picture of poverty in America and the ability of people to change their conditions will emerge.

“I want folks to understand what it means to live in poverty as an African-American mother in this country, and that we begin to see that it’s the system that is the boogey man—because that’s what’s really wrong in this country,” she said.

At the National Mall in Washington on Saturday, two huge banners hung on either side of an elevated stage, framing the Capitol building in the background: fight poverty not the poor, they read. That was the central message of the thousands of people who cheered, yelled, chanted, danced, and sang in support of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.

Over the past 40 days, more than 2,000 people have been arrested across the country as they demanded a right to adequate food, housing, health care, education, fair wages, and other basic necessities. They stopped traffic, petitioned state legislators, and engaged in other organizing and nonviolent direct action in 40 states and the nation’s capital. Many of those activists were on hand on Saturday to mark the completion of the campaign’s first phase as it continues the work that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others who founded the original Poor People’s Campaign in 1968.

In the crowd, signs identifying contingents from at least 20 states were visible. Representatives from another 20 states identified themselves in a roll call on stage. Every region of the nation was well-represented, including by indigenous people from tribal lands. People came from as far as Alaska. “You are the founding members of the 21st century Poor People’s Campaign,” the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, co-chair of the campaign, announced to the crowd. “This is not a commemoration of what happened 50 years ago—this is the re-inauguration.”

A goal of this contemporary movement is to flip the dominant narrative of poverty in America from one that demonizes the poor to one that questions the morality of current public policy and the elected officials who craft it—a status quo in which 140 million people struggle to make ends meet, 54 million people work jobs below a living wage, 14 million are on the verge of not being able to afford their water bills, 4 million are homeless, migrant children are caged at our border, and black families continue to be ripped apart by mass incarceration.

The Nation spoke with some of the activists who came to Washington this weekend and who now plan to carry on the work of the Poor People’s Campaign for months and years to come. They are at the forefront of this decentralized movement, which emphasizes state-based campaigns led by directly impacted people.

Louise Brown, Charleston, SC: 49 Years Fighting for Better Wages and a Union

Louise Brown, 83, is a bridge between the original Poor People’s campaign and the current movement. In 1969, she was one of 12 African-American women who were unjustly fired by Charleston’s Medical College Hospital after they tried to meet with the hospital’s director about higher pay and racism toward black workers. Their dismissal ignited a strike that lasted 140 days and brought in allies from the Poor People’s Campaign, who were redeploying after Resurrection City on the National Mall—among them were Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Four hundred workers—most of them African American—refused to return to their jobs until management reinstated the 12 workers and recognized their union. They didn’t get the union, but they did hold out and march with thousands of people—including some doctors—until they broke the hospital president who had said he wouldn’t rehire the “uneducated women.” Brown and her colleagues returned to their jobs.

“It was very hard, very tiresome,” said Brown, who had three young daughters at the time. The family was kicked out of their apartment and Emanuel Church provided them with shelter. “Forty-nine years later, I see the same thing that happened then is happening now—even worse,” Brown said prior to Saturday’s rally on the mall. She points to workers’ needing two jobs just to make rent, record corporate profits while wages remain stagnant, and a dwindling middle class.

Those concerns led her to get involved with McDonald’s workers in their Fight for $15 campaign, and then the Poor People’s Campaign. While Brown said her experiences and treatment in 1969 were based on her being African American, now she says, “Everybody is being mistreated—overworked and underpaid. Seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour—how can you live?”

“This fight is so different—people of all colors, all walks of life are participating in this,” said Brown.

Brown was arrested on a 100-degree day in June in Columbia, where the South Carolina Poor People’s Campaign delivered a set of demands at the governor’s mansion. “I went to jail in 1969 and I went to jail in 2018,” said Brown. “I’ll do whatever it takes, so long as it’s nonviolent. I’m staying until victory is won.”

Amy Jo Hutchison, Wheeling, WV: Building a Coalition of Moms to Protect the Safety Net

Amy Jo Hutchison, 46, has lived in West Virginia her entire life and “never spent a day out of poverty on some level.”

“Unemployed poverty or working poor,” she said. “And when I was unemployed, SNAP [food stamps] helped me feed my kids. You just can’t do it without the safety net sometimes.”

A single mother of two girls, ages 14 and 11, Hutchison has a bachelor’s degree and previously worked as a Head Start teacher. She is now an organizer for Our Children, Our Future, which is spearheading a campaign to end child poverty in a state where about 30 percent of children under age 6 live below the federal poverty line. Hutchison does some lobbying and policy work at the state level, but said her “passion is organizing low-income moms.”

“They have it in them,” Hutchinson said. “Sometimes people just need someone to say, ‘Hey, I believe in you. Let’s do this together.’” Her work organizing directly impacted people to protect the safety net was a natural fit with the Poor People’s Campaign, which is focused on breaking through historical racial divides that have kept white people in poverty from working with people of color in poverty. “Politicians have set it up to keep us pitted against one another—from Jim Crow on,” said Hutchison. “To change that you have to have boots on the ground—have conversations and establish relationships so you can begin to say, ‘Look, we’re all in the same boat.’” These conversations include Trump voters, who she says believed him during the presidential campaign when he said he was bringing coal back. “Since I’m directly impacted I can go in there and say, ‘I know what this is like, and we’re being hoodwinked,’” said Hutchison.

Hutchison organizes in 20 of West Virginia’s 55 counties, and her approach is to find a contact who can get her “a foot in the door” in a new community. Her goal is to set up a meeting with five mothers, which will lead to a referral and another meeting with five more, and so on. It’s a model that has helped the West Virginia Poor People’s Campaign establish a formidable presence at the state capitol over the past six weeks, as residents fight to protect a safety net that is under constant threat.

Earlier this year, the governor imposed work requirements for food assistance, despite the state’s own study suggesting that it doesn’t help workers find employment; during a nine-county pilot project, there was also a spike in demand at food pantries. But recently, with the help of low-income mothers testifying at the state capitol, the legislature raised SNAP eligibility from 130 percent of the poverty line to 200 percent.

“That was a huge win,” Hutchison said. “With that we bring in thousands of working poor to make them SNAP-eligible since they aren’t paid enough to make ends meet.”

Now Hutchison has her sights on working with the Poor People’s Campaign on voter registration and mobilization, continuing to grow the coalition of mothers, and resisting the latest proposals from congressional Republicans to cut food assistance, children’s health care, and repeal the Affordable Care Act.

GG Morgan, Harlem, NY: Homeless and Fighting for Housing as a Human Right

In December, GG Morgan read an article about Reverend Barber and the new Poor People’s Campaign. She was familiar with him from his remarks at the 2016 Democratic Convention, and knew of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s work on the original effort in 1968. The revived campaign was timely: She’d become homeless for the first time about six months earlier and moved into a women’s shelter in Harlem, where she still resides today. She signed up to get involved.

“I’m one of 89,000 people in shelters in the state,” said Morgan, who described her age as around 50. “Rents are skyrocketing, and every time you turn around there are more luxury condos going up, but nothing that’s affordable.” She said people of color and the working poor are being “pushed out and priced out” of their communities in what she calls “the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression.” A recent study indicated that in 2016 more than half of low-income households in New York City spent 30–50 percent of their income on rent.

In February, Morgan helped launch the New York Poor People’s Campaign by sharing her story at a press conference in Albany, and helping to deliver a letter to elected officials about poverty and voter suppression nationwide. She told The Nation that although she was new to activism she “long had a heart for justice.” Prior to becoming homeless, she would frequently visit shelters to serve meals. Seeing people sleeping in the streets, or on benches, or in the subways deeply affected her. “But I never thought it could be me, until it became me,” she said.

Morgan is now an organizer with Voices of Community Activists & Leaders (VOCAL-NY), a statewide membership organization that helps build power for low-income New Yorkers impacted by HIV/AIDS, mass incarceration, the drug war, and homelessness. A lot of the group’s work overlaps with the work of the New York Poor People’s Campaign. “We’re trying to get homeless people to know that they have a voice,” she said, “and when we go to Albany where decisions are made and money is allocated we can voice our opinions and share our stories about what is happening.”

Morgan said the housing solutions she and the campaign are focused on include raising revenue by closing the carried-interest loophole, a tax break that benefits millionaires and billionaires, and a new Home Stability Support grant that would help people make rent.

“Working people, poor people need decent housing, decent education, decent wages, decent health care—is that asking for so much in the richest nation?” said Morgan. “This Poor People’s Campaign—a call for moral revival—is what’s going to get the heart and soul of America back.”

n the months ahead the campaign will pivot to power-building, voter registration, voter mobilization, and, as necessary, civil disobedience. The activists have already made their presence felt in 40 state capitals and the District, becoming what they call “a new, unsettling force.”

This is exactly where the organizers hoped they would be just 40 days in. As campaign co-chair the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis put it, “When we look at the history of social change in this country, it’s when those that are most impacted band together with clergy, moral leaders, and other activists—and commit themselves to being the foundation for larger scale transformation—only when you start there can you see real justice coming into society.”

Last September, a bipartisan coalition of approximately 70 mayors across 13 counties in Appalachian Ohio had an idea: With so many people thrown off cash assistance (TANF) by the state in recent years, the coalition said that the Kasich administration was now sitting on more than $500 million in unused funds from the program’s block grant. So they requested $12 million to help their constituents, some of the poorest in Ohio: $8 million to prevent water shutoffs, and $4 million to purchase essential items like diapers, feminine-hygiene products, first-aid supplies, and over-the-counter medications.

“We’re just trying to make sure our constituents have the safe water and essential products in their homes that are needed for the health and safety of their families,” said Gary Goosman, mayor of the village of Amesville, population 180, and president of the Mayors’ Partnership for Progress. “The state has more than enough resources to get this done.”

Since 2011, TANF caseloads in Ohio have been cut nearly in half, from 99,000 to 53,000 households. The drop isn’t because people are faring better, but largely due to the program’s inflexible work requirement that many struggle to meet when they can’t work, lack needed transportation to get to a job, or can’t get enough hours at the jobs they do have.

As a result, for every 100 families with children in poverty in the state, only about 22 now receive cash assistance—down from 29 in 2013, and 89 prior to bipartisan “welfare reform” in 1996. There are now many more children in Ohio living in households with zero cash income than there are children in families receiving cash assistance. (The Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services declined to provide an exact figure.) This is a problem nationwide, as evident in the rise in the number of households living on less than $2 per person, per day: from 636,000 in 1996 to nearly 1.5 million in 2011. Over the same period, the number of children in the United States living in $2-a-day poverty also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million.

Goosman said that this drain in assistance is having a significant effect on the local economies of many rural communities in Ohio. In the mayors’ region alone, there is now at least $50 million less annually in cash assistance and SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) benefits compared with 2011. The average SNAP benefit is just $1.40 per person, per meal—and, like TANF, the program has strict work requirements for certain recipients.

“An entire town can be impacted by the amount of money residents have to spend on groceries, or medications, or transportation. People are living closer to the edge,” said Goosman.

And yet, seven months after the mayors’ request, the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services (JFS) would only tell the coalition repeatedly that its proposal remained under consideration.

Finally, on May 4, JFS notified the mayors via e-mail: In September—one year after its initial request—the coalition will receive $500,000 from the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) toward water-bill assistance. In all, the grant will provide 2,450 households with a one-time payment of $200 “to ensure service will be maintained for a minimum of 30 days.” This seems a drop in the bucket in a state where 22 percent of neighborhoods have residents who are currently unable to cover their monthly water bill. The average water-sewer rate in Ohio in 2016 was $1,289 annually, which helps explain why the mayors were looking for individual payments of $500 to qualifying families living below 150 percent of the federal poverty line and a total of $8 million toward assistance. There was also no mention of the mayors’ $4 million funding request in support of the purchase of essential household items for cash-poor families.

JFS provided the bipartisan mayors group with no explanation as to how it reached its figure, or why the funds would be drawn from those already earmarked for cash-strapped community action agencies that provide local services like housing assistance, job training, energy assistance, child care, transportation, and more.

“It was a surprise,” said Goosman. “While we appreciate this funding and it will help us get a pilot program going, we weren’t asking for $500,000 from CSBG, we were asking for $12 million out of $570 million in unspent TANF funds.”

A spokesperson for JFS confirmed that there are indeed now $570.7 million in unused TANF funds. However, he said that those monies are committed to increased funding for childcare facilities that are able to meet the state’s new quality standards. But the mayors’ towns might not benefit from those funds either.

“In our region, a lot of our childcare facilities won’t even be able to afford the quality improvements the state is mandating, so they will shut down,” said Jack Frech, an Americorps VISTA volunteer with the coalition who retired after 33 years as director of the Athens County Department of Jobs and Family Services. “So the TANF money intended for our poor and working-class families will instead go to facilities primarily serving wealthier kids.” (JFS declined to comment.)

It is also notable that a recent congressional appropriation included an 80 percent increase in discretionary childcare funding—enough that one might think the state need not force its mayors to choose between water now and childcare in the future.

The bipartisan group of mayors met last week to discuss next steps. “We voted unanimously: We’re happy to have the $500,000, but we’re still requesting the $12 million from the state,” said Goosman.

This Mother’s Day, at a moment when people in poverty are facing unprecedented attacks on their basic living standards, a new Poor People’s Campaign launches.

It is reminiscent of the campaign Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began developing in 1967, five months prior to his assassination. King made his intention clear in his last sermon: “We are coming to Washington in a poor people’s campaign. Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.… We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty.”

More than 50 years later, the new Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is coming to Washington. But it will be taking action in 39 states across the country, too. The first phase will be 40 days of direct actions, teach-ins, cultural events, and more.  The campaign will then transition to voter registration and mobilization.

Many people are familiar with campaign co-chair the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, through his leadership of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina. (Barber is also The Nation’s civil-rights correspondent.) Less well-known is his fellow co-chair, the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. Theoharis is the co-director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice. She has worked as an organizer with people in poverty for the past two decades, collaborating with groups like the National Union of the Homeless, the National Welfare Rights Union, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

I spoke with Reverend Theoharis about how poverty is viewed in America, the contours of the campaign, the role of the media, and what organizers hope to achieve in the first 40 days and beyond. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Greg Kaufmann: Is this campaign trying to tell a different story about poverty in America?

The Rev. Liz Theoharis: Yes; we are showing the deep reality of poverty where there are 140 million people who are poor or low-income in this country—where poverty affects close to half the US population. It affects people across all races, nationalities, ethnicities, geographies, genders, sexualities, ages, and religions.   

[We need] to break through the current narrative in our society. That narrative is one that blames poor people for their poverty, pits us against each other, and claims that there’s scarcity when we’re really living in a society and world of abundance. We are going to do a sustained season of organizing [for 40 days]; it’s both to connect up, and wake people up, and say that you’re not alone and there is a movement to join—and also to shift the narrative in our country right now.

And what does that narrative shift look like? What is a more authentic narrative?

I think what needs to happen first is for people to deal with the reality of the injustices that are happening, and the intersections of those injustices in people’s lives. And to see that coming out of deep pain and suffering are people who have a set of demands and a program of resolutions to the problems in their communities: We need single-payer universal health care, we need full voting rights, we need decent housing for everyone, we need education that is equitable for our kids, we need higher education that’s free and available to anyone that wants it.

The story that we want to get out there is that right now there are 140 million people who are poor or low-income—that’s 43.5 percent of the population. So we’re not talking about some little group of people over there, and there is no small Band-Aid to fix it. We need a national discussion and national action in terms of policies that will lift people out of poverty, curb systemic racism, shift our war economy to a peace economy, and save the planet and everything living in it.

Have you run into any resistance to the word “poor”? In terms of people with low-incomes not wanting to identify as “poor,” or a feeling that it’s the wrong frame for a broad-based movement?  

It hasn’t been an issue among poor people who are calling for this campaign. But sometimes progressive religious folks or people associated with colleges and universities worry about this. Our response is that the idea of a poor people’s campaign and a national call for a moral revival is coming from poor people ourselves. Also, there is a rich history in terms of poor people organizing across color lines in the ’68 Campaign, and in other moments in US history.

If we go back to our sacred texts and traditions—the Bible is a form of mass media that talks more about uplifting the poor than any other topic. This 40- to 50-year attack on poor people, of blaming poor people for their and everyone’s problems—how you counter that isn’t by throwing out the word poor, or only talking about the middle class, only talking about economic insecurity, without naming the reality that almost half the population in the United States is experiencing.  

A big part of this campaign is about people hearing their names and hearing their condition and coming forward and saying, “This doesn’t have to be and I’m going to stand up with other people and fight for justice.” If you look at our demands, some of them are about broadening our understanding of who is poor and why people are poor. Because right now, in part due to how the media has portrayed poor people, a lot of times there is shame and blame associated with it. But as one of the steering-committee leaders said, “I don’t feel ashamed that I’m poor—I grew up in the poorest census district in the country. I think our society should feel ashamed about the kind of deep poverty that exists and I had to live through.”

The Poor People’s Campaign intentionally didn’t reach out to national organizations until late in the organizing effort. Can you talk about the reasons for that?

We believe this campaign is only going to be successful if it is a deep and wide organizing drive of poor people, of moral leaders, of all people of conscience, who think that these issues are a problem. And it has to come from the bottom up. And so we really started with grassroots leaders who had been doing work for a long time in their communities, or had just emerged because certain struggles were happening in their communities so they stepped forward to respond. We built very diverse coordinating committees in 39 states. It really is being led by people who are most impacted.

After we launched officially on December 4, 2017, national organizations came forward wanting to endorse. We have more than 100 now—and it’s a meaningful endorsement. We see national not as doing work in DC or having a PO box in DC, but as nationalizing state-based movements.

Can you walk us through the launch on Sunday and the 40-day “season of organizing”?

Sunday we will do a Mass Meeting—Reverend Barber and I will lead it—and some local DC folks will be involved, and we will livestream it nationally. And people in different states will gather for watch parties and rallies to prepare for the next day’s action. We’ll have these Mass Meetings on Sundays weekly. For 40 days, [direct] actions will continue to be on Mondays. On Tuesdays we’ll livestream teach-ins, on Thursdays we’ll nationally broadcast cultural events, and on [weekends] we’re in houses of worship and places of worship, where people will focus on weekly themes and get people involved. On June 23, we’ll launch the next stage in terms of people coming to DC for a massive mobilization and then going back to their homes to do organizing that is connected to voter registration and voter mobilization and education.

What can you tell me about what this Monday—this first day of direct action—looks like ideally?

Monday morning we will head from St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and to the US Capitol for a call to action, where leaders from different struggles around the country will have a chance to speak to why we’re building the campaign and what the campaign is calling for. Then Reverend Barber and I will explain how the action will take place, and then throughout the afternoon people will have a chance to continue to make connections with others that are there. So the actions are happening at the US Capitol and then simultaneously happening in more than 30 states.  

What do you do to sustain the movement beyond these 40 days of action?

This is why the coordinating committees in the states have been set up for months now. The committees have connected with teams of lawyers, with teams that do nonviolent direct-action training; they’ve been doing a political-education process amongst their own leadership so that folks understand not just how to do this but why we’re doing this and what is going to be needed for the long haul. And also identifying cultural leaders, and singers and songwriters—components for what a state-based movement of people across all the different lines that divide us need in order to be successful.  

Will the campaign be addressing some of the legislative fights going on right now—such as the proposed SNAP cuts and additional work requirements in the Farm Bill, Medicaid work requirements, and other issues that impact people’s basic needs?

We have posted a preliminary agenda and demands on the website, and they are a mix of federal and state policies. Some of them are reactive to current fights that are going on—from not cutting SNAP, not cutting [heating assistance], not having these work requirements. But then there are things that are more proactive—like single-payer universal health care and automatic voter registration at the age of 18. So we are trying to be be relevant and connected to the current fights that the people in this campaign are having to fight. Like currently in Michigan there is a water crisis, so if there is anything that can help people immediately, we have to take up that fight. But we also have to not just react—to put out visionary and necessary demands that would translate into making everybody’s lives better.

While the heart of the campaign is clearly consistent with Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign—in looking at poverty, ecological destruction, militarism, and systemic racism—are there some key differences as well?

Yes. What Dr. King was talking about was bringing 3,000 of the poorest citizens from about 10 communities across the country to Washington, DC, and staying there until people’s demands were met. It’s really important for us not to just have people come to DC but have people doing actions and organizing in their states. Also, we called for this 40 days, so we’re not staying until everything is met.

We’re doing something historic—historians have told us that there’s never been this kind of direct action at state capitols in a coordinated way for a sustained period of time. And we’ve never had so many people go into the US Capitol and engage in nonviolent direct action, and then keep on returning. So it’s not a one-off mobilization.

Dr. King called for a Poor People’s Campaign in December of ’67, and was killed in April of ’68. The first meeting of the 25 different organizations and leaders—Native Americans, white Appalachians, Latino folks—it was two, maybe three weeks before King was killed. So we also hope that we have more time to keep building these bonds across lines that divide us—especially race, geography, issue, gender and sexuality—and that we can mature in terms of a movement.

The campaign is very clear that it is nonpartisan—that the problems and solutions are not the domain of any single party. That said, have you had Republicans turn out and participate?

Yes. Of the more than 1,000 people who have been engaged in the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and gotten arrested, more than 11 percent of those folks were registered, active Republicans. In some of the homeless organizing and welfare-rights organizing I come out of, we’ve had people from all kind of political beliefs who are impacted by poverty come forward and play leadership roles. And we’ve definitely experienced that in communities where Trump won by a lot, or where Mitch McConnell has dominated politics forever; people in those communities are saying, “We need this. These issues have been going on for far too long, and people are being impacted and dying because they don’t have health care.” It isn’t just uniting progressive people, but instead uniting people around what’s right and wrong.

Anything I’ve not asked you about that you want people to know heading into May 14?

It’s really important to see the grassroots nature of this work and pay attention to the leaders in the more than 30 states across the country and in the District of Columbia who wake up every day thinking, “How do we build a poor people’s campaign? How do we pull off a moral revival in this nation?” People like those in Lowndes County, Alabama, who have raw sewage in their yards, and in El Paso, Texas, who get four minutes—once every 15 years—to hug their relative in the Rio Grande. Or folks living in Grays Harbor, Washington, in a homeless encampment of predominantly poor, white millennials.

Out of those struggles people are uniting and organizing and calling for real systemic change. It reminds me of this quote from Dr. King, when he said: “The poor of this nation live in a cruelly unjust society. If they could be helped to take action together they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.” And I think this new and unsettling force of poor people across race, geography, religion, gender, and sexuality—are rising in this nonviolent army. I think something big is happening, and we need everyone to be a part of it.

Author’s note: To get involved, go to the website and sign up to connect with coordinating-committee leaders in your state. Or check out the interactive map of where  actions are taking place.

In recent months, the speed and force with which the Trump administration and conservative lawmakers have moved to make the lives of people with low incomes harder has been stunning and disorienting.

To name a few damaging policy initiatives: a proposal to punish immigrants for participating in programs like Head Start; closing a Department of Justice office that was created to make legal aid more accessible; repealing guidance to judges that suggested they consider an individual’s ability to pay a fine before allowing her to languish in jail; imposing work requirements and time limits on people who need assistance with health care, housing, or food.

Two experts who have been deeply immersed in anti-poverty policy throughout their careers agree that since the Johnson administration launched its Great Society programs in the 1960s there has never been a more politically dangerous moment for those who are struggling to make ends meet in America.

“We’ve been through things before that we thought couldn’t get worse. But this right now is just one of a kind,” says Georgetown University law professor Peter Edelman. Edelman has worked on poverty for more than 50 years—including as an aide to Senator Robert Kennedy and as an assistant secretary in the Clinton administration, a post he resigned in protest of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, known as “welfare reform.”

Dr. Alice O’Connor, a historian at the University of California–Santa Barbara and one of the foremost scholars on the history of poverty in the United States, notes that the Reagan years and the dismantling of income assistance under President Bill Clinton “were pretty damn bad for people in poverty. But what’s happening now is breathtaking.”

It’s an exceptional moment, but one Edelman and O’Connor say was decades in the making, the way paved during the Reagan and Clinton administrations in particular. Fortunately, it’s also a moment we know how to respond to.

The Reagan Years

The Reagan years, Edelman says, were thought to be a new low because the administration was “devilishly knowledgeable” about how to use reconciliation—a procedural tactic that at that time was brand new to most advocates—to overcome Democratic filibusters of bills gutting various social programs. Reagan enacted deep cuts to income assistance, food stamps, health care, Head Start, and more—though, Edelman notes, “fighting back did at least preserve the general framework of the assistance programs.”

O’Connor adds that the combination of deep cuts to assistance programs and the accompanying tax cuts for the rich were like “an overwhelming one-two punch.” Moreover, Reagan’s “willingness to simply ride out the [1981–82] recession”—the deepest since the Great Depression—and his unwillingness to support economic stimulus measures dramatically undermined the prospects for working-class families, while fostering long-term wage decline and increasing income inequality. The result was a rise in the number of people homeless or considered to be among the “working poor.”

Perhaps the most damaging impact of the Reagan years was the popularization of a narrative that described people in poverty as dependent, fraudulent, or unable to rise due to their own character flaws. There was also an unmistakable racialization of poverty politics that portrayed African Americans as unfairly benefiting from federal largesse. Lee Atwater, advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, described this tactic as a way to get the white vote: Republicans could no longer use the n-word, he said: “that hurts you—backfires.” Instead, they would tell anecdotes about caricatured people of color abusing assistance, and talk about cracking down on so-called fraud.

It wasn’t only the GOP that was responsible for this shift in framing. In her book Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History, O’Connor writes that liberal analysts “played an active part in making family structure and ‘dependency’ the issues in poverty policy while failing to address the problems of employment, wages, and growing inequality.” This liberal-conservative “consensus” set the stage for President Clinton and the Gingrich Congress to deliver an even bigger blow to families in poverty.

President Clinton and the Gingrich Congress

In 1996, Edelman resigned from the Clinton administration in protest of the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which dismantled cash income assistance to families. He predicted that imposing new time limits on benefits, and giving states nearly complete control over the money, would make aid harder to obtain and increase hardship. Edelman was prescient: When the legislation was signed, 68 of every 100 families with children in poverty received cash income assistance; in 2016 that number was just 23. In many states TANF assistance is now virtually nonexistent and a growing number of families live on less than $2 a day.

For O’Connor, the lasting damage of the Clinton years included the neoliberal embrace of a punitive approach to policy-making, which precluded an examination of the structural drivers of poverty, including globalization, attacks on unions, stagnant wages, and disinvestment in struggling communities. “President Clinton put into place a template of work requirements that is now embraced by so-called moderates, but in fact is all about denying people the work supports and social supports that are needed in our economy,” says O’Connor.

Enter Donald Trump

To understand how precarious this political moment is for people with low incomes, O’Connor and Edelman suggest looking at the recent Trump budget. While it’s not expected to pass this Congress, it is an indication of where conservatives would lead with just a few more right-wing votes. (Edelman reminds us that the repeal of the Affordable Care Act was defeated in the Senate by just two votes.)

Trump’s budget would cut more than $300 billion from Medicaid, taking away health care from millions of people; $200 billion from student aid; and $200 billon from the SNAP program (food assistance), which currently has an average benefit of just $1.40 per person per meal. It would cut rental assistance—which currently reaches only one in four eligible families—jeopardizing more than 500,000 subsidized households, and eliminate the fund for public-housing repairs, even though there is a backlog of between $26 billion and $40 billion to fix things like leaky roofs and bad wiring. It eliminates the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps at least 6 million households with utility bills. It cuts $72 billion from federal disability programs, saving less than the cost of Republicans’ recently passed tax cut for heirs of multimillion-dollar estates.

Many of the administration’s policies would have a particularly harmful effect on people of color. The Civil Rights division at the Department of Justice being has been upended—consent agreements with local police departments to address issues like racial profiling and excessive force have been thrown out; cases have been dropped, and others not pursued. Gerrymandering and voter suppression insulate the right from electoral blowback. Trump’s nativism and racism, evident in his administration’s immigration policies, represent an ongoing attempt to exploit the economic anxieties of white people who never recovered from the Great Recession. All of this leaves people of color more vulnerable than anyone to the current state of affairs.

What most concerns O’Connor is that, after decades of effort to eviscerate safety-net programs, conservatives know exactly what they are doing. “The level of viciousness against the working class is unprecedented,” says O’Connor. “[Republicans] have studied how to do this budget slashing, and race-baiting, and policy framing,” she continues. “And now they have a huge amount of power and money to act swiftly and without transparency. None of us should have any illusion about what we’re up against and just how dire it is.”

What next?

For O’Connor and Edelman, the first step to fighting back involves organizing to stop the immediate threats, which includes direct action and electoral organizing. The second step is more daunting—it involves undoing decades of policy and racially coded messaging. And it means replacing it with a vision of a fair economy that inspires people to stay engaged when the house isn’t on fire.

Edelman sees the ongoing debate about whether to focus on the multiracial Democratic base or the white working class as a serious but unnecessary obstacle. “There are a lot of things that attract everyone—like creating good jobs that pay a decent wage, and access to affordable housing, childcare, and college. At the same time, race has its own integrity as an issue. It’s unacceptable to walk away from that in order to get white votes.”

O’Connor is concerned about Democrats’ lack of big ideas to organize around. “A job guarantee? A right to housing?” she asks. “Let’s start defining what exactly our agenda looks like.” Without an agenda that centers poverty and repudiates a punitive approach to policy, O’Connor worries that Democrats would be satisfied with a return to power and an economy that leaves millions of people with jobs that don’t pay enough to make ends meet, much less get ahead.

But in the meantime, the party in power is launching an exceptional bid to cut what remains of basic assistance for struggling Americans. There are signs that the kind of organizing that O’Connor and Edelman call for is emerging—from ADAPT’s direct action and Indivisible’s dominance of town-hall meetingss to help thwart the repeal of the Affordable Care Act to the ever-expanding Fight for $15 and the right to organize; from the HandsOff coalition’s showing how proposed cuts would impact people’s lives to the new Poor People’s Campaign, which in May will kick off 40 days of direct action in at least 25 states.

These efforts and many more must be supported. Otherwise the Reagan years may seem like a bastion of equality and opportunity compared to the new normal.

What could Hollywood’s brightest stars learn from farmworkers in Florida’s tomato fields? When it comes to creating a workplace where women are empowered to report sexual harassment—and receive justice rather than retaliation when they do so—the farmworkers of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) offer a proven model. That the group created this solution in a town known less than a decade ago as “ground zero for modern slavery” makes it all the more remarkable and promising for other industries.

Agriculture is a notoriously dangerous industry for women. Eighty percent of women farmworkers report having experienced some form of sexual violence on the job. The CIW is addressing this crisis through its Fair Food Program (FFP), which puts market pressure on tomato growers to enforce a strict code of conduct in their fields. The code, which was developed by workers themselves, sets various human-rights standards, one of which is zero tolerance for sexual assault. (It mandates immediate firing for unwanted “physical touching.”) If violations of the code go unaddressed, the result is severe economic consequences for the grower.

To enforce the code, which covers more than 90 percent of Florida’s $600 million tomato industry, the CIW has established legally binding agreements with 14 of the world’s largest retail food corporations that purchase tomatoes—including WalMart, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and all major fast-food companies, with the exception of Wendy’s. These corporations promise to cut off purchases from farms that are out of compliance with the code. Now tomato growers know if they don’t crack down on abuses in their fields, they can’t sell their produce to these major buyers. These agreements didn’t come easily: CIW educated consumers about the plight of farmworkers via hunger strikes, marches, and direct action. It took intense public pressure to get most of the corporate retailers to sign on.

Nely Rodriguez, a CIW staff member originally from Mexico, says it’s the economic consequences that make all the difference. “We’ve shown how the power of the market can be used to improve the conditions in the field,” she says. Under the FFP, workers are able to monitor their own workplaces for violations of the code, and can lodge complaints via a trilingual 24-hour hotline operated by an independent monitoring organization, which does annual announced and unannounced audits on every participating farm and investigates all complaints. (During those audits, they speak to at least 50 percent of the workforce, including workers, crewleaders, and supervisors.) In contrast to other workplace hotlines that might be contracted out, or answered by a machine or a corporate HR representative, CIW’s always has an expert on-call who understands the power dynamics of the tomato industry. Headed by a retired New York State Supreme Court justice, the monitoring organization also audits the payroll, looking for minimum-wage violations and enforcing the penny-per-pound tomato surcharge that buyers pay to administer the program.

Since the Fair Food Program started, “Everything about working in the fields as a woman has changed,” Rodriguez says. Every new hire immediately receives a trilingual pamphlet and watches a CIW-produced video about the code, and then participates in worker-to-worker education sessions in the fields. “You literally can see people speaking up about issues—even in front of the bosses—during these sessions,” she says. “You see the lack of fear—it’s a completely different culture,” Rodriguez says. Prior to the FFP, it was “commonplace” to either suffer sexual violence or to know a victim, “and there was never any consequence if it came to light, or the consequence was the woman losing work.”

In recent years, 23 supervisors have been disciplined and nine fired as a result of complaints. When a violation requires corrective action, growers don’t hesitate, because they know the hit they will take to their bottom line if they fail to comply. Rodriguez says the number of allegations has slowed, and the nature of the allegations has also changed, as employees and supervisors come to understand that “zero tolerance” truly means zero tolerance. “Instead of a boss who watches women when they are sleeping, now it might be some vulgar language on the bus,” she says.

CIW’s model is now being replicated in other states, and reaching workers in other industries—most recently dairy workers in Vermont. The MacArthur Foundation recently wrote that it offers the “potential to transform workplace environments across the global supply chain.” And The New York Times called it “the best workplace-monitoring system” in the United States. The CIW has exported its model to farms in seven states and three crops along the East Coast, and it will soon be piloted on citrus and watermelon farms in Texas. It is also informed historic reforms in the Bangladesh garment industry, and is being studied by janitorial and construction workers in Minnesota.

Could this approach work in the television and film industry? The key question is, what parts of the supply chain are equivalent to the tomato buyers? If a CIW-like movement led by the women of Hollywood inked legally binding agreements with 150 major corporations, declaring that they would not buy advertising on network shows that were in violation of a code offering recourse to victims of harassment or assault—that could be a start. What about agreements with the platforms that stream content, like Netflix, mandating that they will carry only films or shows produced by companies that are in compliance with that same code? One could even look at potential agreements with cable providers and national movie-theater chains. All of these agreements would together send a signal that sexual misconduct will not be tolerated in the television and video supply chain, and that companies that do not comply with the agreed-upon code will experience severe economic consequences.

“All Hollywood has to do is ask who has the power, and then bring public pressure to get those agreements signed,” says Rodriguez. “If a solution came from the most unexpected place to eliminate sexual violence in the workplace, they can do it too. And then they could help make sure the model reaches more workers in industries across the country who don’t have the platform and resources that they have.”

In a recent interview, Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA) described the Republican approach to government as “survival of the fittest.”

“If you’re well off, great, if you’re not—too bad,” he said.

McGovern is right. The Republican tax bill, on which Congress is expected to vote on Tuesday, is effectively a bid to weed out people struggling to make ends meet. It could have dire consequences for the social safety net—and for the 70 percent of us who will turn to a means-tested program like Medicaid or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) at some point in our lives. And it could impact millions who expect to rely later in life on Medicare and Social Security.

Think of it as a two-step project. A deficit-exploding tax giveaway to the very wealthiest corporations and individuals is step one. You cannot invest in the strategies that have been proven to help lift families out of poverty—we’ll get back to that in a moment—without adequate revenues. Not only will revenues take a hit at the federal level, but it’s expected that local and state governments will roll back investments in necessities like schools, drug-treatment centers, pensions, and more to lessen the tax burden on residents who will no longer be able to take the same federal tax deduction on property, state, and local income taxes.

Then, by adding $1.5 trillion to the deficit, the tax plan sets in motion the second step: In the name of deficit reduction, Republicans will move to cut the programs that help Americans experiencing financial hardship have at least some shot at affording basic necessities like food, housing, health care, education, and a little dignity in our later years. Indeed, according to The Hill, Speaker Paul Ryan intends to fast-track so-called “welfare reform” in 2018, in a bid to push it through with a simple majority. Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order reflecting similar priorities.

The skids for these cuts have been greased by decades of lies about anti-poverty programs and their effectiveness. Conservatives usually refer to cutting the safety net as an attempt to reduce “waste, fraud, and abuse,” or end a “culture of dependence”—but in reality it’s simply looking squarely at our neighbors, demonizing them, and then turning our backs. The only thing missing is a spit in the eye for emphasis. The underlying problem is that Americans often buy into conservative rhetoric about “welfare” and the media are all too often complicit. A long history of racially coded language has painted people with low incomes as undeserving of assistance, and there is a persistent lack of education about what our safety net is, and whom it benefits. How many Americans know that more than one in two of us will experience at least a year of poverty or near-poverty during our working years?

While conservatives say that people are living off their food stamps, few Americans know that the average benefit is $1.40 per person, per meal. The notion of supporting a family on that is absurd. The public also envisions extensive subsidized housing—it has no idea that only one in four families that qualify for federal rental assistance actually receives it, and that their average income is approximately $12,500 per year. They think people are getting “free cash,” but cash assistance (TANF) goes to only 23 of every 100 families in poverty nationwide, and the program is virtually nonexistent in many states. (It’s little surprise that a gutted TANF “block grant” is the model for what congressional conservatives would like to do with nutrition assistance, Medicaid, housing, and more—watch it lose value with inflation over the years, and watch fewer and fewer people receive it.)

It also doesn’t matter a whit to conservatives what the evidence says about the kinds of things that make a difference in people’s lives. It doesn’t seem to matter that our anti-poverty programs cut poverty in half—that poverty would have been as high as nearly 30 percent in recent years without them; or that girls who had access to food stamps (SNAP) saw increases in their economic self-sufficiency as adults—including less welfare participation—compared to their disadvantaged peers who didn’t have access; or that a little assistance for children up to age 5 is associated with boosted educational performance, and increased work and earnings as adults; or that children under 13 who were able to use a housing voucher to move to a low-poverty neighborhood were 32 percent more likely to attend college and earned 31 percent more annually as young adults, compared to their peers in families that didn’t receive a voucher. Or even that expansion of Medicaid eligibility has reduced infant mortality and childhood deaths, and that children eligible for Medicaid are more likely to go on to graduate college.

You’d think some of this data would make an impression on Speaker Ryan, who is constantly clambering about the need for evidence. The fact is, he simply doesn’t like the evidence he sees. When he wrote a report on the “War on Poverty” in 2014, concluding that our antipoverty investments have failed, numerous academics came forward to say that he had misrepresented their work; apparently, that was the only way Ryan could support his fictitious thesis.

Ironically, despite Ryan and his conservative brethren’s concern with “dependence” on government assistance, rewarding work just doesn’t seem to register as a key anti-poverty strategy. In the late 1960s the minimum wage was enough for a full-time worker to lift a family of three out of poverty—now that same family is about $5,000 below the poverty line. But Republicans vote against raising the minimum wage every chance they get. (Ryan himself has voted against raising it at least 10 times since he’s been in office.) Conservatives are also making it harder for low-wage workers to unionize, collectively bargain, enforce labor standards, or even collect the tips they receive to supplement their $2.13-an-hour tipped minimum wage.

In the coming months, the fight against conservative proposals that target struggling Americans should transcend the specifics of the policy debate, much as the electoral contest between Doug Jones and Roy Moore transcended the candidates. This is a fight are about who we are as a nation, and who we want to be; whether we are comfortable treating people as disposable, or whether we invest in human potential and dignity; and whether we’ll accept conservative charlatans as serious leaders on decisions that have such high stakes. All of the evidence suggests we should reject them.

According to Jennye Pagoada López, when she arrived on July 23 at the US-Mexico border, she was four months pregnant and bleeding. Seeking political asylum, Pagoada hoped to finally put an end to nearly 20 years of violence she and her family had suffered at the hands of the notorious gang Barrio 18—first in Honduras, then in El Salvador.

But instead of finding a new life in America, Pagoada was detained shortly after crossing the border and then sent to the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego. Six days later, Pagoada says, she suffered a miscarriage, after being denied proper medical care. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claims she was never pregnant while in their custody.

The detention of pregnant women is a growing concern among immigrant-rights groups. On September 26, a coalition of seven groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Women’s Refugee Commission, filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) regarding the treatment of pregnant immigrants. The complaint cites media reports that 292 pregnant women were detained by ICE in just the first four months of 2017, a 35 percent increase compared to the same period in 2016.

The signatories write that they are “gravely concerned” with the conditions reported by pregnant women detained across the country, and with “the lack of quality medical care” provided. “In several of the cases, there is concern that women are receiving inadequate and sub-standard medical care during and after miscarriage,” the complaint reads. “In every instance, the women express concern that the conditions of their detention and pressure of preparing for their legal cases in detention has had a harmful impact on their pregnancies.”

The groups argue that these detentions contradict ICE’s own policy. An August 2016 ICE memorandum authored by the current acting director of the agency, Thomas Homan, instructs that “pregnant women will generally not be detained” unless there are “extraordinary circumstances or the requirement of mandatory detention.”

hen Pagoada turned herself in at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, she expected to be released in accordance with this policy. She was escorted to the border by Luis Guerra, a legal advocate with the United Farm Workers Foundation. Advocates say they have repeatedly witnessed Customs and Border Protection (CBP) telling immigrants that “political asylum doesn’t exist” and turning them away. As a result, immigrant rights groups were redoubling efforts to ensure that when people like Pagoada arrived, someone was present to help them obtain their legal right to claim asylum.

Guerra says that both he and Pagoada informed the CBP officers that she had a high-risk pregnancy and should receive immediate parole and access to medical care. Three days later, he learned that Pagoada was being held by ICE at Otay Mesa. Guerra and Allegra Love, an attorney with the Santa Fe Dreamers Project, asked that Pagoada be taken immediately to a hospital for prenatal treatment. She had continued complaining of vaginal bleeding as well as stomach and lower back pain. Love again cited the August 2016 ICE memorandum and said the facility was violating its own policy. “I sent the request to every officer who could possibly have influence on her case,” says Love. “I was ignored.”

Pagoada told her attorneys that on her sixth day at Otay Mesa the medical staff said she wasn’t pregnant. According to ICE spokeswoman Lauren Mack, “All of the appropriate protocols were followed and the medical tests did not support [Pagoada’s] claim that she was pregnant” while in the agency’s custody. Love disputes this assertion, noting that the test results were never communicated to counsel despite repeated instances of her and Guerra advocating for Pagoada’s prenatal care.

Pagoada’s case is among the ten included in the complaint filed with DHS, as are those of five women who were detained in the South Texas Family Residential Center (STFRC) in Dilley, Texas. Katy Murdza of the CARA Pro Bono Project has worked at STFRC as the advocacy coordinator for the past four months. Until recently, Murdza says, most pregnant women were released immediately at the border or within 24 hours, and would then receive a date to go before an immigration judge. This approach didn’t mean that the women got “a free pass to live in the US forever, or that they won asylum. It just meant they would go before an immigration court at a later date,” says Murdza. The majority of women who are released live with family or friends—a healthier environment than detention and also far less costly to taxpayers than detention.

In June, the Trump administration scrapped an Obama-era case-management program offering alternatives to detention, which had a 99 percent compliance rate with immigration-court appearances at a cost of about $36 a day per family. Since then, Murdza says, the number of pregnant immigrants detained at STFRC has risen. “Now we’re seeing about one pregnant person per day, and 30 since mid-August,” she says. “Almost none of these folks are paroled quickly anymore.”

Murdza describes pregnant women struggling with various kinds of stress and trauma in detention. Some are in the United States because they are fleeing torture, abuse, or rape (and in some cases learn in detention that their rape resulted in pregnancy); some are trying to care for their children who are also struggling with detention and recent trauma; some have miscarried in the past because of stress or depression, and now fear a repeat due to their current circumstances; and there is little rest, since detainees are sharing rooms with so many people, many of whom are sick.

Then there is an overlying stress factor for all pregnant asylum seekers: They face an interview to determine if they have a “credible fear” of returning to their birth country. Flunk that test, and they can be deported to the country that they just escaped.

agoada’s credible fear interview occurred one week after her miscarriage, according to Love and Guerra. They claim that at the time of the interview she still hadn’t received proper medical care, was severely depressed, and had had only one visit from a counselor—to determine if she was suicidal.

According to Guerra, Pagoada experienced numerous traumas prior to seeking protection in the United States; they include multiple sexual abuses, one perpetrated when she was an adolescent living in Honduras by her stepfather who had ties to Barrio 18, according to Guerra. At that time, the family reported Pagoada’s stepfather to the police but he escaped custody. Shortly thereafter the death threats began, and a cousin who shared her surname was kidnapped and murdered. Pagaoda and her mother fled to El Salvador, while her brother remained behind and worked.

In El Salvador, Guerra says, Pagoada received phone calls extorting her to pay protection money or she and her brother would be killed. Late last year, her brother joined Pagoada and their mother in El Salvador. Within a few days of his arrival, members of Barrio 18 tortured him and mutilated his body. Pagoada and her mother were able to identify him only by a tattoo of the mother’s name. After fleeing for Mexico, they were still unable to escape violence. Staying at a shelter, Pagoada was assaulted by a man that they feared also had ties to the gang. When she learned she was pregnant, Pagoada decided to seek asylum in the United States, hoping she would finally rid her and the baby she was expecting of the violence that had long plagued her.

But the asylum officer declined to find that Pagoada had a “positive credible fear” of returning to her birth country, and so she was scheduled for “removal.” Guerra believes that determination was due to the fact that Pagoada focused only on her most recent trauma—her brother’s murder—in the interview. With just one day until her deportation, Guerra and Love successfully obtained a second interview for her, saying that she had not been fit “medically, physically, or emotionally” for the first interview, and that she had not been able to tell her entire story. This time Pagoada talked about her life in Honduras, and the officer determined she had a “positive credible fear” of returning there.

Guerra and Love argue that the determination—along with the fact that she isn’t a flight risk and doesn’t pose a threat to public safety—again suggest that Pagoada should be released under ICE’s own guidelines. But nearly three months since she came to the country seeking asylum, Pagoada remains in detention. Pagoada says that she still needs medical care—she is suffering from depression, frequent headaches and vomiting, and numbness in her face. According to Guerra, as of October 1, she still hadn’t seen a doctor outside of Otay Mesa, despite repeated assurances that she would be able to do so. ICE maintains that like every detainee, Pagoada received a screening by medical staff to determine medical, dental, and mental-health status within the first 12 hours of arrival into the detention facility; ICE says detainees are referred to off-site specialists as determined by their on-site primary-care providers.

According to an ICE spokesperson, the August 2016 memorandum stipulating that pregnant women will not be detained absent extraordinary circumstances remains current policy. But advocates see evidence of a new, brutal era in immigration enforcement. “This is about the Trump administration making it as hard as possible for immigrants to come here, even for pregnant women seeking political asylum,” says Love.

The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general and officer for civil rights and civil liberties are responsible for investigating the complaint filed on behalf of Pagoada and the nine other women. Regardless of the outcome, for Pagoada that investigation is too little, too late.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article referred to “Barrio 18” as “MS-18.”

In the early 1960s, as the Lyndon B. Johnson administration worked to enact Medicare and Medicaid, then-actor Ronald Reagan traveled the country as a spokesman for the American Medical Association, warning of the danger the legislation posed to the nation. “Behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country,” he said in one widely distributed speech. “Until one day…you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Reagan set the tone for a conservative war against Medicaid that is now in its 52nd year. Recent Republican proposals to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act would have reduced Medicaid enrollment by up to 15 million people, and, although these efforts were defeated, congressional Republicans aren’t done yet: It’s likely they will attempt to gut the program during the upcoming budget debate. Meanwhile, more than half a dozen Republican governors are trying to take a hatchet to the program—at the open invitation of the Trump administration—through a vehicle known as a “Medicaid waiver.”

Waivers are intended for state pilot projects designed to improve health-care coverage for vulnerable populations. But that’s not what conservative governors are pursuing. In Maine, for example, as citizens prepare to vote on a referendum that would force the state to expand Medicaid to 70,000 people, Governor Paul LePage is moving in the opposite direction. His Department of Health and Human Services has requested permission to create a 20-hour-a-week work requirement, impose copays and premiums, and implement a $5,000 asset cap on Medicaid beneficiaries. The result, health-care experts warn, will be that low-income people in Maine will be kicked off the program.

LePage’s administration argues that the work requirement will help people earn more and become more self-sufficient. But, according to Hannah Katch, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a former administrator of the California Medicaid program, 80 percent of Medicaid patients nationwide are already in working families. “The vast majority of people who aren’t working are either taking care of a family member, have a physical or behavioral health condition, or are in school, or have a combination of these factors,” said Katch. “While a work requirement is unlikely to help them get a job, it is very likely to take away health coverage from people who can’t work.”

While Maine’s application specifies categories of exemptions for the work requirement—including for individuals receiving treatment in a residential substance-buse program, caring for a child under age 6, or who are “physically or mentally unable to work”—Katch said that the exemptions are likely to be difficult to obtain. “The burden could fall on an individual to prove their exemption,” she said. “If a person is low-income and has a disability, or a substance-abuse disorder, or has young children—proving an exemption in a specified time period with the proper and often extensive documentation can be really difficult.” As a result, Maine’s work requirement would likely result in a much broader population’s being kicked off of assistance than intended—or at least than explicitly intended. (Maine Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.)

Of equal concern is the people who likely wouldn’t qualify for an exemption under Maine’s proposal. Previously, the state allowed a limited Medicaid expansion for women with low incomes who need family-planning services, and for people who are HIV-positive. Katch said that these are two of the groups who could be deemed “able-bodied” and required to work for their coverage—people who clearly need consistent access to their medications. (Low-income parents and young adults aging out of the foster-care system are also of particular concern.)

Direct service providers in Maine share Katch’s apprehension. Kara Hay is CEO and president of the community-action agency Penquis, which serves approximately 17,000 people annually through 80 programs across the state, including Head Start and childcare, legal aid, housing, transportation, business training and financial support, health-care assistance, and more. Hay said that the state’s waiver request “is not new, innovative, or designed to deliver care more efficiently” to low-income people, as waivers are supposed to be. In addition to a work requirement that offers no access to transportation, childcare, or training—common barriers experienced by her agency’s clients—Hay takes issue with the state’s proposal to force people with little to no money to pay copays and premiums, and to deny coverage to people with $5,000 or more in assets. Maine used asset tests for public-assistance programs for 40 years and they were “complicated to administer, devilishly inefficient, and problematic to document,” Hay said. “They often cause people who would be eligible to give up during the application process.”

That seems to be LePage’s ultimate goal: forcing people out of the program.

Another problem with Maine’s proposal is, that with far fewer people having Medicaid coverage, the costs of caring for the uninsured will fall on “rural hospitals and providers—who are the least capable of absorbing these additional costs,” Hay said. “It unintentionally sets up the foundation for a collapse in rural health care. It’s a recipe for escalating rural decay.”

Maine is not the only state trying to tighten its Medicaid requirements. Wisconsin, Kentucky, Utah, Indiana, Arizona, and Arkansas have requested similar waivers. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seema Verma, have made clear that waivers granted to one state will be an option for other states. That means that for now, the front lines in the conservative war on Medicaid are in the states, where the fight might be a little quieter than in Washington, but equally dangerous.

While the media and much of the public have been consumed with the spectacle of dysfunction and failure in the Trump White House—The Mooch, the Russia investigation, and the demise of the Republican Party’s plans to repeal the Affordable Car Act—the administration has quietly succeeded in doing some real damage that has received little attention. In normal times, these actions likely would get more coverage, and that points to a problem of access to vital information as citizens and activists try to adjust to the daily tectonic shifts of Trump.1

Here are a few big deal political maneuvers that haven’t received the reporting—or an outcry from a distracted public—that they need and deserve.2

Reversing the Ban on Neurotoxic Pesticide

In March, the Trump administration’s Office of Pesticide Programs—which last year received 30 percent of its operating budget from the pesticide-manufacturing industry—canceled the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed ban of chlorpyrifos, a common pesticide used on crops that was derived from nerve gas developed by the Nazis.3

The Obama administration had called for the ban after “three long-term, independently funded studies showed the substance was toxic,” according to Reuters. Particularly vulnerable are farmworkers, and the brain development of children, infants, and fetuses.4

“Chlorpyrifos has been shown beyond any shadow of a doubt to damage the brains of children, especially those of fetuses in the womb,” said Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and dean for global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. The American Academy of Pediatrics also urged EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to reconsider his decision.5

Yet Pruitt saw fit to hail the ban reversal as “returning to using sound science in decision-making.”6

Dow Chemical—whose CEO leads a White House manufacturers working group—sells the chemical. More than 6 million pounds of it are used annually in the United States on crops like apples, oranges, broccoli, berries, and tree nuts. Two months after Pruitt’s decision, more than 50 farmworkers in cabbage fields were sickened when winds blew the chemical from nearby mandarin orchards.7

You can get informed and fight for a chlorpyrifos ban here and here. You can tell grocers to stop buying foods that might have residue from the chemical here. Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) has introduced a bill to ban the pesticide.8

Nixing Science-Based Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs

Last month, the administration cut more than $213 million from teen pregnancy prevention programs and research, eliminating the final two years of funding for 5-year projects. More than 80 institutions across the country lost their funding, and none of the programs provided abortion counseling.9

Health officials told the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) that denying funding midway through a grant is “highly unusual and wasteful because it means there can be no scientifically valid finding.”10

Some of the programs cut include: work Johns Hopkins University has been doing with American Indian teens to reduce sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy; University of Southern California’s workshops for parents on “how to talk to middle school kids about delaying sexual activity”; the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center program that helps “doctors talk to Native American and Latino teens about avoiding pregnancy”; and Planned Parenthood’s work in five states to bring “rural youths and parents together to share family values, strengthen family bonds, and talk about healthy relationships and sexual health.”11

“We’re not out there doing what feels good,” Luanne Rohrbach, associate professor of preventive medicine at USC, told CIR. “We’re doing what we know is effective.”12

Despite the fact that the teen birth rate has declined steadily over the past 20 years, the ongoing need for science-based approaches to pregnancy prevention is clear. CIR notes that the rate is still high compared to other industrialized nations, and the decline isn’t as steep in low-income communities. Perhaps that’s why the cuts were made outside the normal appropriations process as the administration pursues an ideologically-driven agenda that is out of step with real public health and education needs.13

You can let your elected representatives know how you feel about this decision here.14

DACA at Risk

In June, 10 states, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, informed the Trump administration that it must end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program by September 5 or face a lawsuit that would be heard by an anti-immigrant judge who has halted similar initiatives in the past.15

Past assurances by a notoriously fickle president to keep DACA intact are hardly sufficient. Even if the administration ignores the deadline, there is little reason to believe Attorney General Jeff Sessions would defend DACA in court. As Representative Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) told The Washington Post, “Jeff Sessions is going to say, ‘Deport them.’ If you’re going to count on Jeff Sessions to save DACA, then DACA is ended.”16

More than 780,000 young people, known as “Dreamers,” have been protected from deportation and made eligible to work since DACA’s inception in 2012. Seventy-eight percent of voters believe Dreamers should be allowed to remain in the United States permanently, including 73 percent of Trump voters.17

Aside from the moral argument that people who grew up as Americans should be allowed to remain in the country, the Center for American Progress notes the economic case as well. Ending DACA would drain more than $460 billion from the national GDP over the next decade, and remove about 685,000 workers from the economy. Combined, the 10 states that are suing would lose $8 billion annually.18

There is an opportunity take this issue out of the hands of extremists like the Texas attorney general and an unpredictable Trump administration. In July, the DREAM Act of 2017 was introduced with bipartisan support from Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Chuck Schumer (D-NY). You can let your elected representatives know you want them to support DACA here.19

Chemical Accident Prevention and Protection Delayed

After a 2013 explosion at a fertilizer storage facility in West, Texas, killed 15 people, including 12 firefighters, and injured 260—the Obama administration directed the Environmental Protection Agency to strengthen the safety requirements for facilities using and storing potentially toxic or dangerous chemicals.20

In January 2017, after four years of deliberations, the EPA finalized its Chemical Accident Safety Rule, which would apply to more than 12,000 chemical facilities across the nation. It included commonsense measures like making information more available to communities to support emergency preparedness, and safety audits.21

However, in June, after complaints from the chemical industry that the new rule “may actually compromise the security of our facilities, emergency responders, and our communities,” the Trump administration delayed implementation until February 2019. Even as it did so, it released a fact sheet noting 58 deaths and $2 billion worth of property damage caused by 1,517 facility accidents over the past 10 years.22

A coalition of 11 states led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has sued the EPA over the delay. You can tell EPA Administrator Pruitt to implement the new rule here.23

Trump is losing many of his high-profile fights. But in dozens of less-noticed ways, his administration is advancing its extreme agenda that exacerbates political and economic inequality. As much of the media remains fixated on the Russia story and the Great Trump Dysfunction, journalists and advocates will need to work harder than ever to make sure the damaging daily actions of this administration aren’t ignored.24

Had the Ryan-Trump health care bill been signed into law, 24 million people could have lost their health care—and Donald Trump would have received a $2.18 million annual tax cut. Fortunately, the GOP’s latest attempt to create a windfall for the wealthy at the expense of the poor and working class was defeated. But this week in Mississippi, residents weren’t so lucky.

The conspicuously named HOPE Act (Act to Restore Hope Opportunity and Prosperity for Everyone), introduced by Mississippi State Representative Chris Brown, passed the House and Senate and is now expected to be signed into law. The legislation reads like a compilation of all-time favorites from a Republican wish list: It would enrich a private contractor by outsourcing the work of verifying people’s eligibility for social-support programs, including Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps); throw people who likely qualify for assistance off of these programs; and make it more difficult for people to get food and income assistance in the future.

It does all of this under the guise of helping people—Rep. Brown described the bill as “an incredible opportunity” to help people “move out of welfare dependency and poverty to a better life.” It’s also about eliminating fraud, supposedly, though legislators offered no proof that this is a problem in the state.

The HOPE Act applies to all Mississippians who receive Medicaid, TANF (income assistance), or SNAP. Anyone enrolled in those programs will have 10 days to reply to a written request for information proving eligibility, as deemed necessary by a private contractor hired by the state. That deadline would be tough for anyone to meet, but the fact that many program beneficiaries are disabled, unemployed, lack stable housing, or are simply living under the everyday pressures of poverty makes the deadline all but impossible for many people.

“Just getting that notice to program participants can be a real challenge,” said Matt Williams, the director of research at the Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative. “Then you’re talking about making sense of a lot of highly technical information, and putting that in written form too.”

Currently, a Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS) caseworker determines eligibility by sitting down with an applicant and sorting through liquid assets, utility bills, loans, child-support payments, child-care costs, employee pay stubs, and other sources of income and expenses. It’s a time-consuming process, but the agency has been rewarded for doing it well. Between FY2012 and FY2014, the department received $8.75 million in bonus federal funds for its SNAP-payment accuracy rates.

Under the HOPE Act, however, that kind of reciprocal relationship and guidance will be gone. “People will have to figure out on their own how to acquire the requested information and then explain it—in writing—within 10 days,” said Williams. “If they don’t, they’re going to be kicked off.”

Rep. Brown and other proponents claim that the state will save money through this privatized system. But the assertion is belied by the state’s own analysis, which was conducted by a private firm that supports the legislation. It estimated a cost of $10 million to $12 million, with about $2.5 million covered by state taxpayers. Williams said even that would be hard to come up with given the state’s tax and budget cuts over the past two years. But the actual cost will likely be much higher, and the study wrongly assumed that the federal government will pick up most of the tab for the privatized system. Tennessee considered nearly identical legislation and found that it would run $81 million with the state covering 95 percent of the cost. The legislators killed that bill.

“We will be out millions of more dollars that could have benefited children, the elderly, and disabled people who are already neglected due to budget cuts,” said Williams.

The HOPE Act will also make it more likely that childless adults between the ages of 18 and 49 will be limited to three months of SNAP benefits in any three-year period, unless they’re working. Under current law, the governor can apply for a waiver to this time limit during periods of high unemployment—during recessions, or for particular regions with high unemployment rates, like the Mississippi Delta. Now it will be up to a hostile state legislature to ask for the waiver. Moreover, if any household is found to be out of compliance with any requirement of SNAP or TANF, the children lose benefits, too.

Mississippians can thank the Foundation for Government Accountability—an ally of the American Legislative Exchange Council and an affiliate of the Koch-funded State Policy Network—for providing Rep. Brown with the model for this legislation. The right-wing group’s past efforts include mandatory drug-testing for TANF recipients in Florida. Studies showed that there was no greater incident of drug use for people who receive benefits than the general public—and a lower rate compared to all Floridians—so the court struck it down as an illegal search and seizure. The drug-testing also cost the state far more to implement than it saved in benefits denied to the handful of people who tested positive.

Whatever the costs of Mississippi’s new system, proponents claim that they will be more than offset by savings as the private contractor discovers “fraud” and kicks people off of assistance, particularly Medicaid. However, Illinois used a similar system and found that more than 80 percent of cancelled Medicaid cases were simply due to a lack of response from the recipient, and nearly all of them ended up qualifying and reenrolling. The number of cases referred for fraud investigation was, in fact, “negligible.”

Mississippi’s move comes as conservatives across the country are kicking people off of needed assistance, under the pretense of freeing them from “dependency,” or giving states “flexibility” to better meet a community’s needs. Next up? More governors will likely seek waivers from protections for Medicaid recipients so that they can impose new work requirements, higher premiums, and time limits—and offer more largesse to the wealthy.

Author’s note: If you want to stay informed about upcoming efforts to protect Medicaid, sign up for e-mail updates from TalkPoverty.org.

What if you had to make a choice between hunger or deportation?

As the Trump era unfolds in California, fear of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown is disrupting the daily lives of immigrants and their families. In a state with 5.4 million noncitizen residents—and where nearly half of all children have at least one immigrant parent—the president’s promise to increase deportations may already be affecting the health and livelihoods of families, even those here legally, by discouraging them from turning to public-assistance programs or from working.

At the Alameda County Community Food Bank in the San Francisco Bay area, 40 families recently requested that their food stamps be canceled, according to Liz Gomez, ACCFB’s associate director of client services. Another 54 Spanish-speaking households that pre-qualified for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program turned down the opportunity to apply. Gomez says that the combination of a leaked draft executive order suggesting that legal immigrants could be deported for turning to public assistance within their first five years of arrival, as well as local ICE sweeps—and stories about raids and arrests elsewhere—are making immigrants afraid to give their information to service providers.

ACCFB has one of the largest SNAP outreach programs among food banks nationwide. It also provides enough food for 580,000 meals each week through food pantries, soup kitchens, childcare centers, senior centers, after-school programs, and other community-based organizations.

“We are concerned that some people are hesitant to visit a food pantry out of fear that ICE could show up,” said Gomez.

Indeed, Heidi McHugh, community education and outreach coordinator at Food for People in Humboldt County, says they have seen a decline in Latino clients at some sites. The organization runs 14 community food programs, including meals for seniors, food pantries, school-meal programs, and a mobile produce pantry that travels throughout the county to distribute vegetables. This month, when it stopped in a community that historically turns out 20 or 30 Latino households, only five Latino households showed up.

“We had previous customers drive by without stopping,” said McHugh. “Our pantries in the communities with high proportions of Latino residents say that they are seeing fewer people coming for food.”

Qualifying for Medicaid, SNAP, or WIC can’t currently be used as legal cause for deportation or denying someone citizenship. But people are still afraid, Gomez said, even immigrants with legal status. Given the leaked draft executive order, providing personal information feels risky, at best. “They fear it will be shared,” said Gomez. “But it’s important for people to know that information like immigration status is not collected by pantries or meal programs—they’re simply there to help people who need food.”

About 45 percent of immigrant-headed families with children use food-assistance programs. While undocumented immigrants are not eligible for food stamps, many families include children who are US citizens, and parents may apply on their behalf. Immigrants are more likely to be poor and to experience food insecurity than other groups of Americans; still, there is evidence that they’re already less likely to use public assistance than native-born citizens.

The economic impacts of forgoing benefits ripple to the surrounding community: Gomez said that the 40 households that canceled SNAP benefits and the 54 households that didn’t apply adds up to $630,000 annually in lost stimulus to the local economy. “And that’s just one example from our own work,” she said. “What’s the economic impact in communities across the country?”

Given recent ICE activity around the country, it’s not hard to see why immigrants might worry about the risks of using social support programs. Recently, ICE agents entered a courthouse in El Paso County, Texas, and arrested a domestic-violence victim who was trying to get a restraining order against her alleged abuser. In Alexandria, Virginia, there was a report of homeless people being interrogated by ICE at a church where they’d taken shelter from the cold. And in Los Angeles, a father was arrested by ICE immediately after dropping off his 12-year-old daughter at school.

Recently, two California state legislators sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the federal government seeking information about reported ICE activities in “sensitive locations” like “schools, hospitals, medical clinics, community centers, courts, government offices or churches.” Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and Senate President Pro-Tem Kevin de León wrote that “the fear of possible ICE enforcement activity in sensitive spaces prevents Californians from accessing services, including educational, medical, and law enforcement assistance.”

At a recent press conference in Fortuna, a small Northern California city where nearly 20 percent of residents are Latino, members of the community talked about how the presence of ICE agents had disrupted their lives, including their ability to work. Jorge Matias, a community-health worker, said there are parents who are “afraid to leave their homes to go to work or to go to their children’s schools for fear of being deported.” A woman named Karina Coronel said her children, ages 4 and 6, have recently been bullied at school by students and a teacher, and that she has been shoved in stores and repeatedly told to “Go back to Mexico.” Coronel said, “Right now I am very fearful to even leave my home.”

“What gets me is that our people were already struggling,” said Gomez, noting that a 2014 study conducted by ACCFB showed that half of the food bank’s clients were already forced to make impossible choices between food and things like rent, utilities, transportation, and medicine. “People are literally now making the choice not to eat or to sacrifice their health because they are so invested in being an American,” said Gomez.

Author’s note: Join millions of people around the nation to protect immigrants and refugees and stand up for the values of love, compassion, and family in the #HereToStay campaign.

One of the biggest lies about poverty in our country is this: We don’t know what to do to dramatically reduce it.1

The truth is, there is no shortage of excellent plans, great scholars, and people living in poverty who can tell you exactly what we need to do—we just elect too many political leaders who don’t give a damn.2

This Election Day, you have the power to move our nation towards doing right by people in poverty. Before you touch the screen, pull the lever, or fill out your ballot, here are some questions you might ask yourself to determine the hearts and minds of your candidates:3

Does your candidate push stereotypes and myths about people living in poverty and anti-poverty policies, or does s/he stick to the facts?

Does s/he know that nearly 40 percent of us will spend at least one year in poverty during our working years?4

Does your candidate conflate poverty and race, in a manner that stereotypes people of color as poor and urban?5

Does s/he speak to the fact that the average food stamp benefit (SNAP) is just $1.41 per person, per meal; only 1 in 4 households that qualify for federal rental assistance actually receives it; and only 23 of every 100 families with children in poverty receives cash assistance (TANF)?6

Does s/he fight to protect and strengthen the safety net, recognizing that poverty would be twice as high today—approaching 30 percent—without it?7

Does your candidate accept a status quo that keeps people in poverty? Or do they embrace policies that work?

Does s/he want to raise the minimum wage so that it can lift a family of three out of poverty (just as it could in the late-1960s)?8

Does your candidate take paid leave, but fail to fight for the 80 percent of low-wage workers who can’t take a single paid sick day to care for their families?9

Does your candidate accept that most low-income parents can’t afford the child care they need to go to work? Or does s/he have a plan to make quality child care affordable for all families?10

Does your candidate understand that people with low incomes often lack the transportation needed to get to good jobs? Does s/he have a plan to create affordable housing where jobs are located and reliable public transit so people can access opportunities?11

Does your candidate understand that inequality is rooted in intentional policy choices throughout our nation’s history, and offer an agenda to correct that?

Does your candidate recognize that the average black family would now need 228 years to catch up with the wealth of today’s average white family? Does s/he consider this inequity when formulating key policies around the tax code, home ownership, college affordability, job creation, and more?12

Does your candidate recognize the water crisis in Flint is not an isolated incident? And that across the country, the government is investing in and protecting affluent white communities, while exposing low-income communities of color to environmental and health hazards?13

Does your candidate recognize mass incarceration as “the new Jim Crow,” which targets black men and communities of color? Does s/he have plans to end the school-to-prison pipeline, promote alternative sentencing and treatment, and ensure that people can successfully reenter society upon release?14

Does your candidate speak to the fact that anti-LGBT laws drive economic insecurity for LGBT people, including higher rates of poverty?15

Has your candidate ever said anything about addressing rural poverty across the country—from Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta, the Alabama Black Belt to the colonias of south Texas, and on Indian reservations? What will s/he do to help reduce rural poverty?16

Does your candidate recognize the connection between immigration reform and poverty, and that a path to citizenship would significantly decrease economic exploitation like wage theft, and increase payroll tax revenues by an estimated $33 billion over five years?17

Does your candidate accept that women earn only 80 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts, or does s/he make it a priority to close the gender pay gap?18

Does your candidate have a real plan to help children in low-income families succeed?

Does your candidate accept that our public schools are separate and unequal, with many low-income students forced to share textbooks and work in decrepit classrooms while nearby affluent communities have state-of-the-art facilities? Does s/he have a vigorous plan to make sure our schools reflect that our nation values all children?19

Does your candidate accept that many students are simply priced out of a college education, or does s/he have a plan to make college affordable for all?20

Does your candidate talk about the fact that 1 in 6 children in America struggle with hunger, and have a detailed plan to address it?21

There is nothing inevitable about poverty in America. This Election Day, send that message to all candidates with your vote.22

In my dream, the next president is an antipoverty president because she knows in her bones that the way we think about poverty in America is wrong, the way we treat people in poverty is wrong, and therefore what we do about poverty is more off the mark than need be.

My president declares herself the educator in chief on poverty, and uses the bully pulpit to teach Americans. She tells the stories of struggling people and their experiences, and regularly takes us to communities that are used to being dismissed, demonized, and disempowered.

My president shows Americans that people in poverty are not who we have been led to believe they are—some fixed group that has lost its initiative; that, in fact, more than half of us will experience at least one year of poverty or near poverty during our working years. She recognizes that while generational poverty is important, it is only a small part of poverty; that over a three-year period, only 3.5 percent of people were in poverty for the entire 36 months, while the national poverty rate ranged between 15 and 16 percent.

She teaches that most of us fall into poverty because of universal experiences—like the birth of a child, an unexpected illness, job loss or reduced work hours—which is why we have a safety net that is there for all of us; and though it is much maligned, it is highly effective.

My president explains that without the safety net our poverty rate would be nearly twice as high today—approaching 30 percent. She states clearly that cutting poverty in half is not “losing a War on Poverty”—cutting poverty in half means that we are half way to where we want to be. (She will also suggest that we stop using that tired, dated metaphor.)

My president tackles head-on the foolish notion that the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant—our cash assistance program—should serve as a model for our safety net. She acknowledges that whatever the intentions of those who created the program, it has not done what it was supposed to do—unless what it was supposed to do was make assistance nearly impossible to come by, erode any national standard of basic economic decency, and drive people into deeper poverty.

She explains to us that when TANF was created in 1996, for every 100 families with children living in poverty, 68 were able to receive cash assistance; now that number is down to just 23. In 12 states, 10 or fewer families are helped for every 100 in poverty. My president warns us that when we hear talk of block-granting Medicaid, food stamps, or housing assistance, what we are talking about is less health care, less food, less housing, and lower standards for assisting vulnerable people.

Instead of embracing a broken program like TANF, my president embraces the evidence about what works and shares it with the American people. She teaches, for example, that women who had access to food stamps early in life fared better as adults than their peers who didn’t—that they had better health outcomes and increased economic self-sufficiency, including less welfare participation. She notes, too, that boosting a struggling family’s income when children are young is associated with greater education performance and increased earnings when those children reach adulthood.

My president reminds us that we need to use such evidence to keep moving forward in our antipoverty efforts, and to ensure that we don’t turn back to recent and far worse times. She tells us to consider the words of Peter Edelman, who traveled down to Mississippi in 1967 with then-Senator Bobby Kennedy, and said, “We saw children who were tangibly, severely malnourished—bloated bellies, running sores that wouldn’t heal. It was this incredibly awful, powerful experience that’s with me all the time.”

That was what America looked like before we expanded the food-stamp program to take on hunger, she reminds us.

My president uses all of these tactics—visits to struggling communities and people’s own stories, evidence of what works and doesn’t work, and her own courage and determination—to embark on a new antipoverty/pro-opportunity agenda. It’s an agenda that, among other things, includes: a bold jobs program to help rebuild our neighborhoods, schools, and infrastructure; raising the minimum wage so that it can once again lift a family of three out of poverty just as it could in the late 1960s; closing the gender pay gap, which would cut poverty in half for working women and their families; paid leave and affordable childcare, so that people can work and take care of their families and don’t have to choose between them; immigration reform, so that our most vulnerable workers aren’t exploited; and a commission to explore reparations for African Americans and educate the public about this issue.

My president constantly engages with the grassroots and the nascent antipoverty movement to build support for action—just as occurred with the passage of the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act, and, more recently, the Affordable Care Act.

For too long we have been listening to lies, not recognizing our progress, and failing to fight together for what we know will work to ensure that everyone has a shot at the American Dream.

My president puts an end to that madness and begins a new day.

On either side of Memorial Drive, one after another, are relics of better days: massive brick factories now closed, sprawling warehouses deserted, empty lots, boarded-up buildings. Rusted water towers and aged smokestacks rise from industrial rooftops, like sentries standing guard long after they served their duty. Racine Steel Casings, Case Tractors, Sealed Air, Jacobsen Textron, Golden Books, Young Radiator—once-great employers, all gone, but not forgotten by locals.

“We were known for making things here,” said Democratic State Representative Cory Mason, a fifth-generation Racine resident who has represented his neighbors in the Wisconsin Statehouse for 10 years. “You could graduate from high school, get a union job, and send your kids to college. For most of the 20th century, that was what Racine was like.”

But in recent decades, as trade deals shipped most of the middle-class jobs overseas, recessions hit, and labor protections deteriorated, that kind of shared prosperity vanished. Now many residents work in the service industry and can barely get by.

As a result, more than 21 percent of the city’s residents live in poverty, and it cuts across demographics—including 22 percent of whites, 23 percent of African-Americans, and 28 percent of Hispanics. Racine has the highest unemployment rate among large cities in the state. The school district serves approximately 20,000 students, and between 1,000 and 1,500 are homeless for all or part of the year.

Racine also lies in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s district, and Mason suggested that Ryan doesn’t seem to adapt his agenda to the hardship people are experiencing.

“Congressman Ryan can’t have it both ways,” he said. “He can’t be the guy for the trade deals that move the middle class jobs away and be the guy who’s opposed to raising the minimum wage, and then say that we need to take safety-net programs away.”

Kelly Gallaher, a community organizer with Racine’s Community for Change, put it a little more bluntly: “How do you take away half of our manufacturing jobs and then say poverty is some moral failing?”

* * *

On Saturday morning, in Speaker Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, a dozen people lined up outside of Echo food bank a half-hour before it opened.

Janesville plays a central role in Ryan’s rhetoric. In a recent commencement speech he delivered at Carthage College, he said, “I live with my family in Janesville. Every weekend I am here with my family. Yesterday was turkey hunting and track meet and then dinner at my mom’s.”

There is an idyllic quality to Ryan’s anecdotes, and on one side of the Rock River that snakes through town, you can see why: stately homes, charming shops downtown, bustling commercial activity.

But on the other side of the river, where Echo is located, the damaging effects of lost jobs and low wages are on full display: dilapidated and boarded-up houses, vacant retail spaces, the palpable tension of people struggling to simply make ends meet and tired of it.

Within an hour of Echo’s opening, about 30 people were seated inside, waiting for their number to be called so they could meet with a case manager and then visit the pantry. People continued to stream in, and most did not want to speak with a reporter. As one young woman said, “It’s hard enough just to be here. I don’t want my picture all over some newspaper.”

But Robert, who works for Walmart, shared his story. He has a 45-minute commute to his job, and this March his car slid off the road in the snow and hit a tree. He no longer has reliable transportation, and he and his family were recently evicted. They relocated, but now face a high electric bill.

He said that what people in the area need more than anything are good jobs, or training for good jobs, especially if Ryan wants to reduce the use of food stamps and other work supports that are needed in a low-wage economy. He recounted that at a Labor Day parade a couple years ago people held posters that read, “We Needs Jobs in Janesville.” Ryan walked in a different direction.

“The people with posters ran after him so that he could see,” said Robert.

* * *

Peter and his 9-year-old daughter, Love, met us at the Halo homeless shelter back in Racine. They had recently returned from 10 months in Chicago, where Peter cared for his mother who is diabetic while working as a driver of a medical-supplies van. When his mother was stable, Peter and Love returned to Racine and moved in with his girlfriend. But she had fallen behind on rent due to her own hospitalization with sickle-cell anemia, and they were evicted from the apartment.

Peter and Love slept in his car until they discovered Halo. The organization found them a permanent, subsidized house, for which Peter now pays 30 percent of his income.

He obtained work operating a forklift, but the work dried up and he was laid off at the end of May. Peter described himself as “very skilled,” and was confident he would quickly find another job given his experience as a commercial vehicle driver, medical assistant, machine operator, and working in community-based residential facilities. He had filled out 100 job applications in the past week, and gotten two job interviews. He expected an offer for work in Kenosha, but was concerned about the commute in traffic and time away from his daughter.

“My biggest problem is I want to get a job around here—I probably won’t be able to find one,” he said. “I don’t know why it’s so hard to get a job in Racine.”

Part of the reason he can’t find a job with a good wage in Racine might be that his skill set doesn’t match the limited number of high-tech manufacturing jobs that remain in the city. In better times, Peter might have been able to return to school for those jobs. Mason said that until 1980 there was no tuition for technical colleges in the state. But the state and federal governments stopped making the necessary investments, and now people who are struggling are expected to rack up $20,000 in debt in some cases to return to school.

* * *

At the Racine Interfaith Center, 20-year-old Valeria and her father Gabriel—both undocumented—talked about their family’s struggles and the need for immigration reform.

They moved to Racine 16 years ago, and without a Social Security card, Gabriel said he is only able to work minimum- and low-wage jobs “that other people don’t want.”

For the past five years, he has worked at a foundry melting metals for reuse. It’s known as “the little hell” because in the summertime, when it hits 80 degrees outside, it is 130 degrees inside the foundry. Prior to this job Gabriel worked at a duck farm, doing 12-hour shifts with just two breaks—30 minutes for lunch, and 10 minutes for the bathroom. If workers attempted to take another break, they were sent home.

Because of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, Valeria is able to get better jobs than her father can, and currently works in sales. College, on the other hand, has had to wait, since Governor Scott Walker repealed in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants in 2009.

Valeria has lived in Ryan’s district since the age of 3, and has met with him through her activism in the immigration-reform movement. She is frustrated with his pledges to support immigrants and subsequent actions that she feels demonstrate a lack of commitment.

“I’ve met with him lots of time, face-to-face,” she said. “One time I was telling him my parents are living on a low wage and we can’t live like this. And he said, ‘Well, why can’t they get a better job?’ And he knows they can’t get a better job because they don’t have a Social Security card.”

* * *

So what would Paul Ryan do if he wanted to address poverty in Janesville and throughout his district in a serious way?

Gallaher suggested the speaker might start by visiting those who are struggling right in his backyard.

“If Paul Ryan wants to talk about poverty, he doesn’t have to go more than a mile from his house to talk with people who can tell him specifically how they found themselves living in their car, or without a job,” she said.

Representative Mark Pocan, whose district borders Janesville and who shares Rock County with Ryan, thinks that the ideas Ryan and other conservatives keep introducing “are really more stealth ways to cut programs that assist people in poverty.”

According to Pocan, the most important thing elected leaders can do in the fight against poverty is help people get jobs with family-supporting wages. That means investing in things like childcare, job training, apprenticeship programs, higher education, and infrastructure; raising the minimum wage, and supporting collective bargaining.

But if Ryan’s latest poverty plan is any indication, he won’t be supporting a bold antipoverty agenda any time soon. His plan calls for cuts to much of the safety net that remains for his constituents. It includes cuts to unemployment assistance, phasing out the Head Start program, and rolling back federal Pell Grants for students trying to get a higher education. It does little to nothing to create jobs or raise wages. In fact, it looks a lot like this year’s House Republican budget—which gets more than 60 percent of its cuts from programs that help low- and moderate-income Americans, while protecting tax cuts for the very wealthy.

Finally, the speaker’s plan demonstrates this: his enduring disconnect from the people struggling in his own district and across America.

Pope Francis’ call for an urgent response to poverty is unambiguous. As he writes in Evangelii Gaudium, “The need to resolve the structural causes of poverty cannot be delayed, not only for the pragmatic reason of its urgency for the good order of society, but because society needs to be cured of a sickness which is weakening and frustrating it, and which can only lead to new crises.”

In anticipation of the pope’s arrival in Philadelphia, TalkPoverty visited with Tianna Gaines-Turner—a member of Witnesses to Hunger and a leader in the antipoverty movement—to talk about what the fight against poverty looks like through her eyes.

This is what she had to say.

Jodi and Randy Speidel, a couple in their mid-40s, taped a note to the front door of their one-bedroom rental home warning visitors of carbon monoxide. They let their three cats outdoors and wrote a note attesting that their next decision was a mutual one. Then, in their locked bedroom, they lit two charcoal grills and committed suicide.

The couple’s 20-year-old daughter had recently turned to gofundme.com to seek assistance for her parents, The Columbus Dispatch reported. Describing them as “the hardest-working people I know,” she wrote, “now that they literally cannot work anymore, they have nowhere to turn to.”

Chronic illnesses had forced both to stop working. They had lived without heat all winter and without water for a week. Jodi had applied for assistance and was waiting for a response. She had turned to food banks but was struggling to cook without water. They were down to $33 in savings.

Jodi herself sought help from gofundme.com and giveforward.com. She in fact signaled a little hope—writing that she had “found a job that is willing to work with my illnesses.” But she also described driving more than 30 miles “on gas fumes” and not knowing if she “would make it back home or even there.”

“I have turned in every direction possible and don’t know what else to do,” Jodi wrote. “If you can help we will be forever grateful and will even pay you back once we get back on our feet.”

One thing the Speidels apparently didn’t do was turn to their neighbors—some of whom said they would have offered help had they known of the couple’s struggles.

“We have become such a disassociated and anti-social society that we don’t even know our own neighbors,” a pastor lamented to the Dispatch, suggesting that a tighter community could have made a difference.

We don’t really know if their neighbors were in a position to provide the kind of resources the couple needed. But it’s notable that Jodi opted for the relative anonymity of reaching out online rather than turning to her neighbors. Over the years, I have heard from many people with low incomes about the shame and stigma of poverty, and how it keeps them from telling others about what they are going through.

In March, a couple of colleagues and I met with five members of Witnesses to Hunger, an advocacy organization whose members use photographs and their testimonials to document their experiences in poverty and advocate at the state, local, and federal levels for policy reform. We wanted to explore a campaign that would push back against the shaming of low-income people by the media, politicians, and other high-profile individuals, and support individuals who want to share their stories in order to educate the public and policymakers about poverty in America.

“Telling my story was like coming out of the closet,” said Betty Burton of Martha’s Vineyard. “Stigma makes people hide in the shadows. Your next-door neighbor could be struggling with poverty and you don’t even know it.”

Anisa Davis of Camden said she felt ashamed to tell her story until she became a member of Witnesses to Hunger. “People need to tell their stories in order to rid themselves of the baggage that comes with that shame.”

But finding the courage to tell one’s story is easier said than done, especially when much of the media and our politics not only blame people who are struggling for their poverty, they also bash them for it. Philadelphia Witness to Hunger member Angela Sutton spoke of the stereotypes propagated about people with low-incomes, such as their being “dumb, lazy, or just making babies.”

“Stories rarely show the positive changes that Witnesses and others are trying to create in our communities,” said Sutton. She said these kinds of stories would “break barriers” and help “people who are struggling to speak up.”

In addition to Jodi’s posting online, the Dispatch reports that she also had applied for assistance. We don’t know what she applied for—or whether her application would have been approved—but it’s worth looking at how hard we make it for people to get help in our country. Despite all of the rhetoric that suggests “welfare dependence” is rampant, the numbers tell a far different story.

• Only 25 in every 100 families with children in poverty receive TANF cash assistance, down from 68 in 1996. In Ohio, it’s about 29.

• Only about 1 in 4 households eligible for federal rental assistance actually receives it. By mid-2014, because of sequestration, there were 100,000 fewer families receiving housing vouchers. In Ohio, more than 370,000 low-income renter households pay more than half of their monthly cash income towards housing costs.

• Ohio opted out of a waiver of work requirements for recipients of nutrition assistance, despite the continuing struggles of low-wage, unemployed, and underemployed workers. This impacted thousands of people, many of whom reported poor physical or mental health.

• According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), when it comes to disability benefit systems, the United States has “the most stringent eligibility criteria for a full disability benefit.” More than 80 percent of people are denied when they submit their initial application, and less than 40 percent are approved after all appeals are exhausted. Every year, thousands of applicants die while awaiting their benefits.

Jack Frech, the former director of the Athens County Department of Job and Family Services in Appalachian Ohio, recently retired after more than thirty years of service in the welfare department. He said times have changed and we have made it much more difficult to get assistance.

“I’ve watched the stigma about welfare grow at the hands of both political parties at all levels of government,” said Frech. “It is deeply ingrained in our administration of assistance programs. We have codified the belief that we are not our neighbors’ keeper. Shame on us.”

I hope a reporter does a follow up to this story: What assistance did Jodi Speidel try to obtain? Did she receive a response? What is the process for applying? Is there any expedited process for emergency assistance? How could we reform the system to prevent the next unnecessary deaths from occurring?

The unavoidable truth is this: These deaths did not need to happen, and the Speidels should not die in vain.

“The idea that poverty is a problem of persons—that it results from personal moral, cultural, or biological inadequacies—has dominated discussions of poverty for well over two hundred years and given us the enduring idea of the undeserving poor.”

—Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor

In a recent op-ed, New York Times columnist David Brooks called for a “moral revival,” one which requires “holding people responsible” so that we have “social repair.”

To illustrate the need for said revival—which he frames as a reassertion of social norms—Brooks offers what he describes as three “representative figures” of “high school-educated America”: a man whose mother was absent, Dad is in prison, attended seven elementary schools, and “ended up under house arrest”; a girl who was “one of five half-siblings from three relationships,” whose mom lost custody of the kids to an abuser, and whose dad left a woman because another guy had fathered their child; and, finally, a kid who “burned down a lady’s house when he was 13” and says, “I just love beating up somebody and making they nose bleed…and beating them to the ground.”

So goes the latest iteration of the “undeserving poor,” an age-old concept brilliantly excavated by the late historian Michael Katz in his book of the same title. Like the long lineage it stems from, Brooks’ rendition is as “representative” of people with low-incomes as corrupt corporate titans are of small entrepreneurs. Anecdotally, in my years working for Boys and Girls Clubs, reporting as a poverty correspondent for The Nation, and now editing TalkPoverty.org which regularly features posts from people living in poverty—Brooks’ “representative figures” remind me of exactly zero people I have met during this time. I’m not saying that these individuals don’t exist, but they have little to do with the policies or the morality we need to dramatically reduce poverty in America.

Brooks preaches that we should react to these stories with “intense sympathy,” but then ask people who are struggling questions like: “Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?”

“Everybody struggles,” he writes. “But we need ideals and standards to guide the way.”

Katz presciently called out those like Brooks when he updated The Undeserving Poor in 2013 not long before his death: “The role of culture in the production and perpetuation of poverty…is enjoying a revival…[This] work remains implicitly animated by the questions, in what ways are poor people different (the answer is not because they lack money) and what should be done about these differences? They are not the most important questions to ask about poverty today.”

What we really need isn’t a moral revival but a moral revolution, one that might begin with Brooks and others looking in the mirror and asking some basic questions:

Do I accept that people working full-time are paid wages that keep them in poverty?

Do I accept that workers with low-incomes can’t take a paid sick day to care for themselves or a family member?

Do I accept that many parents can’t afford the childcare they need to go to work?

Do I accept that people with low-incomes often lack the transportation needed to get to job assignments and as a result are kicked off of income assistance?

Do I accept that our public schools are separate and unequal—with some kids forced to share textbooks while just miles away an affluent community has state-of-the-art facilities?

Do I propagate myths and stereotypes about people living in poverty, or do I help spread the truth—like the fact that more than 1 in 2 Americans will spend a year in poverty or near poverty during their working years?

Do I embrace the real evidence that shows just how far a little assistance can go to improve life outcomes for people in poverty?

When it comes to morality and supporting families, I’ll trust my favorite nun over Mr. Brooks any day. Testifying at a congressional hearing on the status of the War on Poverty, Sister Simone Campbell was asked if the real blame for continuing poverty is “the fact we’ve lost our family values? We’ve got single parents and so forth?”

She replied: “I practiced family law for 18 years in Oakland. I found with low-income families that the biggest cause of family break up was economic stressors. So I think the most important piece we could do to support families would be to raise the minimum wage.”

Katz had it exactly right when he closed his book noting “the promise of remaking poverty a moral issue—a result needed to overcome an ethical lapse in American politics and public discourse.”

On Saturday, Katz posthumously received a distinguished service award from the Organization of American Historians. It was well deserved, and his voice is still well worth listening to.

Recently, at the Social Mobility Summit at the Brookings Institution, Representative Paul Ryan declared the War on Poverty a failure. He went on to announce: “Later this year I plan on saying a whole lot more about this subject. But before I lay out any policy prescriptions for poor families, I need to hear more from the real experts—the families themselves.”

He had an opportunity to do just that when Amy Treptow visited Washington, DC, as the winner of the 50th Anniversary of the War on Poverty Storyteller Contest, sponsored by the Half in Ten campaign and the Coalition on Human Needs. The contest was part of the Our American Story project, which connects people who have experienced poverty with political leaders, media, and advocacy organizations—an ongoing effort to raise the visibility of those who don’t have a high-profile lobby representing their interests during policy debates. (Full disclosure: I am an adviser to the Half in Ten campaign.)

Treptow visited the nation’s capital to share her story with journalists and policymakers. She met with her representative, Mark Pocan; Representative Barbara Lee; and Paul Ryan, whose staff contacted her to set up a meeting.

When Treptow showed up to meet with Ryan, he suggested they take a photo in the corridor in front of the flag where Treptow could tell him a little about herself.

“I let him know that I had become a single mother unexpectedly, and that through the help of Medicaid, Section 8, food stamps and the West CAP [job training] program I was able to get back on my feet, be self-sufficient and own a home again,” she says. “I told him it was important to protect programs that help people.”

“Republicans aren’t against all of those things, despite what you might have heard,” Treptow says Ryan told her.

They snapped the photographs and the congressman said he had to head to his next appointment. Treptow was disappointed. She had heard that Ryan wants to speak with people who have experienced poverty firsthand.

“I was right there,” she says. “He didn’t ask me to elaborate on a single thing. If he’s really thinking about how these programs are working for people, he could have asked something. But I shared as much of my story as I could—whether he chooses to listen or not.”

Treptow’s story is indeed a compelling one. A veteran of the Navy, she says that just six years ago she had “a very good life” with her then-husband and two children in a house that they owned. The family’s income allowed her to stop working full-time as a first grade teacher. She taught reading at the school for three hours a day, worked as a substitute teacher, and did a lot of volunteer work.

“But then my life drastically and instantly changed,” she says.

Treptow’s husband left without warning, and she found herself alone with her two children.

“It was terrifying,” she says. “I was worried I was going to be homeless.”

Treptow waited for a year to receive Section 8 housing assistance. (She notes that many people wait for much longer.) She turned to food stamps and Medicaid, and applied for 110 full-time teaching positions to no avail. She continued to work as a substitute and part-time reading teacher, earning approximately $15,000 a year—well below the poverty line for a family of three.

“The district hadn’t hired in several years,” she says. “I knew I needed to go back to school to make myself more valuable to a district so I could obtain a full-time job with benefits.”

Her caseworker referred her to the West CAP community action agency in Glenwood City, Wisconsin. The agency offers a program for low-income adults who work at least twenty hours per week; it helps them gain additional skills to obtain a living wage job with health benefits.

To be admitted to the program, Treptow had to demonstrate that becoming certified as a reading specialist would boost her chances at a full-time teaching position. She found job postings online and submitted them to the agency. A professor at University of Wisconsin-Stout also wrote her a letter of recommendation. Treptow was accepted into the program, which then covered a portion of her tuition and textbooks.

With the help of West CAP’s $2,076 investment in her, Treptow received her certification and now earns nearly $40,000 and health benefits teaching mostly low-income children to read.

“I work with students in first through fifth grades who need intense intervention to increase their overall reading skills,” says Treptow.

In order to support her family and pay off her student loans, Treptow works two additional jobs—in the afterschool program and at an athletic field house on Saturdays. She once again owns her home.

Treptow enjoyed her time speaking with Congressman Pocan—whose congressional district shares Rock County with Ryan’s district.

“He was very welcoming,” she says. “We talked for about fifteen minutes or so.”

Pocan called her story “inspirational” and read it into the Congressional Record on the floor of the House of Representatives. Treptow says that was important to her.

“I was very hesitant to come to DC,” she says. “I hadn’t shared my story with my colleagues because of the negative stereotypes about people who receive public assistance. But this made me feel better about what I’ve been through, and that these kinds of stories need to be heard by politicians, if there is a chance of these safety net programs continuing.”

Representative Lee is someone who frequently shares with her colleagues the stories of ordinary Americans who are struggling. In fact, Treptow sat in the House Gallery as Lee spoke on the floor of a constituent whose children were benefitting from Head Start. Treptow says she had “read up on” the congresswoman prior to her visit and wasn’t surprised that they connected with one another when they met.

“Because she had been in the same shoes as me,” said Treptow. “I admire her—where she has been and where she is now. And not only that, she fights for where she has been and what she believes makes a difference.… These are the people we need in Congress, not people who just want to cut everything.”

Treptow hopes that the media and policymakers will keep telling the stories of the millions of people who turn to our safety net programs to “move forward, or get out of poverty—to have a better life.”

“If it’s just a couple of stories here and there, people see it as an exception and the negative stereotypes continue,” she says. “But if it’s story after story after story—that makes a difference. We need that now. Because if you take those safety net programs away, then what’s going to happen?”

With more than 46 million people living below the poverty line, struggling to survive on $19,530 or less for a family of three, and with more than one in three Americans living on less than twice that amount, scrimping to pay for basics, this country will require a broad-based movement to reverse the decades of failed national imagination.

The groups listed below are all worth watching as they do just that: galvanize communities, arm activists with information, and fight for living-wage jobs, stable housing and a strong safety net that catches people when they fall.

1. Coalition of Immokalee Workers: If you want to see what is possible through grassroots organizing by those who are most affected by poverty—or what it means to set a seemingly unreachable goal and persevere, or understand your opposition and find new ways to challenge it—look no further than the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

When the CIW was founded in 1993, it was as a small group of tomato farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida, trying to end a twenty-year decline in their poverty wages. Who is historically more powerless than farmworkers? Yet today, most major buyers of Florida tomatoes have signed agreements with the CIW to pay an extra penny per pound for tomatoes. These agreements have resulted in over $11 million in additional earnings for the workers since January 2011.

In addition, through its Fair Food Program, the CIW has persuaded corporate buyers to purchase tomatoes only from growers who sign a strict code of conduct that includes zero tolerance for forced labor or sexual assault. As a result, the majority of growers (those accounting for 90 percent of the tomato industry’s $650 million in revenue) have agreed to that code. If major violations occur but don’t get corrected—and there’s a twenty-four-hour hotline for worker complaints—corporations will not buy from those growers.

The Fair Food Program serves as a new model of social responsibility, and its influence is clear in the recently signed agreement between retailers and factory owners in the Bangladesh garment industry. Follow the CIW not only to get involved with farmworkers but for a sense of what can be achieved through strategic, fearless organizing.

2. Center for Community Change: For forty-five years, the Center for Community Change has worked with low-income communities and local grassroots organizations to fight poverty. The CCC has intentionally worked behind the scenes, keeping the spotlight focused on members of the communities instead and organizing around issues ranging from voter registration, affordable housing and community development to, more recently, immigration reform, healthcare and retirement security.

Executive director Deepak Bhargava says, “We have chosen as our great task in this next era to build a nationwide movement against poverty and for economic justice. The core issue is jobs—making sure that good jobs are available and accessible to everyone.” The CCC plans to work with grassroots organizations at the local and state levels, and then form coalitions at the national level, to demand policies that create good jobs with good wages. Its goal, Bhargava says, is to help build “a massive, diverse, boisterous, energized and organized social movement.”

3. Children’s HealthWatch: This country’s political leaders talk a good game about their commitment to the well-being of children, but in too many cases, their actions tell a far different story. That story is captured, in part, by the pediatricians and healthcare professionals at Children’s HealthWatch.

CHW collects data at pediatric clinics and hospitals to show the real impact of public policy choices on the health, nutrition and development of children up to the age of 4. CHW research has shown, for example, that children receiving SNAP (food stamps) are less likely to be food insecure, underweight or at risk for developmental delays than their peers who are likely eligible for SNAP but not receiving it. CHW has also demonstrated the importance of affordable housing for children’s health, showing that children in households that move frequently or fall behind on rent are significantly more likely to be underweight, in fair or poor health, and at risk for developmental delays than their stably housed peers. And CHW has examined energy insecurity, showing that children in families struggling to afford utilities and keep their homes sufficiently heated or cooled are more likely to be food insecure, hospitalized at some point since birth, or to have moved twice or more in the past year.

By using science to evaluate whether our policies demonstrate a commitment to children and then proposing alternatives, CHW’s research guides activists past the bombast and rhetoric of today’s policy-makers.

4. Half in Ten: This campaign—which I am currently advising—is a project of the Coalition on Human Needs, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and it has 200 partner organizations across the country. Its mission is simple: to cut poverty in half over ten years, just as we did between 1964 and 1973.

Through its comprehensive annual report, Half in Ten tracks the country’s progress toward this goal and outlines the many policies that could help slash poverty. In its 2007 inaugural report, Half in Ten demonstrated how poverty could be reduced by 26 percent simply by passing a modest increase in the minimum wage (to $8.40 at the time), expanding the earned-income tax and child tax credits, and providing affordable childcare to low-income families, among other proposals. Our leaders failed to make those recommended policy changes, and then the economy crashed, burying ever more Americans in deeper holes.

But Half in Ten keeps pushing toward its goal. In addition to policy analysis, the campaign mobilizes local groups in the field to speak out and take action during congressional policy debates. The campaign also works through its “Our American Story” project to ensure that low-income people have opportunities to tell their stories to the media, policy-makers and other advocacy groups. Follow Half in Ten to get a sense of the anti-poverty policy landscape, take action at the federal level, and hear powerful stories about individuals and families who are struggling to survive in this broken economy. 

5. Occupy Our Homes/Home Defenders League: Many of us would like to believe that the foreclosure crisis is over, but the fact is that far too many people are still losing their homes because banks refuse to modify mortgages, fail to return phone calls, or simply (and scandalously) file fraudulent paperwork. If my family or neighbors were ever in a dire situation with a bank that refused to work with them, Occupy Our Homes and the Home Defenders League (HDL) are the allies I would want on my side.

With community partners in more than twenty-five cities and states, these activists help homeowners organize protests, call-ins to bank officials, and other actions to cut through the bureaucratic roadblocks that individuals and families encounter when they deal with the banks. They also show up with neighbors to stop forced evictions.

In May, Occupy and HDL mobilized hundreds of people for a sit-in at the Justice Department, successfully shaming the feds and playing a key role in restarting stalled litigation against Wall Street. They are also collaborating with dozens of local groups, large and small, to rebuild the wealth stripped out of communities of color by pressing cities to use their power of eminent domain to do what the banks have refused to do: enact wide-scale principal reductions.

6. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the War on Poverty, conservatives are deploying bogus “studies” and revisionist history to attempt to discredit programs that are not only vital to people who are struggling, but have been proven effective in preventing much higher poverty rates. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities does a forceful job of countering this misinformation with analyses that—tellingly—conservatives rarely challenge.

During policy debates about programs like SNAP, TANF (welfare), healthcare, housing, Social Security, disability insurance, Medicaid, Medicare and other domestic priorities, you can count on CBPP experts to provide vital, clear-eyed analysis of how government programs work. Follow the work of policy wizards like Arloc Sherman, LaDonna Pavetti, Liz Schott, Jared Bernstein, Robert Greenstein, Douglas Rice, Kathy Ruffing and others to get the information you need to see through the spin, misinformation and outright lies about key policies that combat poverty.

7. Jobs With Justice: For twenty-six years, Jobs With Justice has built powerful coalitions with labor, community, student and faith leaders to protect and advance the rights of working people. Most recently, Jobs With Justice has played a pivotal role in the national Caring Across Generations campaign, which helped secure historic overtime and minimum-wage protections for homecare workers. Its Debt-Free Future campaign has mobilized students and concerned citizens to make college more affordable, expose abusive private lenders and win debt relief for working families. Jobs With Justice is also a critical partner in challenging the exploitative labor practices of employers like Walmart and the large fast food chains, and in protecting the right of immigrant workers to organize without threat of retaliation.

With its savvy use of strategic communications, original research and on-the-ground mobilizing, Jobs With Justice is challenging the structural problems of our economy in creative and effective ways.

8. Western Center on Law and Poverty: Translating grassroots activism into legislative victories will require strong inside/outside partnerships at the local, state and federal levels. One group that has mastered this delicate dance is the Western Center on Law and Poverty in Sacramento, California.

California is the seat of some of the poorest congressional districts in the nation, and it’s also home to more poor Americans than any other state. For over a decade, the state government has been dominated by budget austerity—California was the epicenter of the “no tax” pledge—as well as the kind of budget brinkmanship that now plagues Congress. But in part through the Western Center’s leadership, advocates have moved from simply defending against cuts to articulating a shared vision for a more vibrant, inclusive economy.

The Western Center has spearheaded new alliances among women, immigrants, the working poor, people without homes, the formerly incarcerated, food stamp recipients, labor union members, college students, youth and others, creating new opportunities for low-income people to get involved in effecting change. The result has been a series of notable victories, such as requiring call centers serving Californians who need public assistance to be located in-state in order to create jobs; restoring dental care through Medicaid; enacting protections against excessive bank fines or fees; introducing a Homeless Bill of Rights to outlaw the criminalization of homelessness; and protecting SNAP from federal cuts. The Western Center and its allies have also defended against bad policy proposals like the ALEC-inspired legislation to drug-test public assistance applicants. Follow this group to see how diverse coalitions get results at the state level.

9. Center for Hunger-Free Communities, Witnesses to Hunger: Founded in Philadelphia in 2008, Witnesses to Hunger is a research and advocacy project led by mothers and other caregivers of young children who have experienced hunger and poverty. Through photography and testimonials, Witnesses advocates for change at the local, state and national levels. There are now more than eighty Witnesses in various cities, including Philadelphia, Camden, Boston and Baltimore. (A new chapter in Sacramento is in the works.) In addition to lobbying Congress on issues like food stamps, welfare and affordable housing, Witnesses is vocal in its insistence that people living in poverty be included in conversations among advocates and political leaders in Washington, where low-income people are too often talked about but never heard. Follow this group to learn about poverty and hunger—which policies help, which policies harm—and to work directly alongside those living in poverty.

10. NETWORK: While the real power of an anti-poverty movement will come from the grassroots, a national leader who mobilizes people of faith and speaks with prophetic authority can play a powerful role—especially since the opposition so often cites Scripture as a justification for stripping the safety net.

Sister Simone Campbell and NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobby, captured the attention of millions of Americans as well as the mainstream media with their 2012 “Nuns on the Bus” Tour challenging Congressman Paul Ryan’s reckless budget proposals. Since then, Sister Simone has proved that she can not only tap into a network of progressive faith-based organizations, but also respond effectively to the absurd proposition that charities and religious institutions can address the needs that arise from a broken economy on their own, without the help of government resources. What’s more, she was masterful during Ryan’s hearing on the War on Poverty, eloquently batting away assertions that social programs create dependence and that the minimum wage should be banned, as well as challenges to her own standing as a Catholic.

While an anti-poverty movement will need nonviolent civil disobedience and avenues to express anger and despair, Sister Simone and NETWORK have shown that it’s possible to beat the opposition at its own game.

Nearly two years ago, TheNation.com launched This Week in Poverty as a way to keep the issue of poverty—and what we can do about it—front and center for our readers.

We felt that poverty was largely ignored by the mainstream media, with the exception of every September, when the new Census Bureau statistics were published. In contrast, as the oldest political weekly magazine in the country—founded by abolitionists in 1865—The Nation has poverty coverage in its DNA. It’s been a great privilege to be a part of that coverage on a weekly basis.

Today marks my last This Week in Poverty post. I’m going to spend more of my time working with local, state and national organizations engaged in the fight against poverty. I look forward to continuing to contribute to The Nation as well as to BillMoyers.com, which has also been so supportive of this blog.

For me, spending more time in the field, and having the freedom to engage strategically with activists, feels like a natural progression of my work at The Nation. The more I have spoken with people who are struggling in poverty, or with workers trying to survive on low wages; the more I have been alarmed by Republicans, and disillusioned with Democrats; the more I have been impressed with the activists, thinkers, and advocates fighting for good policy and stronger communities, while also searching for new approaches to that fight… the more I’ve wanted to get involved as an activist myself.

TheNation.com created this blog with the notion that it simply isn’t true that we don’t know what to do to turn the tide in the fight against poverty—that there are many progressive organizations and, most importantly, people living in poverty themselves, offering solutions that are there for the taking and that need to be heard.

My friend and editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and I share a deep respect for the people who are doing this work, and that was also a key motive for creating this blog: we need to recognize people and groups for their good ideas, and their hard work, much of which is done in relative anonymity. And of course, it was a glaring weakness in most media coverage of poverty that the stories rarely engaged with people who are actually living in poverty themselves. As we headed into the presidential campaign last year, this absence was even more glaring.

I think one of the best moments for this blog and what its readers could accomplish was TheNation.com’s #TalkPoverty effort during the presidential campaign, which was developed in collaboration with senior editor Emily Douglas and community editor Annie Shields.

We interviewed advocates (here, here, here, and here) and people living in or near poverty, providing them with an opportunity to pose direct questions to President Obama and Governor Romney. It was an effort to push a constructive conversation about poverty into the presidential debate. Little did we know that so many groups and individuals would adopt the campaign as their own, trying to get the moderators of three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate to ask at least a single question about poverty (which the moderators failed to do). In the end, the Obama campaign responded to This Week in Poverty, and #TalkPoverty still thrives on Twitter today as a way to share information and promote action.

It’s my hope now that we will aggressively move beyond talk to organizing and taking action to push for known solutions. I believe that we will not see the kind of change we seek without a movement that is visible, constant, and disruptive, as we have witnessed with the recent immigration reform and marriage equality movements.

The conditions for an antipoverty movement now exist: when more than one in three Americans are living below twice the poverty line (below about $36,500 for a family of three)—unable to pay for the basics like food, housing, healthcare, education, and unable to save—something’s got to give. When 95 percent of the economic gains are going to the top 1 percent, and more than 60 percent to the top .1 percent—the potential is there to unite the majority of people who are being denied an opportunity to get ahead.

So my hope as we close out this blog is the same as it was when we launched it—that readers will get involved in the fight against poverty, and work and push, and work and push, and work and push some more, until we get where we need to go.

Below is a list of organizations whose work I’ve had the privilege to get to know over the past two years. If you keep up with these groups, sign up for their updates, you will know more about poverty and what we can do about it than the vast majority of members of Congress or your state and local representatives do, and you will find opportunities to get involved. You can also share your own ideas with these groups about how we can build a strong movement—and I know you have great ideas. I know it because the most unexpected thing of all about this blog was the number of people who started e-mailing me about what needed to be covered. Your passion and ideas helped shape This Week in Poverty in significant ways over the past two years, and I thank you for that.

I hope you will keep in touch—I’m still writing—but most importantly I hope you will get involved and fight hard.

Children, Parents and Families


Broader, Bolder Approach to Education


Children’s Defense Fund


Children’s HealthWatch


First Focus


Legal Momentum


Mary House

Mary’s Center

National Partnership for Women and Families


National Women’s Law Center

Healthcare, Disability and Aging


The Arc


Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities Social Security Task Force


National Council on Aging

National Organization of Social Security Claimants’ Representatives

Housing and Homelessness


Care for the Homeless

Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness

Home Defenders League


National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty


National Low Income Housing Coalition


Occupy Our Homes

Pathways to Housing

Hunger


Center for Hunger-Free Communities/Witnesses to Hunger


Food Research and Action Center


Mazon

New York City Coalition Against Hunger


Share Our Strength

Justice and Courts


Center for Court Innovation

Race and Civil Rights


Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights


Poverty & Race Research Action Council

Research


Center for American Progress

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities


Center for Economic and Policy Research


Demos


Economic Policy Institute


National Employment Law Project


Urban Institute: MetroTrends

Workers’ Rights


Caring Across Generations


Coalition of Immokalee Workers


Interfaith Worker Justice


Jobs with Justice


Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United

Multi-issue Groups


Alliance for a Just Society


Campaign for America’s Future

Center for Community Change


Center for Law and Social Policy


Center for Social Inclusion

Coalition on Human Needs



Community Action Partnership


Half In Ten


Jewish Council for Public Affairs


Kansas Association of Community Action Programs

LIFT


National Council of La Raza


National Nurses United


NETWORK


PolicyLink


Progressive States Network


RESULTS


The Rural Assistance Center


Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law


Western Center on Law & Poverty

Greg Kaufmann challenged democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow's support for cuts to food stamp funding.

On the same day that President Obama eloquently described his vision of an economy defined by economic mobility and opportunity for all, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow was busy cutting a deal with House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas to slice another $8 to $9 billion from food stamps (SNAP), according to a source close to the negotiations.

“One study shows that more than half of Americans will experience poverty at some point during their adult lives,” said President Obama. “Think about that. This is not an isolated situation.… That’s why we have nutrition assistance or the program known as SNAP, because it makes a difference for a mother who’s working, but is just having a hard time putting food on the table for her kids.”

Indeed it does, but the chairwoman consistently fails to get the memo.

There are currently 47 million Americans who turn to food stamps to help make ends meet. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, nearly 72 percent are in families with children; and one-quarter of SNAP participants are in households with seniors or people with disabilities. Further, 91 percent of SNAP benefits go to households with incomes below the poverty line, and 55 percent to households below half of the poverty line (about $9,500 annually for a family of three).

Despite the fact that the Institute of Medicine demonstrated the inadequacy of the SNAP benefit allotment, and that a child’s access to food stamps has a positive impact on adult outcomes, the program was just cut by $5 billion on November 1. The average benefit dropped from $1.50 to $1.40 per meal. The Senate Agriculture Committee’s previous proposal to cut yet another $4 billion from SNAP would have led to 500,000 losing $90 per month in benefits, the equivalent of one week’s worth of meals.

“That was the first time in history that a Democratic-controlled Senate had even proposed cutting the SNAP program,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “The willingness of some Senate Democrats to double new cuts to the program…is unthinkable.”

The president recognized in a very personal way the need for a SNAP program that protects families from severe hardship.

“When my father left and my mom hit hard times trying to raise my sister and me while she was going to school, this country helped make sure we didn’t go hungry,” he said.

In contrast, Berg tells of a mother he recently met who now sees this country turning away from her and her children.

“I recently met a mother of two, trying to advance herself and her family, by working her way through college,” said Berg. “After November 1st, she lost $46 worth of groceries a month, which equals at least thirty fewer meals for her family.”

It seems she and her kids are about to absorb another hit.

“These SNAP cuts will be devastating to families across the nation,” said Dr. Mariana Chilton, co-principal investigator of Children’s HealthWatch, a research organization analyzing the effects of economic conditions and public policy on children in emergency rooms and clinics around the country. “Not only will families lose significant SNAP dollars—which will make it harder for them to feed their kids and also reduce their children’s nutrient intakes—but it will also cause major health problems for children, increased hospitalizations for very young kids, and greater need for psychosocial and mental health services for school aged kids.”

President Obama perfectly captured what it means for this country to turn its back on children.

“The idea that a child may never be able to escape poverty because she lacks a decent education or healthcare, or a community that views her future as their own, that should offend all of us and it should compel us to action,” said President Obama.

We are the community, and it is offensive. Now is the time to tell the president: if these cuts land on his desk, he must veto the bill.

Update, December 7, 3:39pm: Senator Stabenow's office did not initially respond to a request for comment, but have replied to this post. Their statement:

Senator Stabenow strongly opposes any changes to food assistance that make cuts in benefits for people who need help putting food on the table for their families. She has been the number one defender against the House Republican proposal to cut food assistance by $40 billion, including rule changes that would throw four million people off of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) altogether.

Unlike the House proposal, the Senate Farm Bill protects critical food assistance for the over 47 million Americans who need help. The Senate bill saves $4 billion solely through ending program misuse—like stopping lottery winners from continuing to receive assistance, cracking down on retailer benefit trafficking, and curbing the misuse of a LIHEAP paper work policy by a small number of states. It is very important that we continue to maintain the integrity of these critical food assistance programs so that opponents cannot use rare examples of misuse as arguments for gutting assistance to children, families, seniors and disabled Americans.

While no final agreement has been reached, Senator Stabenow will not support any policies that arbitrarily remove people in need from SNAP or make across-the-board cuts to benefits. She will only support savings focused on program misuse.

 

Update, December 9, 11:31am: Response from Greg Kaufmann:

I think many anti-hunger advocates would disagree with the notion that the Chairwoman has been “the number one defender” against the draconian SNAP cuts proposed by House Republicans.  Representatives Jim McGovern, Barbara Lee, John Conyers, and Marcia Fudge come to mind, as does Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.  They not only defend against Republican cuts, but also try to strengthen benefits at a time when nearly 50 million Americans aren’t necessarily sure where their next meal is coming from.  

It is true that Senator Stabenow has spoken clearly in her opposition to the extreme cuts and rule changes in the House Republican proposal.  But that’s hardly a reason to claim bragging rights—it would be like a WNBA player boasting that she can whup any Junior High School player in a game of one-on-one.

The statement that $4 billion (of the more than $8 billion in SNAP cuts agreed to in current negotiations) is found through cracking down on lottery winners, retailer benefit trafficking, and addressing “misuse” of the Low Income Housing Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) seems misleading.  The amount of SNAP benefits misspent due to fraud by lottery winners and retailers is negligible, and of course everyone supports vigilance to protect the integrity of the program.

But the bulk of the $4 billion in cuts alluded to here—and the other $4 billion-plus agreed to in negotiations—is found through a change to the rule that currently allows families receiving SNAP assistance to qualify for additional benefits if they receive LIHEAP assistance to help with their utility bills.  (If a state’s governor opts in to what is called the “heat and eat” program.)  The heat and eat program—which boosts SNAP benefits for families receiving utility assistance—is based on the recognition that too many Americans are choosing between paying for food or paying for energy.  Some states sign families up for $1 in heating assistance so that they then qualify for the additional food stamp benefits, decreasing the likelihood that they will face the “heat or eat” dilemma.  According to Politico, the agreement between Senator Stabenow and Republican leaders would require $20 in LIHEAP assistance in order to receive additional SNAP benefits.  That change would result in up to $8 billion in SNAP cuts.  Currently, roughly 20 percent of eligible households receive LIHEAP, so there is little reason to believe that most states would step up to meet the $20 threshold for people who need it.

While Senator Stabenow might not be in a position to defend the $1 work around that helps get families the assistance they need, she surely is in a position to explain why both Democratic and Republican Governors alike are looking to obtain additional benefits for families that qualify for food stamps, and why we need to be increasing, not decreasing, those benefits. 

The Chairwoman might remind the country that the average benefit is $1.40 per meal for an individual.  She might point to the report by the Institute of Medicine that clearly describes the inadequacy of food stamp benefits: from the way a family’s net monthly income is calculated by using a standard shelter deduction capped at $478; to the assumption that low-wage workers with erratic schedules will have time to cook unprocessed ingredients from scratch, as well as access supermarkets that offer a variety of healthy foods at lower costs in urban and rural areas.  The Chairwoman might tell America that the SNAP program assumes food prices are consistent no matter where one lives in the nation.  She might point to the millions of families that include children with special health care needs—families not permitted to deduct their out-of-pocket health care costs to calculate their net income. She might draw attention to USDA testimony—all the way back in 1933—that the theoretical “Thrifty Food Plan” currently used in the SNAP program to determine a nutritious diet at minimal cost is for “restricted diets for emergency use,” and that “a reasonable measure of basic needs for a good diet… should be as high as the cost of the low-cost food plan” which would result in more generous food stamp benefit levels.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the staff asserts that the Senator “strongly opposes any changes to food assistance that make cuts in benefits for people who need help putting food on the table for their families.”  But the fact is that the proposed changes would indeed cut benefits for people who need help putting food on the table.  As the Food Research and Action Center writes, “Bottom line, elimination of ‘Heat and Eat’ means lost meals for elderly and disabled households.”

The Chairwoman is in a position to educate the country about how the SNAP program really works, and how it could and should be made better.  If raising benefits through LIHEAP isn’t the right avenue, then she and her fellow-Democrats should suggest the myriad of reforms that would more accurately measure the existing need of hungry families in this country and would consequently raise their benefit levels.

The point isn’t that Republicans would never go for those reforms.  The point is to speak the truth to the American people, shatter the myths and end the misinformation, and make the Republicans defend policies that are indefensible.

Update, December 9, 11:31am:  Response from Joel Berg, executive director, New York City Coalition Against Hunger:

In the year 2000, as a private citizen on vacation time, I volunteered for a week in Grand Rapids, Michigan to help elect Debbie Stabenow to the United States Senate. That is why it is particularly painful to me that not only is she playing a key role in cutting nutrition assistance for struggling families, but she also is not being straightforward with the public about the impact of the policies she is promoting.

Virtually all advocates—myself included—agree with her efforts to stop lottery winners from continuing to receive assistance and to crack down on retailer benefit trafficking.  But given how rare lottery winners and retailer fraud are, those changes are mostly cosmetic and have nothing to do with the more than $8 billion in nutrition cuts that she is proposing.

The third provision she is proposing—the one that would cut all the money—would eliminate a current feature of the SNAP program that now allows governors in 14 different states, of both political parties, to better combine home energy assistance with SNAP benefits in order to boost food aid to some of the hardest-hit families. Every single penny Senator Stabenow is proposing to take out of SNAP would come directly out of the grocery baskets of families that are very low-income and are currently eligible for the benefits.

It is important to again note that the $5 billion in SNAP cuts which went into effect on November 1 were also enabled by Senate Democrats. Senator Stabenow’s contention that she must advance massive additional cuts of more than $8 billion—as the only possible way to forestall even more massive cuts proposed by the GOP—is misleading as well. As Chair of the Agriculture Committee, she has it well within her power to propose a Farm Bill with no additional SNAP cuts whatsoever.  The House Republicans have no legal ability to pass additional cuts unless the Senate Democrats and President Obama consent to such cuts.  The Democrats should join together in scrapping this horrible bill that slashes food for struggling families while boosting corporate welfare, and instead start from scratch with a brand new farm bill that aids small to mid-sized family farmers, slashes hunger, and boosts rural economic development.

Update, December 9, 11:31am: Response from Dr. Mariana Chilton, PhD, MPH, Director, Center for Hunger-Free Communities, Drexel University School of Public Health:

When Senate Ag leadership likens the cuts to SNAP as “savings” that curb “misuse of a LIHEAP paperwork policy,” we can see that they do not fully grasp the way that American families experience hunger and food insecurity.

Families don’t go hungry in a vacuum.  Families make terrible tradeoffs- between paying for heat or paying to eat.  The women of Witnesses to Hunger—who use their photography and stories to describe their experiences with hunger and poverty—can tell you that first hand.  Jill Shaw, a Member of Witnesses to Hunger from Central Pennsylvania shows a picture of her stove, and writes:  “I am a witnesses to hunger everyday.  I am a witness to the disappointment in my children’s eyes when they tell me they are hungry and I tell them there’s no food.  My stove is a source of heat more than it is a source for cooking food.” To learn more about housing and utilities and how they relate to hunger, just take a brief tour here of America’s reality in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Camden NJ. If you want this in cold hard numbers instead of pictures and experiences, see our Children’s HealthWatch research.

Those of us on the ground: pediatricians, public health researchers, social services providers, and the true experts—those who know hunger and poverty first hand—recognize that the forward thinking states have attempted to prevent the worst of hunger and the worst of frigid mornings.  The states that utilize the heat and eat provision, are actually improving our current income support systems, because they are calculating the amount of SNAP benefits needed when one considers the true cost of shelter. To learn more about this, check out the Congressional Research Service explanation.

This LIHEAP provision is a protection for families based in a cold hard reality: food insecurity is a form of hardship based on trading off costs of basic needs. It’s a smart work around that ought to be scaled up across the country, not slashed as a technical expediency.  If there were really forward thinking change coming out of the Senate and House, the SNAP benefit calculation would be based on the true cost of shelter regardlessof whether or not a family receives LIHEAP.  It’s a frigid wake-up indeed, to see these proposed cuts.  Some have said that the House GOP is out of touch with low-income America, but sometimes it seems as if all of our leaders are out of touch.

Editor's Note: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this headline suggested that Stabenow was pushing for the cuts to food stamps.

Last week, Greg Kaufmann wrote about the need for a shared agenda to combat poverty.

I get it, we need to play defense.

There are 50 million people who are food insecure—meaning they can’t meet their basic food needs and don’t necessarily know where their next meal is coming from—and yet both Democrats and Republicans are debating how much more to cut from a food stamp program that was already cut on November 1 and now has an average benefit of only $1.40 per meal…

We need to play defense.

At a time when the economy needs to add 8.3 million jobs just to return to pre-recession employment levels—and sequestration will result in the loss of nearly 1 million more jobs by the third quarter of 2014…

We need to play defense.

At a time when we have reached crisis levels of poverty for children of color under age 5—more than 42 percent of African-American children and 37 percent of Latino children under age 5 live below the poverty line of $18,300 annually for a family of three—and sequestration has resulted in more than 57,000 children being kicked out of Head Start classrooms…

We need to play defense.

At a time when there are record levels of homeless students in US public schools—nearly 1.2 million in the 2011–12 school year—and sequestration will result in as many as 185,000 low-income families losing housing assistance by the end of 2014…

We clearly need to play defense.

But then there is also this: anger, frustration, worry, rage, sadness and despair across the nation. It’s combustible. Ninety-five percent of the recovery gains since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent, 60 percent have gone to the top .1 percent who earn more than $1.9 million annually. That doesn’t leave much for anyone else to get ahead.

So isn’t this actually the perfect moment for the anti-poverty community to pivot to offense? To rally around a tight, shared vision—one that appeals to people living in poverty or near poverty, and to the middle class?

In January of this year, I proposed an anti-poverty contract to unite groups around the minimum wage, paid leave, affordable childcare, subsidized jobs/TANF reform and ending childhood hunger. I shared the contract with advocates in DC and outside of the nation’s capital as well. The reaction? Roll soundtrack: crickets chirping (with a few notable exceptions).

As we approach the new year, I still think advocates are too segregated from one another, working on their specific issues, rather than increasing their power and numbers by coming together around a shared vision with popular appeal.

So I again sent some great leaders in the anti-poverty community a scaled back version of my previous proposal, asking whether they thought organizations could and should unite around three or so core issues. For purposes of discussion I proposed:

Raise the minimum wage: no one in America should work full-time, or two or even three part-time jobs, and still be stuck in poverty. Historically, a full-time worker earning the minimum wage could lift a family of three out of poverty. The Harkin-Miller proposal of a $10.10 per hour minimum wage would return us to that standard. (It also would raise the tipped minimum wage—stuck at $2.13 per hour for more than twenty years—to 70 percent of the minimum wage.)

Paid sick and family leave: nobody in this country should have to choose between a paycheck and caring for themselves or a sick family member, and yet only 34 percent of low-wage workers had access to paid sick leave in 2013.

Affordable, quality childcare: it’s tough to go to work and get ahead when there isn’t a safe, affordable place to take your kids for childcare, and yet childcare assistance policies worsened in twenty-four states in 2012. The average annual fee for full-time childcare ranges from $3,900 to $15,000.

The advocates I reached out to include: Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK, a catholic social justice lobby; Dr. Mariana Chilton, director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities, which includes the Witnesses to Hunger project; Steve Savner, director of public policy for the Center for Community Change; Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs; Melissa Boteach, director of Half in Ten and the Poverty and Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress; and Jessica Bartholow, legislative advocate at the Western Center on Law and Poverty.

Here are some of the insights they offered and common themes that emerged from our conversations:

There is a need for a shared agenda among advocacy organizations.

Sister Simone Campbell: I’ve been thinking how Speaker John Boehner is not a leader for the twenty-first century. And it got me thinking, ‘What are we doing for the twenty-first century?’ NETWORK’s Nuns on the Bus is like a lightning rod for hope and opportunity. That experience for me touched the hunger for community—and there’s a hunger for community not just for folks around the country—but also for those of us who do advocacy in DC.

Dr. Mariana Chilton: Housing groups and hunger groups, labor and immigrants rights groups, childcare groups and education groups—we need to all be talking and all have the same platform. We are too caught up in our own talking points for our own particular issues, and what that does is, ultimately, it chops up regular human beings—we’ve got to pull together as regular human beings, to humanize the issues of poverty, and hunger, and injustice.

Steve Savner: We agree with the idea that we need a small set of key demands that will connect with people in meaningful way. Since no three things will address all of the issues that folks face, the fight on some core demands also needs to connect to a broader vision and narrative about economic justice and eliminating poverty that allows us to build more power as we go from one fight to the next.

Jessica Bartholow: The best efforts to thwart austerity measures will not work unless there is a strong coalition that knows not only what it doesn’t want but what it does want, and that can unite across fissures in coalition and movement building to achieve that. We need to articulate a vision that is simple enough and urgent enough to build momentum in a short period of time, while conceding the need to go much farther with shared work on other issues down the road.

Melissa Boteach: While we definitely have to continue to defend the critical safety net programs under attack, we know we’re not going to reach Half in Ten’s goal of cutting poverty in half from a crouched, defensive posture. Anti-poverty advocates have got to come together and press for an agenda that speaks to the pressing task of rebuilding the middle class, and creating ladders of opportunity so that more people can reach the middle class.

Which issues should be selected and how should they be determined?

Savner: Folks here don’t feel like we are at a place to name the most resonant demands absent, at least for us, more testing on the ground directly in low income communities—both as to content and how to engage a lot more people in the fight. The broader vision behind the demands you name feels right, a decent job that pays fairly and a system that doesn’t force people to choose between a good job and a safe and healthy family. One more element I’d say the vision needs to address is the right to a decent jobs for all who seek them and fair access for those who are struggling to succeed in the labor market, such as people returning home from jail or prison, or who have been excluded from certain industries and occupations, most importantly women and people of color.

Chilton: The people are missing from this idea. If we all just get around these three issues it will just be a little sign-on thing that’s just going to fizzle out, unless you have people who are poor running the show. If it’s just words, ‘we hereby decree,’ it’s not going to get anywhere. The movement can be facilitated by the NGOs and non-profits, but it’s going to have to be the people who are poor that are supposedly represented by these organizations who need to be out front. Also, while I personally like this idea of having a simplified message: minimum wage, paid leave, and childcare as three top-ticket items, there’s a fourth ticket, and that’s people who are low-wage workers need to rise up, and it needs to get beyond the fast food industry and WalMart. People who are on SNAP benefits and working need to protest. And we need to join them.

Deborah Weinstein: It would be interesting to see if we could get broad support for a narrow positive agenda, and if so, what would it include? For me, minimum wage and paid sick leave are two easy choices. If there’s a third, it’s less obvious to me what [it] should be. Increasing the amount of the SNAP food benefit? A renter’s credit (refundable) combined with transforming the home mortgage interest deduction to a credit—which would save money by reducing the huge amounts going to the highest income homeowners? More childcare, perhaps combined with universal pre-k? Immigration reform?

Sr. Simone: I like the idea that we could focus on some key principles and make it proactive—but not as an adversarial scold—but as ‘We the People are better than this.’ And ‘work needs to pay.’ While we need to keep nudging at specific issues, there’s a much bigger hunger to get the community together, to recover ‘We the People…’ If we put the specific issues in that bigger context—they kind of hang together for the benefit of the 100 percent, for everybody. But we have to put it in the communal context without fear of each other.

Boteach: Grassroots partners are already calling for an end to the politics of austerity. To set the positive vision, low-income people have to be leaders in shaping and organizing around the unified agenda, but clearly a few wins on policies that have widespread appeal could make an enormous difference for low-income families. Raising the minimum wage commands strong public support across party lines—we just need to make sure members of Congress get the memo. Paid family leave and investments in childcare and pre-K would not just cut poverty; they’d help families of all income levels balance breadwinning and caregiving.

Bartholow: I read your blog calling for a national contract for shared prosperity on the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King. That night, I stayed up laying out the policy asks that had surfaced through coalition work I have been engaged in. In California, we have finally been able to move from a decade of simply defending against cuts to articulating our shared vision for a vibrant, inclusive economy. New alliances have formed between women, immigrants, the working poor, people without homes, people formerly incarcerated, food stamp recipients, labor union members, college students, youth and others. So I shared my draft not only with these communities and organizations I work with, but with colleagues in other states and people working at the national level. Each conversation surfaced new insights, confirmed the need for an organizing vehicle like this, and raised very good—and still somewhat unanswered—questions about the long-term goals of the organizing effort. We hope to roll out our National Call to Action soon.

What would this movement look like if it were to be effective?

Chilton: I think it takes a march—and it has to be massive, bigger than the number of people who showed up for President Obama’s inauguration. It has to show that we are fed up. Then we could signal to the rest of the country that there are many of us just like you that are fed up—join us. I think people are waiting for something massive, for something like a familiar social movement. Something a little different from Occupy Wall Street—something that makes people head to DC with something like a banner of three key demands. Something that really includes and speaks to families with children. But who are the ones that could pull it together?  Is it the Community Action people?  Is it MomsRising? The labor movement? Who has the people to make it happen—to get the buses going and to roll with it?

Bartholow: Our Call to Action is designed to be an ongoing, relentless campaign informed, inspired and driven by the experiences of the people who are most impacted by stagnant poverty and historic levels of inequality. It will hopefully broaden the anti-poverty community through a time-sensitive, narrowly drawn campaign that supports active federal legislation.

Boteach: If this were to happen, it would mean that there has finally been a realization that the interests of low- and middle-income Americans are aligned. That’s the way we will achieve a broad-based movement. We are committed to working with our partners to make the case, build the power, and hold our leaders accountable to enact policies that cut poverty and rebuild the middle class.

Savner: At the Center for Community Change, we are indeed trying to build a nationwide movement against poverty. The core issue is jobs: making sure that good jobs are available and accessible to everyone. We will start at the local and state level, working with grassroots groups to win breakthroughs and redefine the possible. We’ll support massive new organizing among low-income people, build coalitions at both the state and national level, communicate the problems and the solutions, and working with others, we will make sure that good jobs for all—as a way to address poverty—is a central agenda for politicians who are running for office.

Sr. Simone: If this effort were successful we would know that we have each other’s backs. We would not need to be afraid of being left out…. We can make this happen if we try.

What do you think? Please comment below or email me at weekinpoverty@me.com

Get involved

The Time is Now: Tell Congress to Protect SNAP

Find a protest at a Walmart near you

Take Action: Urge Your Senators to Raise the Minimum Wage

Publix: Join the Fair Food Movement

Strong Start for America’s Children Act

War on Poverty Storyteller Contest

A Tale of Two Thanksgivings

Events

Getting Back to Full Employment with Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein (Tonight, November 25, 6:30–8 pm, Busboys and Poets’ Cullen Room, 5th and K Streets NW DC)

Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity and the Elimination of Health Disparities (Thursday, December 5, 8 am Pacific, Beckman Center, Irvine, California) The Institute of Medicine will hold a workshop exploring the history of social movements for lessons and strategies that could inform contemporary efforts to improve the health and well-being of all communities. The workshop will be webcast live.

Witnesses to Hunger 5-Year Anniversary Exhibit & Reception (Wednesday, December 11, 6–9 pm, Drexel University’s Bossone Research Center, First Floor Lobby and Mitchell Auditorium, 3140 Market Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) In 2008, a group of women from North Philadelphia were given cameras to take pictures and speak out about their firsthand experiences with hunger and poverty for a project known as Witnesses to Hunger. Today, there are more than eighty Witnesses in sites from Boston to Baltimore. Join them for a night of reflection, celebration and action.

Clips and other resources

“Native Americans Are Less Likely to Be Employed Than Whites in Nearly Every State,” Algernon Austin

“Paul Ryan, Poverty Warrior? Huh?,” Jared Bernstein

“Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People,” Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker

“Inside The Death Of A D.C. Public School,” Kavitha Cardoza

“Actually, the Fed Can Do Something (Lots, Even) About Inequality,” Josh Bivens

“Inequality Is (Literally) Killing America,” Zoë Carpenter

“Justice Center Helps Reduce Crime and Incarceration in Brooklyn,” Center for Court Innovation

“Infographic: The School-Readiness Gap,” CAP Early Childhood Team

“We Have Skilled Construction Workers−They Need Jobs,” Ross Eisenbrey

“As I See It—Declaring a new war on poverty,” William Elliott III

“Gathering insights from Native American communities,” Lionel Foster

“Congress Must Not Break 40-Year Commitment to Let WIC Provide Most Nutritious Food,” Robert Greenstein

“Child poverty remains high while spending on children falls,” Julie Isaacs

“Expanding Social Security,” Paul Krugman

“The Long-Term Unemployment Trap Could Get Worse,” John Light

“In rural Kentucky, health-care debate takes back seat as the long-uninsured line up,” Stephanie McCrummen

“Education for Homeless Children and Youths Program Data Collection Summary,” National Center for Homeless Education

“Healthy Relationships, Employment and Reentry,” National Transitional Jobs Network

“There is not enough affordable rental housing,” Erika Poethig

“Access to Healthy Food and Why It Matters: A Review of the Research,” PolicyLink and The Food Trust

“SNAP Costs Leveling Off, Almost Certain to Fall Next Year,” Dorothy Rosenbaum

“Focus of US Fiscal Policy Must Shift Back to Full Employment,” William Spriggs

“The Detroit Bankruptcy,” Wallace Turbeville

“Breaking Bread to Build a Movement: Harnessing Philanthropy’s Power to Convene,” Luz Vega-Marquis

Why We Raise Up Massachusetts

Vital Statistics

US poverty (less than $23,492 for a family of four): 46.5 million people, 15 percent.

African American poverty rate: 27.2 percent.

Hispanic poverty rate: 25.6 percent.

White poverty rate: 9.7 percent.

People with disabilities: 28 percent.

Poorest age group: children, 34.6 percent of all people in poverty are children.

Children in poverty: 16.1 million, 21.8 percent, including 38 percent of African-American children, 34 percent of Latino children and 12 percent of white children.

Poverty rate among families with children headed by single mothers: 40.9 percent.

Gender gap: Women 31 percent more likely to be poor than men.

Deep poverty (less than $9,142 for a family of three): 20.4 million people, 1 in 15 Americans, nearly 10 percent of all children, up from 12.6 million in 2000—an increase of 59 percent.

Homeless students in K-12 public schools: 1.2 million.

Twice the poverty level (less than $46,042 for a family of four): 106 million people, approximately one in three Americans.

Jobs in the US paying less than $34,000 a year: 50 percent.

Jobs in the US paying below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually: 25 percent.

Poverty-level wages, 2011: 28 percent of workers.

Federal minimum wage: $7.25 ($2.13 for tipped workers).

Federal minimum wage if indexed to inflation since 1968: $10.59.

Federal minimum wage if it kept pace with productivity gains: $18.72.

Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: 68 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Families receiving cash assistance, 2012: 25 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Impact of public policy, 2011: without government assistance, poverty would have been twice as high—nearly 30 percent of population.

Number of people 65 or older kept out of poverty by Social Security: 15.3 million, including 9 million women.

This Week in Poverty posts again at Moyers & Company. You can e-mail me at WeekInPoverty@me.com and follow me on Twitter.

Five community members met with Congressional leaders to discuss the dire implications of cuts to food stamp spending.

Nia Timmons was stressed.

A mother of three, she works full-time as an assistant teacher at a pre-K program in Camden, New Jersey where she earns $12 per hour. By the second week of November, she still hadn’t received her family’s food stamp (SNAP) benefits and she didn’t know why. She thought it might be due to the SNAP cut on November 1 that hit 48 million people, including 22 million children, but she couldn’t get any answers from the Camden Board of Social Services.

“I’ve not heard from anyone there, and I can’t reach anyone either,” said Timmons.

She told me her story in a coffee shop in the basement of the Russell Senate Office Building last week. She had traveled to Capitol Hill along with four of her “Witnesses to Hunger sisters” from Camden, Philadelphia and Boston to speak with Members of Congress about the impact their policy decisions are having on people who live in poverty. Witnesses to Hunger is a project of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities at the Drexel University School of Public Health. Participants are mothers and caregivers of young children who use photography and testimonials to document their experiences and advocate for change at the local, state, and federal levels. There are more than eighty Witnesses in various cities on the East Coast.

Timmons and Anisa Davis—also from Camden—shared their experiences with staffers for their representatives, Democratic Senator Robert Menendez and Democratic Congressman Robert Andrews. The other Witnesses met with legislative aides for their respective Senators and Representatives too. They also stopped by the offices of Republicans on the Farm Bill conference committee, including House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas and Florida Congressman Steve Southerland. All of the Witnesses met directly with Democratic Congressmen Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania and Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, and with Kellie Adesina, legislative director for Ohio Representative Marcia Fudge.

I was invited to sit in on the meeting with Adesina.

Quanda Burrell, a mother of two from Boston, told her story of being just one semester shy of her teacher’s assistant degree when she was informed that her Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) cash assistance would run out in two weeks. Her caseworker said she needed to drop out of school and enter a “career readiness program” in order to continue to receive assistance. The Witnesses say these programs often lead to no jobs, or dead-end jobs, and are frequently run by for-profit companies.

Burrell felt she was forced to choose between feeding her family in the immediate term or staying in school so she could attain a stable income in the very near future. She dropped out. But the extension of TANF assistance turned out to be just for two months, and so her only current income is a small stipend she receives for work for Thrive in Five, which promotes early childhood education in Boston. She can’t afford to re-enroll in school and now her rent is due.

“It affects you mentally, emotionally, physically—it drains you,” said Burrell. “You have to hide it from your children. You gotta pretend like you’re not struggling with this, but you really are. You don’t want your kids to feel that stress. But it does trickle down.”

Philadelphia Witness Emily Edwards works part-time as a home healthcare aide earning $9 per hour. Like many Witnesses, she checks in frequently with her neighbors about how they are getting along. She said that in West Philadelphia she is constantly asked two questions: “Why were there SNAP cuts on November 1? And why didn’t anyone tell us?”

“Instead of a notification, what they get is this answering machine, once they call to check on their benefits, that says ‘due to government cuts you might not receive the same benefits,’” said Edwards, who is 29 and has a 5-year-old son.

She suggested that if Members of Congress had “pictures” to go with the numbers and statistics that usually dominate budget discussions, maybe that would help broaden some minds about what programs like SNAP mean to people.

“Give them a face with that number, and make it feel real,” Edwards told Adesina.

Adesina said that some Members who voted for cuts might be affected by stories of veterans or elderly people on SNAP, but not necessarily by stories about children.

“With children they’re not as moved,” said Adesina.

“Unbelievable,” said Boston Witness Juell Frazier, incredulous. “Unbelievable!”

A mother of two daughters, ages 4 and 8, Frazier was also forced to drop out of college in order to continue receiving TANF cash assistance. She had made the Dean’s List at Springfield College and only had two semesters remaining to obtain her Bachelors Degree in Human Services.

After the meeting with Adesina, we returned to the coffee shop and Edwards told me more about how she and her son are faring. She started her job two weeks ago and knows that she will soon face what is known as “the cliff effect”: when an increase in income triggers a sudden loss of federal assistance, leaving a person economically worse off just as they are trying to get ahead.

Edwards has been through this before, and said that when she shares her first pay stub with her caseworker she will lose her TANF cash assistance and child care assistance, and her food stamps will be cut by “more than half.”

“If I can’t afford to pay someone to watch my child, then I can’t go to work,” said Edwards. “I’ll end up losing work, and go back to having to depend on this system that’s not really helping me get ahead in life, it’s helping me stay stagnated, and it starts to become a cycle.”

Edwards shared her experiences with Representatives Fattah and McGovern.

“They just don’t give us enough time once we get that job to make the transition,” she told them.

Dr. Mariana Chilton, director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities, pointed to research showing that families who have a modest increase in income, and therefore lose their SNAP benefits, are more likely to experience hunger than are families who remain on SNAP.

“Just when the families are doing what they’re supposed to do, and want to do—right here we’ve got a teacher and a home health aide—they get cut off at the knees,” said Chilton. “And that’s over and above the SNAP cuts on November 1 and whatever else might happen with SNAP next.”

The conversation then turned to just that—what might happen with SNAP next.

You could feel the tension in the room about the prospect of more—and deeper—cuts, and what that would mean for the Witnesses’ families and their communities. They are already feeling the effects of the November 1 SNAP cut, which reduced the average individual benefit from $1.50 per meal to $1.40 per meal. It adds up to a reduction of $29 per month in food assistance for a family of three.

Already, the Witnesses say they are all purchasing fewer fresh fruits and vegetables. Frazier struggles to buy the higher-priced, gluten-free foods that her 4-year-old daughter needs due to food allergies. Edwards—who cut sugars out of her son’s diet when he was diagnosed with ADHD—now has to purchase more affordable processed foods and worries about how that will affect her son’s progress. And Davis—who is out of work and about to have reconstructive foot surgery—is already relying on food banks and friends more than ever before.

Now the House and Senate are negotiating over further proposed SNAP cuts of $40 billion and $4 billion, respectively. McGovern pointed out that the November 1 cuts will total $5 billion over the next year, and $11 billion through 2016.

“There should be no more cuts. My line in the sand is that we pass a Farm Bill that does not make hunger worse in this country,” said Representative McGovern. “We might have to swallow a lot of stuff we don’t like to get a good [SNAP outcome]. But do no harm is a big accomplishment here.”

He told the Witnesses that they could be “the wind at our backs, the hurricane at our backs” during these negotiations, and that over the next few months people need to be speaking out loudly and clearly for “no more cuts in SNAP.” He also said there should be protests in front of the offices of House Republicans who voted for $40 billion in SNAP cuts even though their constituents currently need food assistance.

When the Witnesses wrapped up their final meeting it was after 6 pm. They had started the day in the early morning hours to travel to Capitol Hill, and they now had to hurry to catch a train home. They felt a sense of accomplishment.

“I think our presence was powerful today because they got to hear our stories firsthand,” said Davis. “That’s what [Camden Witnesses] was basically about—ten women with ten cameras—taking pictures about anything that needs to be improved.”

“Anything we want to see a change in,” said Timmons.

The women and men of Witnesses to Hunger will surely continue to advocate for themselves, their families, each other and their communities. But if they are to succeed in their efforts, they will just as surely need millions of people to join them—people who are currently silent, or quiet, or taking action only when it’s convenient, like by clicking a mouse.

We will only turn the tide when we value the well being of Nia, Anisa, Emily, Quanda and Juell as much as we value our own—and we’re willing to fight for it, and make that fight visible.

You can learn more about Witnesses to Hunger by attending their fifth-anniversary celebration here.

A Walmart in Ohio held a food drive for its own employees, inadvertently admitting the company doesn’t pay its workers enough for them to afford food.

This post is co-written with Elaine Weiss.

The negative impact of poverty on a child’s educational achievement is indisputable. Whether the metric is school grades, state assessments, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), the SAT—the scores of low-income children are far lower than those of their wealthier peers. The reasons for that gap—and how our nation should respond—is the subject of heated debate and is explored by filmmaker Jyllian Gunther in the award-winning documentary, The New Public.

The film is inspiring and sobering as it examines the experiences of students and teachers at the Brooklyn Community Arts & Media (BCAM) High School. BCAM is a new, small public school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where one-third of the residents live below the poverty line and the graduation rate is 40 percent.

With nuance and humor, Gunther shows how poverty presents many obstacles to effective teaching and strong learning. It showcases BCAM’s ability to overcome some of those obstacles through relationship-building and teaching to students’ strengths. But it also demonstrates that no matter how dedicated and focused the teachers and leaders are, a school will too often be unable to transform its students’ academic lives.

Gunther follows BCAM’s inaugural class during its freshman year, and then returns to document its senior year as well. Several of the Bed-Stuy ninth-graders entering BCAM’s doors speak frankly of their unhappiness at their past schools. Students and parents discuss the failures in those schools to reach students, or of being kicked out or asked to leave.

We see BCAM faculty and staff grapple with how they can best overcome gaps in their students’ learning. Research suggests that those learning gaps begin prior to kindergarten and widen over subsequent years. As Kevin Greer, a veteran teacher of honors English at a large public high school in the Bronx, describes, “Kids here have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about.”

The teens also face deficits in skills that are often misnamed “non-cognitive”—like social, emotional and behavioral skills. Because we can’t measure resilience, perseverance, capacity to communicate, and appropriate interaction with peers, we tend to pay far too little attention to these qualities that researchers know contribute to academic and life success.

But BCAM educators strive to nurture these characteristics. Gunther highlights some of the school’s less orthodox approaches, such as students’ engaging in meditation practice. A social worker, Charlene Fravien, also leads the “Fly Young Women” empowerment group, where we listen in on discussions about body image and race. Fravien says the group is designed to help these students communicate more effectively—the members were selected because they are known to be “much more short-tempered—the girls you don’t mess with.”

One of the group’s participants is Lateefah. We see her quick intellect, sharp sense of humor, and leadership abilities from the outset of the film. She says her old school was bad—that the students were “uncontrollable” and so was she. BCAM seems to be helping her.

“Before I had a terrible look on life,” says Lateefah. “Now I’m not wasting my time on nothing, I’m going straight for what I need and what I want.” Yet she confides to the Fly Young Women that you can never leave your “baggage outside at the door.”

“Because there’s still gonna be that one thing in the back of your mind that’s bugging you and that piece missing from your heart,” she says.

Indeed, the “baggage” Lateefah has accumulated over the years soon returns. Despite the efforts of Fravien and supportive teachers, Lateefah finds herself once again fighting and struggling with peers.

Ninth-grader John reveals another challenge children growing up in poor households disproportionately face—maternal depression. His mother is physically present but emotionally absent. John says she suffered a series of severe seizures that forced her to stop working and has shut her in their small apartment for years.

Luckily, John is close to his warm, funny father. But that father, who works six or seven days a week and has little time to do much besides work and sleep, dies before John’s senior year. This compounds John’s struggle to come out as a gay man while also pursuing college and the financial aid he needs.

Moses enters BCAM as one of the school’s most promising new students. His mother and father push him hard to excel. Both his parents and teachers emphasize Moses’ strong aptitude, great energy, and potential. Yet, as Moses puts it, “the street” proves too strong a lure. As his enthusiasm for BCAM’s creative, arts-based approach wanes, he distances himself from teachers who want to help him. Senior year, just as he is being urged to get his college applications in order, his grades slip and his interest in school reaches new lows.

We also learn that the inaugural class has dropped from 104 students freshman year, to just sixty senior year, with thirty on track for graduation.

“I think small schools go through a wake-up call that third or fourth year and then they make adaptations,” says BCAM humanities teacher Lavie Raven. “These schools desperately need that fifth to seventh year, because when we’re measured by our first year graduates, the measurements are horrible. But the schools with the good staffs and leaders—learn.”

The New Public successfully depicts poverty’s complex impact on education, especially at the high school level. It offers nuanced suggestions that aren’t nearly so catchy as “no excuses,” and it doesn’t suggest the existence of a silver bullet like “grit and character” or “miracle teachers.” What the film does demonstrate is that creating schools where students in high-poverty neighborhoods can thrive calls for far more than teaching to a test and punishing teachers for not obtaining mandated results.

“Inner-city school teaching is like no other job,” Greer offers. “Because you’re dealing with basic American inequalities. Our society’s problems are so enormous. And they’re all foisted upon the schools to fix them all.”

Elaine Weiss is the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education, where she works with a high-level task force and coalition partners to promote a comprehensive, evidence-based set of policies to allow all children to thrive.

Aura Bogado delves into the school-to-prison pipeline in Los Angeles Public Schools.

The Half in Ten campaign—launched in 2007 by the Center for American Progress, Coalition on Human Needs and Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights—set an ambitious goal: to cut poverty in half over ten years. Today, it seems almost fantastical on the face of it, given the nation’s polarization and soaring political and economic inequality.

But with 200 coalition members across the nation combatting poverty, Half in Ten remains steadfast, as campaign manager Erik Stegman described at the release of its third annual report, which tracks progress towards the campaign’s ultimate goal.

“It’s an achievable goal because we’ve done it before,” said Stegman, who co-authored the report along with other contributors, including Sister Simone Campbell, who wrote the foreword. Stegman writes that the War on Poverty contributed to cutting poverty by 43 percent between 1964 and 1973, “to a historic low of 11.1 percent.”

“We know how to do it, and we can do it again,” asserts Stegman.

Half in Ten has always done an exceptional job of laying out the policy choices that are there for the taking if we want to dramatically reduce poverty. But the heart of its work lies in showing how public policy decisions intersect with the lives and experiences of real people.

So it was fitting that among the many stellar speakers who participated in the release event—including Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez; Congresswoman Barbara Lee; Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; and Reverend David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World—the first speaker was Chelsey Hagy, a mother of two from southwest Virginia.

Hagy grew up in a middle-class home and enrolled in community college at age 17. She got pregnant, and the father of her child was incarcerated prior to Hagy’s giving birth. She worked two part-time jobs but couldn’t make ends meet. She turned to assistance—public housing, WIC, Medicaid and food stamps (SNAP). Her son was diagnosed with Fragile X syndrome, a genetic disorder that will require special education and medical care throughout his life.

“I found myself traveling from doctor to doctor, adding more expenses that could not be met without the assistance of these programs, especially Medicaid,” said Hagy.

She enrolled in a residential nursing program, her sights set on obtaining a job that pays a living wage. She married and had a second child, but later separated from her husband. While pursuing her degree, her sons attended Early Head Start, where the family benefitted from early childhood education, preventive healthcare and nutrition classes and parental instruction.

With two semesters left to earn her degree, Hagy’s financial aid was exhausted. She turned to a Workforce Development program where prerequisite testing and a career assessment determined she would “likely be successful in the nursing field.” The program then paid for her tuition, books, uniform and stethoscope, as well as her state board exam fees.

Hagy graduated in May and works full-time as a cardiac nurse. She works twelve-hour rotations and “nursing students [now] shadow me.” She and her children no longer need government assistance, and Hagy has remarried and purchased her first home.

“I cannot imagine where my life would be right now if it weren’t for the support and opportunities that were given to me,” she said. “If I as a single mother of two—one of whom has special needs—can do it, anyone can.”

But it is this very notion that “anyone can” that is at stake in the current public policy debate, and Half in Ten explores that in a comprehensive manner in its report. It proposes that indeed people are worth investing in so that they can succeed and contribute to society; and that our country has the wealth to ensure that those who can’t work, or can’t find work with decent wages, can obtain the services needed to escape poverty.

The report focuses not only on the 46.5 million people living in poverty, but also on the more than one in three Americans—106 million of us—who live below twice the poverty line, on less than $36,600 annually for a family of three. While these families and individuals might not officially be in poverty, they are struggling to afford the basics—food, housing, healthcare, education—and are just a single hardship away from poverty.

The report suggests that the biggest obstacles to the kind of “shared prosperity” we had in the three decades following World War II—where all incomes were lifted by an expanding economy—are slow and inequitable economic growth and a proliferation of low-wage work, all exacerbated by the sequester and austerity policies.

Not only does the United States have the most extreme economic inequality it’s seen since the 1920s, but in the past three years the top 5 percent have had income growth of more than 5 percent, while the bottom fifth has seen its income fall by .8 percent (middle-class incomes have fallen even more over this same period).

Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said at the release event that of all the factors contributing to contemporary growth in poverty, economic inequality is the most significant.

“The largest factor for increasing poverty rates over the last thirty or forty years is the increase in economic inequality,” said Bernstein. “Economic inequality added [about] 5 percentage points to the growth of poverty over this period. If the economy is growing but the growth isn’t reaching the bottom half, then you’re going to have more poverty.”

Of course, the best anti-poverty program is a job that pays a decent wage. But the report notes that the economy needs to add 8.3 million jobs to reach pre-recession employment levels, and at the current rate of growth that would take until 2018. Meanwhile, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the sequester will result in “the loss of nearly 1 million more jobs by the third quarter of 2014.”

As for decent wages, too many of the jobs in this recovery pay low wages. The report points out that more than 40 percent of job growth in 2012 occurred in low-wage sectors. Many of these jobs pay the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour—a poverty wage that leaves a full-time worker earning approximately $15,000 per year. (The tipped minimum wage is just $2.13 an hour, which results in the people who serve us our food being twice as likely to need food stamps as the general population.) If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation it would stand at $10.75 an hour; if it had kept pace with increased productivity it would be $17.19.

“We continue to work to pass an increase in the minimum wage, and you can rest assured that the president will continue to exert his leadership,” said Secretary Perez, who delivered an impassioned speech that in part celebrated the historic decision to extend minimum wage and overtime protections to homecare workers.

But when I asked whether the president would sign an executive order to give priority to federal contractors who pay a living wage, Perez offered no such assurance.

“We’re looking into a range of interventions to address the issue of poverty,” he said. “We’re looking at every tool in our arsenal.”

If we can’t take common-sense action on the sequester and wages, it’s tough to envision how we get to other smart policies recommended in the report, unless we build a broad-based movement that is visible, disruptive and ongoing—as we have seen with marriage equality and immigration reform. The report recommends creating a Pathways Back to Work Fund which would include temporary, subsidized jobs—supported by both Democratic and Republican governors—as well as summer and year-round employment opportunities for low-income youth (14 percent of young people ages 16 to 24 are neither in school nor working); investing in jobs that will rebuild and modernize our infrastructure; passing paid leave legislation so that low-income workers don’t have to choose between their paycheck—and maybe keeping their job or making rent—and caring for themselves or a sick child (only 34 percent of low-wage workers had access to paid sick leave in 2013); and expanding access to higher education and skills training—funding for the Workforce Investment Act has declined by $500 million since 2010.

But as long as wages remain low, and job growth is slow, then the safety net is going to continue to be strained—even more so if congressional (mostly, but not entirely) Republicans are successful in their efforts to cut it further. Food stamps (SNAP) kept a record 4 million people out of poverty last year, but benefits were cut last week and both the House and Senate are now deliberating further cuts in Farm Bill negotiations. The Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit lifted 9.4 million people above the poverty line in 2011, but as the report notes a budget deal only extended the expansions of these credits through 2017, while it made the Bush era tax cuts permanent for most Americans. The percentage of uninsured people fell from 15.7 percent to 15.4 percent last year, but medical out-of-pocket costs also pushed 10.6 million families into poverty in 2011, and 27 Republican governors are currently refusing Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. If all states opted into Medicaid expansion, 17 million Americans could gain health coverage. Welfare reform is still hailed by many in both parties as a success, but it resulted in cash assistance (TANF) reaching only 25 of every 100 families in poverty compared to 68 for every 100 in 1996.

“I was a food stamp recipient,” said Congresswoman Lee. “If it had not been for the safety net, and my government, and an opportunity to go to college, I never would be where I am today.”

Lee said repeatedly that there is a need for a “grassroots movement” if we are to change the conversation in Washington and make the kinds of sensible investments in people that this report outlines.

Stegman said there is a hunger for the kind of movement Lee is calling for among Half in Ten’s grassroots networks across the country.

“One of the things I hear constantly is ‘we are sick and tired of the debate as it is right now. We are sick and tired of the cuts, we don’t even know where they are coming from,’ ” he said. “Most people don’t know what sequestration is versus the last round of cuts that happened through appropriations. What they know is it’s the wrong track.”

“This January will mark fifty years since President Johnson waged a War on Poverty. We have to build on what works, but also recognize that our economy and country have undergone dramatic shifts since then, and our laws and workplaces haven’t caught up,” said Melissa Boteach, director of Half in Ten. “We can’t just get stuck fighting defensive battles, even though it’s important to oppose austerity policies. We have to show an alternative path forward, and fight for our country to invest in people.”

If you read this entire 113-page report, I guarantee that you will know more about anti-poverty policy and the necessary battles that lie ahead than most members of Congress. There is so much in the report that deserves attention that I don’t have space for: the fact that the employment rate for people with disabilities is just 17 percent—their poverty rate more than 28 percent—and that programs like Supplemental Security Income and the Earned Income Tax Credit could be strengthened to reverse these trends; that childcare assistance policies are worsening in twenty-seven states in 2012, making it harder for single mothers—who have a poverty rate of 42.5 percent—to go to work; the sequestration cut of $4.2 billion in 2013 funding for children—concentrated in the areas of education, early learning and housing—comes at a time when more than one in five children live in poverty.

But in the end, it might all come down to this: when you consider Chelsey’s story—and those of other families and individuals who are profiled throughout the report—do you think human capital is worth investing in, and that people are worth protecting from severe hardship? If so, how hard are you willing to fight for that?

Because don’t doubt for a second that it won’t require a real, sustained and hard fight to follow the kind of roadmap provided by Half in Ten in this report.

Events/Get involved

Wendy’s Founder’s Week-of-Action with Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Tell Congress to Protect SNAP

Tell the House: The time is now for Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Organizing Meeting: DC Restaurant Workers organizing around increasing tipped minimum wage and expanding paid sick days for all restaurant workers. (Today, November 4, 2 pm–3:30 pm, Restaurant Opportunities Center Office, 1326 9th NW, Washington, DC 20001.)

Rally: Join Paid Sick Days for All Coalition and Respect DC as they rally to pressure DC Councilmembers to pass a bill to raise the minimum wage, tipped minimum wage, and extend access to paid sick days to all workers in the District. (Friday, November 8, 9 am, Wilson Building 1350 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20004.)

Clips and other resources

“Food Stamps Cut: A Bipartisan Scandal,” George Zornick

“Native Americans Are Still Waiting for an Economic Recovery,” Algernon Austin

“The First Eight Years: Giving Kids a Foundation for Lifetime Success,” Annie E. Casey Foundation

“…States Taken Over by the GOP Have Been Quietly Screwing American Workers,” Zoë Carpenter

“CHARTS: The Hidden Benefits of Food Stamps,” Christopher Cook

“Microcredit for Americans,” Shaila Dewan

“19 Young Activists Changing America,” Peter Dreier

“What pediatricians have learned about SNAP,” Deborah Frank, MD

“Ohio Governor Defies G.O.P. With Defense of Social Safety Net,” Trip Gabriel

“Pennsylvania welfare department urged to improve its methods,” Kate Giammarise

“Rejecting False Choices to Protect Vermont’s EITC,” Jack Hoffman

“Audio: McDonald’s Tells Full-Time Employee to Apply for Welfare Benefits,” Joshua Holland

“A War on the Poor,” Paul Krugman

“The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011–2012,” Gordon Lafer

“Will Every State Eventually Expand Medicaid?” John Light

“A Letter From Bill Moyers,” Bill Moyers

“Expanding Social Security Benefits for Financially Vulnerable Populations,” National Council of Women’s Organizations, Center for Community Change

“The real 21st-century problem in public education,” Elaine Weiss

Quote of the week

“I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor. That if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy. You know what? The very people who complain ought to ask their grandparents if they worked at the W.P.A.”
   —Republican Governor John Kasich, in The New York Times

This Week in Poverty normally posts on Friday mornings, and again at Moyers & Company. You can e-mail me at WeekInPoverty@me.com and follow me on Twitter.

Greg Kaufmann wrote about the Older Americans Act —a safety net for seniors—last week.

The Older Americans Act (OAA) is one of the most important pieces of legislation that you probably never heard of or at least know very little about. You know Meals on Wheels? The OAA funds it, and also essential services for seniors like job training, caregiver support, transportation, preventive health services, and protection from abuse and financial exploitation.

This Wednesday, Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, along with Republican Senator Lamar Alexander and Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, will offer a 5-year reauthorization of the legislation to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. If the legislation is to pass the Senate and the House, it will need strong bipartisan support from the Committee.

OAA programs aren’t means tested, so they serve as a safety net for many seniors living just above the poverty line, and prevent other seniors from falling deeper into poverty. The programs also save money over the long-term. One clear example of cost-savings is the Meals on Wheels program. A study by the Center for Effective Government found that for every $1 in federal spending on Meals on Wheels, there is as much as a $50 return in Medicaid savings alone. However, the program currently reaches less than 10 percent of low-income seniors who need access to meals programs.

“During this terrible recession, there has been a growing demand for meals for seniors at a time when budgets are being slashed,” Senator Sanders told me. “There is clear evidence that some of our poorest seniors are simply not getting the food they need.”

Fall prevention programs funded by the OAA also protect seniors from needing to go to the hospital or into nursing homes—where too often they spend every last dime and are then forced to turn to Medicaid. One in three seniors falls every year, and falls are the leading cause of fatal and nonfatal injuries for people ages 65 and older. The resulting injuries are projected to cost the nation $60 billion in 2020. Research has shown that several OAA-supported programs have reduced falls by 30 to 55 percent—which saves both money and lives.

The OAA’s Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP) allows very low-income seniors to get job skills while also providing community service for non-profits. Nearly 90 percent of participants live in poverty (on less than about $11,000 annually), and one-third are homeless or at risk of homelessness. While the job training helps these seniors return to the labor force and in some cases prevents homelessness, participants also perform millions of hours of community service for local organizations struggling with their own budget cuts. Howard Bedlin, vice president of public policy at the National Council of Aging, said SCSEP has “a value to states and communities estimated at over $1 billion.” But due to a lack of resources, the number of seniors served by the program has declined by 34 percent since FY 2010, and the program now has waiting lists in many cities.

All of the OAA programs have been severely underfunded, failing to keep pace with inflation and population growth for decades. Senator Sanders and eighteen cosponsors previously attempted to reauthorize the OAA with a funding increase of 12 percent over FY2010 levels, but in this political climate that proved to be a non-starter, despite the fact that the programs save money. This bill is a scaled back version of the previous legislation. It does not set a cap on current funding levels, and it leaves appropriators with the flexibility to increase funding in future years.

Other important aspects of the legislation prevent and address elder abuse. Elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation are all too common in the US and have long been overlooked. The bill directs the Administration on Aging to include training for state and local agencies on elder abuse prevention and screening, and it promotes data collection at the state level to help assess the scope of this problem. It also strengthens the Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, which provides ombudsmen to serve all residents of long-term care facilities, regardless of age. These advocates address issues ranging from complaints over a scheduled wake-up time, to concerns about quality of care, or abuse. Significantly, the bill specifies that all residents must have private, unimpeded access to ombudsmen, so there are no other parties that are interfering, intimidating, or somehow preventing candid communication.

The Nation is facing a crippling postal rate hike—donate by October 31 to help us foot this $120,272 bill.

In contrast to the National Council on Aging, which has been a steady supporter of a strong OAA, one powerful advocacy voice that was missing during earlier attempts at reauthorization was AARP. Although it is late to the party, AARP is endorsing the legislation now, and its support is critical to passing a strong bipartisan bill.

If you are represented by Senators on the HELP Committee, now would be a good time to let them know that you expect strong support for the OAA—from the Committee markup on Wednesday through passage on the Senate floor—and that the legislation needs more funding.

If we truly think it’s important to respect our elders, here’s a simple way to prove it.

Greg Kaufmann has called for renewed political will to confront poverty in America. 

This Friday, 48 million people—including more than 21 million children—will see their food stamp (SNAP) benefits reduced. Instead of receiving an average of a buck-fifty for a meal, individuals in need of food assistance will get about $1.40. For families of three, the cut means they will receive $29 less in food stamps every month.

Tianna Gaines-Turner recently described the impact of cuts like these in written testimony she submitted to Congressman Paul Ryan’s War on Poverty hearing: “Cutting a person’s benefits by $10, or $15, or $20 might not seem like a lot to legislators, but it would cut meals out completely for families like mine.”

Families like hers are families with two working parents earning low wages while trying to support three children. Ms. Gaines-Turner is employed by a childcare provider and her husband works the deli counter at a grocery store.

The SNAP cuts come at a time when 49 million people—about 14.5 percent of all US households—are food insecure. That means they don’t have enough money to meet their basic food needs, and don’t necessarily know where their next meal is coming from. The Institute of Medicine already demonstrated the inadequacies of the SNAP allotment for hungry families even before this cut.

What are we to make of this—the timing of the cut, the lack of discussion about it on the Hill, and the fact that it will deliver yet another blow to people who are already among the most vulnerable citizens in our nation?

It all points to the same hard truth we see time and again: when it comes to responding to the struggles of the more than one in three Americans who are living below twice the poverty line—on less than about $36,600 annually for a family of three—we prefer to look the other way. Even as the interests of low-income people and the middle-class converge—for example, the need for good jobs and fair wages, access to continuing education, a more equitable economy where 95 percent of the gains don’t go to the top 1 percent, and a safety net that is available in tough times or when jobs pay lousy wages—we still find that a SNAP cut like this can occur with hardly a whisper of protest (outside of the advocacy community) at a time when hunger is widespread.

What is most frustrating, of course, is how easily we could move in a better direction.

In 2007, when the Half in Ten campaign to cut poverty by 50 percent over ten years was launched, the Urban Institute found that implementation of just four of the campaign’s many recommendations would result in a 26 percent reduction in poverty. (At the time, there were 37 million people in poverty, so it would have meant lifting 9.5 million people out of poverty over ten years.) The four recommendations included a modest increase in the minimum wage, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit (which lifted 9.4 million people above the poverty line in 2011), and guaranteeing childcare assistance to low-income families (tough to go to work when there is no reliable and affordable place for childcare).

We didn’t move in that direction and we continue to move in the wrong direction today. Food stamps lifted a record 4 million people above the poverty line in 2012, but benefits will be cut on Friday and both the House and Senate are deliberating further cuts in Farm Bill negotiations.

Unemployment insurance (UI) lifted 1.7 million people above the poverty line in 2012. But in 2011, it lifted 2.3 million people, and 3.2 million in 2010. Arloc Sherman, senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted that “we pulled back too quickly on unemployment insurance” and if we hadn’t “there would be a million fewer poor people today.” Instead, Sherman writes, “the number of UI recipients for every 100 unemployed workers fell from 67 in 2010 to 57 in 2011 and 48 in 2012.” Why? Because some states cut back the number of weeks people are eligible for regular, state-funded UI benefits; and Congress provided fewer weeks of federal UI benefits for long-term unemployed workers.

If we can’t even get good policy for unemployed workers in the aftermath of the Great Recession, or for hungry people at a time when there is a proliferation of low-wage work, then how in the world can we possibly expect to win on issues like investing in affordable housing, ending child hunger, or making post-secondary education available for all?

It’s time to stop bemoaning “the lack of political will” to take on poverty and focus on what we are doing to create that political will. Because no matter how great a speech someone delivers, or how compelling a study someone conducts, or how smart the talking points are for those advocating for good policy, or how many twitter storms, e-mails, or online petitions we push—there will be no significant change without a truly broad-based movement along the lines of what we are seeing with immigration reform and marriage equality.

Otherwise, expect the advocacy community to always be playing defense and the most vulnerable people to keep paying the price for it.

Get involved

Tell Congress: Protect Federal Nutrition Programs

Stop the Hunger Clock

Tell McDonalds to Stop Buying Luxury Jets Until They Pay Workers a Living Wage

Tell Wendy’s to join the Fair Food Program

United for Homes: Campaign to fund the National Housing Trust Fund

Talking to Tavis

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Tavis Smiley on his show. It was a little surreal, since I’ve interviewed him a few times and found myself resisting the urge to answer his questions with questions of my own. But I enjoyed it, and I especially appreciate Tavis because he never stops talking about poverty—never. Truth be told, I kind of botched the ending because I always have so much to say about the Coalition of Immokalee (CIW) workers and I unsuccessfully tried to condense. So to learn more about CIW, please check out my last blog. Also, check out Tavis’s new four-year initiative, ENDING POVERTY: America’s Silent Spaces. (Be sure to sign up for updates at the bottom of the page.) Here is my segment with Tavis:

Other resources

“Texas Voter ID Law Discriminates Against Women, Students and Minorities,” Ari Berman

“Four steps for keeping at-risk youth from engaging in the sex trade,” Meredith Dank

“Oakland Workers’ Collective Matches Laborers, Employers,” Equal Voice News

“U.S. Hits Record Number of Homeless Students,” First Focus

“It’s Time to Bolster TANF,” Ife Floyd

“TANF Cash Benefits Continued To Lose Value in 2013,” Ife Floyd and Liz Schott

“Why housing policy really is education policy,” Megan Gallagher

“As Our Safety Nets Get Slashed, More People Fall into Deep Poverty,” Stephanie Mencimer

“Pivot Point: State Child Care Assistance Policies 2013,” National Women’s Law Center

“Poor kids in schools is a poverty problem, not an education policy problem,” Austin Nichols

“A Primer for Our New Mayor,” NYC Food Forum

“Running In Place: Where the Middle Class and the Poor Meet,” Miles Rapoport and Jennifer Wheary

“Social Security Keeps 22 Million Americans Out Of Poverty,” Paul Van de Water, Arloc Sherman and Kathy Ruffing

“Paying But Not Eating: Fast Food Gets $7B in Subsidies,” Brad Wong

This Week in Poverty normally posts on Friday mornings, and again at Moyers & Company. You can e-mail me at WeekInPoverty@me.com and follow me on Twitter.

Greg Kaufmann has previoulsy written about the impact of budget cuts on Middle America. 

Protest by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers outside a Wendy’s restaurant in New York. (Credit: Aaron Cantú)

I was thrilled to see the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) honored at the Roosevelt Institute’s Four Freedom Awards on Wednesday night. Having followed the organization’s work for seven years, I believe their effectiveness is unmatched, and their achievements constantly offer a reason for hope.

The CIW way is non-hierarchal, led from the grassroots, fearless and savvy—and they have defeated Goliath so many times that they can no longer be considered a David. I think many community-based and national anti-poverty organizations can learn a lot from them.

The Four Freedom Awards honor those who exemplify Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vision of democracy—“a world founded upon four essential human freedoms”—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. Past recipients include President Jimmy Carter, Senator Ted Kennedy, Studs Terkel, Barbara Ehrenreich, Elie Wiesel, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi and Carlos Fuentes. The farmworkers were introduced by Roosevelt Fellow Dorian Warren, who outlined some of CIW’s key campaigns and victories.

In 1993, the CIW was a small group of tomato industry farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida, whose unflinching organizing efforts would eventually end a twenty-year decline in their poverty wages. How did they do it? Over a five-year period, they engaged in work stoppages and demonstrations, a thirty-day hunger strike and a 234-mile march from Fort Myers to Orlando, Florida.

Although they won raises of 13 to 25 percent—resulting in an increase of several million dollars annually for the community—they still earned well below the poverty line. The group realized that the real power was with the corporate buyers whose constant demand for lower tomato prices exerted significant downward pressure on farmworker wages. In 2001, the CIW launched its Campaign for Fair Food—forging an alliance between consumers and farmworkers—and initiated the first-ever national boycott of a major fast food chain: Taco Bell.

Students, people of faith, workers and community members demanded that Taco Bell pay an extra penny per pound of tomatoes, which would go directly towards workers’ wages. They also called on the corporation to take responsibility for its supply chain and only purchase from growers who signed an enforceable code of conduct that addressed human rights violations in the fields—violations such as involuntary servitude and sexual harassment.

After four years of struggle, Taco Bell agreed to the demands and called on other fast-food chains to do the same. Over the next three years, McDonald’s, Burger King and Subway all followed suit. Today, Wendy’s remains the only holdout. The CIW turned its attention to the supermarket industry and won similar agreements with Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s (Publix, Giant, Kroger and Stop & Shop still aren’t on board); in the food service provider industry, Bon Appétit Management Co., Compass Group, Aramark and Sodexo all signed fair food agreements in 2009–10.

In 2010, the Campaign for Fair Food evolved into a broader Fair Food Program—a new model of social responsibility. In addition to abiding by the penny-per-pound agreement—which has resulted in over $11 million in additional earnings for workers since January 2011—corporate buyers who sign on will purchase tomatoes only from growers who sign a code of conduct drafted by workers, in consultation with the growers and buyers. There is also worker-to-worker education on the new rights, and workers monitor their own workplaces.

Under the agreement, the Fair Food Standards Council conducts regular audits, investigates complaints and monitors resolutions at the twenty-six participating growers—growers who account for 90 percent of the $650 million in revenues in the tomato industry. When major violations occur and aren’t corrected, corporations stop buying from those growers. (This model is similar to the one US retailers have refused to sign on to in the Bangladesh garment industry.) Through this system, four crew leaders with long histories of sexual harassment or labor abuse have been terminated, and supervisors at those companies were trained to address sexual harassment and other requirements under the Fair Food Program.

“With this program, the women who pick tomatoes to support their families no longer have to leave their dignity in the tomato fields,” said farmworker Nely Rodriguez, who accepted the Freedom From Want Medal along with fellow CIW members Gerardo Reyes and Greg Asbed. “Women now have a voice and a way to stop the harassment and abuse that happened for too long.”

Finally, there is the CIW’s stunning anti-slavery campaign: since 1997, the group has assisted the Department of Justice in uncovering numerous multi-state slavery operations in the Southeastern United States. This work has resulted in the liberation of more than 1,200 workers and was a major factor in the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The State Department recognized the CIW as “an independent and pressing voice as they uncover slavery rings, tap the power of the workers, and hold companies and governments accountable.” Now, with the Fair Food Program and the severe financial consequences for growers that are imposed when forced labor is discovered, Florida has evolved from what one federal prosecutor described as “ground zero for modern-day slavery” to having no cases of slavery over the past three years.

Asbed spoke of the special significance of the Freedom from Want Medal in the context of the organization’s history.

“Twenty years ago when we began organizing, Immokalee was a town defined by violence,” he said. “Violence against women, beatings in the fields, modern-day slavery—it was a brutal and unforgiving place.”

The farmworkers began to gather every week in a room at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in town. They would pass around the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights—the preamble of which included FDR’s Four Freedoms.

“This book gave us hope that a better world, a more humane world, was in fact possible,” said Asbed. “[It] gave us the strength we needed to fight to make that world real. So being here today feels a bit like coming home, like our journey has come full circle.”

It’s a journey that shows us what it means to work directly—from the grassroots—with those most affected by poverty; what it means to set a seemingly unreachable bar and persevere; and what it means to understand your opposition and find new ways to challenge it.

Asbed insisted that the CIW’s “work has only just begun.”

“Our work is not done until all farmworkers live free from want,” he said. “Until all farmworkers live free from fear; and until all farmworkers live free to enjoy the dignified life they deserve for the hard work they do.”

Get involved

Tell Wendy’s to join the Fair Food Program

Tell Publix to join the Fair Food Program

Stop the Hunger Clock: On November 1, all 48 million low-income Americans who currently need food assistance will see a cut in their benefits—an average cut of $29 per month. (The average benefit is currently just $1.50 per person, per meal). Take action to stop the cut.

United for Homes: Campaign to fund the National Housing Trust Fund

Clips and other resources

“Sister Simone Reflects on the Faithful March,” BillMoyers.com Staff

“Another N.C. threat to program for poor,” The Charlotte Observer

“What You Can Get For The Price Of A Shutdown,” Bryce Covert

“Seeking Shelter: The Experiences and Unmet Needs of LGBT Homeless Youth,” Andrew Cray, Katie Miller and Laura Durso

“La. Group Works to Reduce ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline’,” Equal Voice News

“This map shows where the world’s 30 million slaves live. There are 60,000 in the U.S.,” Max Fisher

“Let’s Treat Housing as a Health Issue,” Jeff Foreman

“Cancer survivors in rural areas often skip care due to costs,” HealthDay News (via Rural Assistance Center)

“In Washington State, Home of Highest Minimum Wage, a City Aims Higher,” Kirk Johnson and Steven Greenhouse

“Study: Poor children are now the majority in American public schools in South, West,” Lyndsey Layton

“Health of rural communities threatened by loss of grocery stores,” Jim McLean (via Rural Assistance Center)

“Not a Dentist: Is a ‘Dental Therapist’ the Solution?” Michael Mello

“Low Wage Employers Cost American Families a Quarter Trillion Dollars,” Alan Pyke

“What would Milton Friedman think of food stamps? Brace yourselves, conservatives,” Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

“Data Show Critical Role of Head Start in the Lives of Poor Children and Their Families,” Stephanie Schmit

“Separate Spaces, Risky Places: A Price the Nation Can’t Afford,” Brian Smedley

“Nine Facts That Prove Disability Insurance Isn’t A Giant Boondoggle,” Rebecca Vallas and Shawn Fremstad

“Nothing Ted Cruz Said About the ACA Today Is True,” George Zornick

Vital statistics

US poverty (less than $23,492 for a family of four): 46.5 million people, 15 percent.

African-American poverty rate: 27.2 percent.

Hispanic poverty rate: 25.6 percent.

White poverty rate: 9.7 percent.

People with disabilities: 28 percent.

Poorest age group: children, 34.6 percent of all people in poverty are children.

Children in poverty: 16.1 million, 21.8 percent, including 38 percent of African-American children, 34 percent of Latino children, and 12 percent of white children.

Poverty rate among families with children headed by single mothers: 40.9 percent.

Gender gap: Women 31 percent more likely to be poor than men.

Deep poverty (less than $9,142 for a family of three): 20.4 million people, one in fifteen Americans, nearly 10 percent of all children, up from 12.6 million in 2000—an increase of 59 percent.

Twice the poverty level (less than $46,042 for a family of four): 106 million people, approximately one in three Americans.

Jobs in the US paying less than $34,000 a year: 50 percent.

Jobs in the US paying below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually: 25 percent.

Poverty-level wages, 2011: 28 percent of workers.

Federal minimum wage: $7.25 ($2.13 for tipped workers)

Federal minimum wage if indexed to inflation since 1968: $10.59.

Federal minimum wage if it kept pace with productivity gains: $18.72.

Hourly wage needed to lift a family of four above poverty line, 2011: $11.06

Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: 68 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Families receiving cash assistance, 2011: 27 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Impact of public policy, 2011: without government assistance, poverty would have been twice as high—nearly 30 percent of population.

Number of people 65 or older kept out of poverty by Social Security: 15.3 million

Quote of the week

“Somewhere we have heard that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.… Today, for first the first time in the history of the south, this dream is coming true for farmworkers in Florida’s agriculture. For the first time, we have a place at the table. In our struggle for better wages and working conditions, we are confident that this recognition will help us to arrive to the day in which our dreams will be made fully real.”
   — Gerardo Reyes, farmworker, accepting Freedom from Want Medal on behalf of the CIW

This Week in Poverty posts here on Friday mornings, and again at Moyers & Company. You can e-mail me at WeekInPoverty@me.com and follow me on Twitter.

In last week’s report on poverty, Greg Kaufmann described how defunding Obamacare would hurt the poor.

An interfaith group of Americans sings prayers for reconciliation in Washington, DC.

Yesterday in the Canon House Office Building rotunda on Capitol Hill, Rabbi David Shneyer led an interfaith group of approximately 150 clergy leaders, locked-out workers, and people of faith, in song.

“Of love and justice I will sing,” sang the rabbi, playing a guitar and riffing off of Psalm 101.

As the others joined in, their voices rang out powerfully and could be heard clearly a floor below.

The group had gathered to participate in an action organized by Faith in Public Life and the Washington Interreligious Staff Community. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Unitarians and others marched on the offices of key Republican Members—including GOP Leadership—and urged a vote to immediately end the shutdown and to raise the debt ceiling without preconditions. Petitions with over 32,000 signatures were simultaneously delivered to members’ home district offices around the country.

When the song ended, Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK, offered a prayer: “It is the common good that is the way forward for our nation…. And so let us pray for their courage that they can act on behalf of all of our people. And may our walking these halls, and praying with Congress, be the bridge that you need for healing and for some sanity in caring for all.”

The group then began its procession while singing “Amazing Grace” and other hymns. Police officers quickly told them to keep their volume low and stay to the sides of the corridors, or risk arrest. The group complied. It wasn’t that they feared arrest—many of these faith leaders have engaged in civil disobedience in the past—but that wasn’t their mission on Tuesday.

“The softer tone actually made it feel like a pilgrimage,” said Rabbi Shneyer, director of the Am Kolel Jewish Renewal Community. “Like a witnessing.”

The group divided in two so there would be sufficient time to visit congressional offices in the Cannon, Rayburn and Longworth buildings. When Sr. Simone arrived with her delegation at Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan’s office door they were greeted by staffer Joyce Meyer.

“Good to see you again,” said Meyer to Sr. Simone.

Sr. Simone told Meyer that they had come to pray that Representative Ryan “has the courage and insight to do the work that needs to be done to care for the common good.”

“We have furloughed workers who are with us,” she said.“This is not just about numbers, this is about people. Congressman Ryan, I know, understands that. We pray that his heart is broken by it so that he will act courageously.”

One of the participating workers was Alex Vasquez, a food worker at the Smithsonian, who said in a released statement, “Before the shutdown I was struggling to support my unemployed father and little sister. Now I’ve gone from low wages to no wages. Tea Party Republicans need to stop these political games.”

While Meyer was polite and told the marchers that she appreciated what they had to say, other staffers indicated that their bosses share the marchers’ urgency to end the shutdown.

According to one clergy member invited into the office of Congressman Dave Joyce of Ohio, a staffer said that the representative had a “strong desire to end the shutdown [and] knows that people are hurting.” A staffer for Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf distributed copies of a recent floor statement in which the congressman said, “For those of us who think Obamacare is a disaster…its future will not be decided by shutting or opening the government.”

As the meetings drew to an end, Sr. Simone shared that she “had been feeling a little discouraged, but coming together in faith makes me think, ‘Yes, there is a way forward in this desert time.’”

The group closed by singing “We Are Marching,” and as they did, Reverend Cathy Rion Starr of All Souls Church Unitarian offered these impromptu remarks: “We are the changemakers. It is us, and those we are connected to in our congregations and communities, and we need to keep coming back and forth and back and forth. This is the way that we walk in the light of God, in the light of life, in the light of love. So let us keep marching together.”

So what is next for these faith leaders and the marchers? What about the fact that so many of the Republicans who have shut down the government and are willing to default already consider themselves people of deep faith?

“It is true that some think they are people of faith, but it seems to me that they don’t know the struggle of the working poor people,” Sr. Simone told me. “They have a head for figures but not a heart for the people. Maybe faith for them is more research and theory and less the story of people.”

“Perhaps the faith community needs to engage with Congress more often and have serious discussions [about] morality and ethics,” said Rabbi Shneyer. “Maybe that would help Congresspeople and staffers open their hearts to surveying the people in a more just and compassionate way.”

Greg Kaufmann previously blogged about what Republican efforts to defund Obamacare mean for impoverished Americans.