Do-Gooder-in-Training

The other day, my five-year-old daughter Merrie said she wished she could be a baby again, like her sister, Charlotte, because it seems more fun getting all the attention. 

I wanted to remind her of some of the advantages of being a big girl: I told her of an article I had seen in the paper about a tri-state fair (with big amusement park rides and such) to be held in our little hometown, Pownal, on the grounds of the former Green Mountain Racetrack.  The last two years we’ve gone to the Columbia County Fair in August, and she loves it.  I reminded her that Charlotte won’t be able to go on the big rides.  Merrie forgot all about wanting to be a baby, and started making plans for how we would attend every day of the 5 day tri-state fair because it would be so close to home.

We had just been to the racetrack this past weekend; Merrie was riding her bike for the first day this spring, and we used the enormous empty parking lot of the track for her to practice on safely.  At one point we parked her bike and explored the outside of the track’s buildings, looking in at the stacks of chairs that probably haven’t been touched for 10 years.  It’s a gloomy sight, and the emptiness must seem utterly bizarre to a 5-year-old.

The next morning, as I was driving her to school past the big forlorn racetrack, Merrie said to me from the back seat, “The thing I’m most happy about the fair coming here is just that it won’t be so empty anymore, at least for a few days.”

That’s my girl.  An abandoned building and parking lot the size of an ocean just doesn’t feel right.  Maybe she’ll be the one who can finally figure out how to do something productive with that racetrack property and create some more economic life for the people of Pownal.

New National Anti-Poverty Strategy Proposed

I was excited to see today that the progressive Center for American Progress has just come out with a new national anti-poverty strategy report.  This is important news, because the CAP seems to be playing a larger and larger role in influencing policymakers in Washington.

I haven’t had time to dig into the report yet, but I was glad to see in the executive summary that asset-building represents one of four guiding principles for the new strategy.

Does this foreshadow greater attention to be paid to domestic poverty in the years ahead, following the recent changes in leadership in congress? According to an op-ed in today’s Washington Post by staff of the Center for American Progress, we have reason to be optimistic.

“Today, the House Ways and Means Committee will hold a hearing devoted to discussing solutions to poverty. It will be their fourth poverty-focused hearing this year, and it’s clear that they want to do more than just talk.”

I’ll be eager to see how this unfolds.

Techno-Poverty Watch: Rising Infant Mortality

I complained to my wife the other day that a blogger writing about poverty is like that kid in the lunchroom no one wanted to talk to, or better yet a wino staggering down the street, fellow pedestrians rushing to the opposite sidewalk to avoid his slurred, paranoid monologues. 

You can see I feel that there’s not much of a blogging community for folks like me whose passion is poverty-reduction — compared, say, to the community of bloggers like my wife who are interested in wholesome food (we all have to eat). 

What I’m saying is, my Technorati subscription to the “poverty” tag doesn’t often unearth a lot of juicy posts on domestic poverty issues, but the last couple of days have been a bit of an anomoly; my “Techno-Poverty Watch” has finally yielded some action. As usual, leave it to the The New York Times to get bloggers writing about social issues. The Times ran an article on Sunday about the recent rise in infant mortality in Mississippi and other southern states.

I counted at least seven bloggers (who had never hit my radar screen before) who posted on this article and tagged it “poverty.” I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that all seven were activists on the political left; I’m a lefty too, after all, although truthfully I don’t want poverty to be stereotyped as an issue of the left because it won’t be effectively addressed in the long-term except by policies that build consensus and inclusion across the political and demographic spectrum.

That being said, it’s interesting to observe when poverty captures people’s attention. Several of the posts framed the issue in terms of women’s rights and equity for women. Justice for Women, who describes herself as a radical feminist and theologian, stresses the “feminine face of poverty” made evident in the article. Thoughts of an Average Woman was so outraged she quoted virtually the entire article in several chunks. The Tennessee Guerilla Women, who keep busy “fighting the radical right in Tennessee and the nation,” compare the rise in infant mortality to the “quagmire in Iraq,” both being phenomena that were predicted by those on the left in response to policies pushed by the right. Arse Poetica felt the article was casting blame on the women rather than on the policies that are causing infant mortality to rise. Similarly, Dispatch from the Trenches points to hypocrisy among conservative politicians who support a “culture of life” but push for “anti-life policies” that “have been systematically depriving real-life pregnant women who will be carrying to term of luxuries like food and adequate medical care because they’re too expensive.

Taking a more gender-neutral perspective, The Rusted View calls this an issue that “should shock the conscience,” while AMERICAblog reminds us we’re in the 21st century and should demand better. The latter blog has recorded over 390 comments to this post.

Personally, while I agree that statistics like this are tragic, and that increases in infant mortality in southern states are likely tied to the greater willingness of red states to cut safety net services, I don’t think it’s constructive to have a knee-jerk response that implies we ought to return to the good old days pre-welfare reform. We do need to invest more in services for the poor, but we need to focus on asset-building strategies such as job skills, financial education, parenting education, transportation, daycare and access to post-secondary education, not just traditional welfare, which has never been very successful at moving people out of poverty.

Financial Lit 101

No, I don’t mean Wall Street literature, although perhaps someday I should blog on that topic. I mean financial literacy, a phrase that always sounds a bit off-kilter to me, as if financial skills were something everyone would have if only they had paid a bit more attention in elementary school.

Until just a few days ago we thought we had our financial literacy plans all worked out. We would offer classes for 10-12 people at a time, perhaps 4 groups per year, in 6-week sessions. From the first group of low-income participants starting in late May, we would choose 5 of the most motivated to be our initial IDA account-holders and receive matched savings accounts. After completing the financial literacy course, those 5 would continue to meet once a month as a “savings club” to receive further training and encouragement while they saved for the purchase of a first home. Easy, right.

All of this seemed logical to us until we made a visit to Franklin County Community Action to chat with the person in charge of their asset development program. She has run their program since it launched about 4 years ago, and she was kind enough to impart some hard-earned wisdom. She strongly advised us to re-consider our plan for the financial literacy classes. She didn’t come right out and say, “You’re nuts,” but she might as well have. She was concerned that it would be very awkward to train IDA participants and non-IDA participants with the same curriculum. IDA participants are motivated to go through a full 6-week course because it’s part of joining the IDA program and therefore it’s the only way they can receive the matched savings. But with no such motivation for the non-IDA participants, she was skeptical that we’d have any luck keeping people in a class for 6 weeks. She felt that a separate class for non-IDA participants would be lovely, but would have to be structured much differently, perhaps meeting only 2 or 3 times instead of weekly for 6 weeks.

This same concern had occurred to us 6 months ago, but somehow we had managed to banish it from our minds as we drew closer to the launch of the program. Now we’re just a month from starting classes and the question of whether to run a class just for IDA participants or for a mixed group has come screeching back into view. Running a class for only 5 IDA particpants seems like a less than ideal use of resources. And what if 1 or 2 drop out after we’re several weeks into the class. Then we won’t have our 5 IDA accounts.

We haven’t settled on an answer yet. Tune in next week to learn how our heroes extricate themselves from this thorny dilemma.

Robert Hayden

I claim to be among the legions of literary-minded anti-poverty bloggers, and yet we’re more than halfway through national poetry month without a single poem from me.  For shame.  Today I remedy that.

My younger daughter Charlotte is nine months old, and I recently revived a tradition that I began when my older daughter, Merrie, now five, was also less than a year old: I read Charlotte poetry every evening as she falls asleep in her crib, which usually takes at least 15 or 20 minutes a night, sometimes much longer.  Often I read from “A Child’s Anthology of Poetry,” which isn’t full of particularly childish poetry, so I find it quite tolerable. 

One of my favorites from that collection, which I must have read at least a hundred times to my older daughter, and which I re-read last night for the first time in several years, is “Those Winter Sundays,” by Robert Hayden.  I checked Hayden’s bio online today, confirming what comes through so powerfully in the poem — the terrible heartbreak and poverty of Hayden’s childhood. 

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

One of the great last lines; that vaguely difficult-to-conjure word, offices, somehow conveys the tone of failure and regret just perfectly. 

That poem alone says much more than a hundred posts on poverty.  Does that mean I can take the next six months off?

Po’ Richard on Wealth-Build’n

My friend and favorite starving artist Jenn Mattern of Breed ‘Em and Weep blogged recently on her perennial financial woes, but bounced back to her usual hilarity with an introduction to the wonders of Gizoogle.

If you’ve read my founding post, you know that I have a soft spot for founding father Ben Franklin, whose pithy proverbs in Poor Richard’s Almanac put most of today’s financial advice to shame.  It’s a little-known fact that although Latin was the language of choice for the writings of many founding fathers, Franklin preferred to write in Jive. 

So I offer you some of my favorite Poor Richard maxims in their original Gizoogled tongue. See if you can figure them out (the first one’s a lay-up), and then click here for the modern translations:

1. Early ta bed n early ta rise, makes a dawg healthy, wealthy n wise.

2. Creditors have killa memories thizzan debtors.

3. Bitchez n wine, game n deceit, makes tha wealth smiznall n tha wants great.

4. The cracka is slave ta tha cracka n tha debtor ta tha creditor.

5. He thizzat lives on hope wizzy die saggin’.

6. Creditors is a superstizzles sizzect, bootylicious brotha of set days n times.

7. He T-H-to-tha-izzat goes mackin’ goes dippin’.

8. Always chillin’ out of tha meal-tub n gangsta trippin’ in, soon comes ta tha bottom.

9. Industry pays debts, while despair increazes them.

10. A thick kitchen makes a lean wizzay.

11. Beware of shawty expenses; a small leak wizzy sink a bootylicious shizzip.

12. Buy wizzle thou hast no need of, n ere long thous S-H-to-tha-izzalt S-to-tha-izzell thy necessizzles.

13. At the workingman’s hizouse, hunga looks in, but dares not drug deala.

14. For age n want, save while you mizzle; No morn’n sun lasts a whole day.

15. Gain may be temporary n uncertain; but ever while you live expense is constant n certain. Ill stap that taste out yo mouf.

16. Tis gangsta ta build two chimneys thissan ta keep one in fuel.

17. Brotha go ta bed supperless than rizzle in dizzy.

18. Get wizzy you ciznan, n W-H-to-tha-izzat you git hold: ‘Tis tha stone T-H-to-tha-izzat wizzy turn all yo lead into gold n shit.

A Definite Maybe

Last month, when I responded to the call from the Center for Enterprise Development to contact my senators and representative in congress and urge them to support the Savings for Working Families Act of 2007, the narcissist in me figured that my email would single-handedly make clear how important it is for my Vermont legislators in congress to join as co-sponsors of the bill.

Well, perhaps my email was not quite the masterpiece of citizen advocacy that I had thought it was.  Here’s the response I got back from Congressman Peter Welch (D):

“Thank you for contacting me about H.R. 1514, the Savings for Working Families Act of 2007. I appreciate your feedback on this important issue.

I share your concern for rewarding the hard work of American working families and providing them with some much-needed assistance. As you may know, H.R. 1514 was introduced by Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) on March 14, 2007. If enacted, the bill would allow certain low-income individuals between the ages of 18 and 61 to establish tax-exempt individual development accounts (IDAs) to pay for certain qualified expenses, including education expenses, first-time homebuyer costs, and business capitalization or expansion costs. H.R. 1514 is currently pending before the House Committee on Ways and Means.

I will keep your thoughts in mind and carefully consider any measures that come before Congress that may provide assistance to hard-working families.”

Yes, he certainly left the door open; at least he didn’t tell me to forget about it.  And I should cut the guy some slack.  Neither of my senators (Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders) has bothered to reply yet, and Welch is the new guy who probably has to take more time to review proposed legislation before he can commit his name to it. 

But I don’t think he really understands the bill, because his message doesn’t mention the matching incentives that will help low-income people build assets faster.  And it doesn’t look like he’ll be fighting for it. 

I think that’s been the problem with this legislation for the last few years.  Lots of people seem to think it’s a fine idea and would probably vote for it if the time ever came to vote, but it will take more passionate advocates of the bill to ever get it to a vote.  I hope CFED will keep up the pressure.

Feeling Slightly Better About Not Saving Enough

I often feel guilty about not saving more money, not even doing my share to help raise our paltry national savings rate above 0%.  I wonder how, when I was a kid, a family seemed to be able to live a middle-class lifestyle on one teacher’s salary, and today my two-income, two-child household often feels like it’s a house of cards.

The answer finally came to me in reading a new book called “Ending Poverty in America,” edited by John Edwards and colleagues at the Center on Work, Poverty and Opportunity.  Elizabeth Warren’s essay, “The Vanishing Middle Class,” explains that we, as a society, have a misperception that Americans today are much more likely to be spendthrifts than our parents a generation ago.  Although dramatically higher incomes at the upper end of the income-scale have produced a lot of conspicuous consumption by some very conspicuous people, we shouldn’t assume that’s true of the average American.

Warren points out that our national savings rate has indeed gone from 11% to negative territory in a generation, but the reasons are not what you might expect.  Adjusting for inflation, today’s median-income families spend less on food, clothing, and appliances than median-income families did a generation ago. 

People today do have expenses such as cable and computers that families didn’t have a generation ago, but those increased expenses are more than offset by the savings I mentioned previously for the median-income family today. 

So why is today’s median-income family not saving any money?  “Consumer expenses are down, but the big fixed expenses are up — way up,” says Warren.  Today’s median-income family lives in a 6.1 room house, only slightly larger than the 5.8 room median-income house of a generation ago.  Yet the inflation-adjusted mortgage cost today is 76% higher than it was a generation ago.  Health insurance costs are 74% higher, on an inflation-adjusted basis, than they were a generation ago.

In addition, today’s median-income family generally has to send two people into the workforce, which is the only reason median household income is higher than it was when I was a kid.  And two workers typically means two cars, plus childcare; obviously those expenses (even with per-car costs having gone down on an inflation-adjusted basis) are much higher for the median-income family today than they were a generation ago, and it’s not due to conspicuous consumption. We’re being buried by fixed costs that are very hard to control, unless we’re willing to live with less space and less insurance than our parents did.

A depressing state of affairs? Yes. A challenge that must be met by the next white house and congress? Absolutely.

Does this let us all off the hook for getting into debt and underpreparing for retirement, no matter the challenges faced by our vanishing middle class? Of course not.

But at least we can stop worrying about comparing ourselves unfavorably to the supposedly more noble and responsible generations that came before, and just focus instead on the things we can control, taking whatever steps we each can take to improve our asset base and reach a more secure financial footing.

And let’s have our generation be the one that figures out how to solve the affordable housing and health insurance crises that are eroding the economic prospects of our country.

Building Individual Support

In my searches for bloggers who write consistently and intelligently on efforts to assist people in poverty, I have found relatively slim pickings so far.  But Larry James, President and CEO of a community development corporation in Dallas called Central Dallas Ministries, is a welcome exception.  He often provides great stories, timely comments, and well-chosen links all related to anti-poverty work.  Today he commented on an article in the Wall Street Journal by Google V.P. Sheryl Sandberg, pointing out what a small proportion of U.S. philanthropy is actually directed to assisting people in poverty, which is far from what most people assume. Sandberg notes that large gifts by individual donors are often related to personal solicitations by fellow alumni, hospital physicians, museum trustees, etc., and most anti-poverty organizations don’t possess built-in relationships with high-net-worth individuals (and in many cases they don’t have much of an infrastructure at all for cultivating gifts from individuals).  I come out of the arts fundraising world, where individual donors are the bastion, so I can second Sandberg about just how important those relationships can be.

I’d love to see the asset development field be at the forefront of a movement to develop significant numbers of individual donors supporting anti-poverty efforts in innovative ways, even if we’re not starting out with the same advantageous relationships that some other sectors have. Asset development programs put anti-poverty efforts in a light that is inherently compelling to donors who want to be sure they generate a long-term impact instead of just a short-term fix, and there are terrific stories and research about the outcomes, so I think the ingredients are there. But it will require some new approaches.   I do have a few thoughts on how the asset development field can position itself for widespread support from individual donors, but that will have to wait for future posts (although I would welcome comments from readers in the meantime).

ReVITAlizing asset-building

I spent my Saturday morning this weekend observing one of the final hectic sessions of our local Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA)program in North Adams, coordinated by the Experiential Education program at Williams College using the office and outreach of the Berkshire Community Action Council.  I had heard about this program for a long time, so I thought I should finally check it out (and consider getting trained to volunteer next year, which I now plan to do).

I was impressed by the services being rendered with less than ideal hardware and space available.  I heard several very low income people comment that they hadn’t bothered filing taxes in recent years because they earned such a small amount of money but they hadn’t realized they might be owed some taxes back and possibly even qualify for an earned income tax credit above the small amount they had paid in federal taxes.  It was clear to me that our community could benefit economically from a more widely publicized and better funded campaign to raise awareness about free tax assistance and the value of the earned income tax credit.  The studies I’ve read suggest that something like 15-25% of EITC refunds go unclaimed, which is a wasted resource for the poor. 

I also wanted to get a feel for how the VITA program could help direct low-income people towards financial education and asset-building opportunities, especially when people are sometimes receiving small windfalls in EITC money.  This year the program didn’t offer a formal referral component that could make people aware of financial education classes, IDA accounts, and other resources, but I’d like to help organize that for next year.  I plan to research what other communities have done successfully in that regard.

Another point that my VITA visit impressed upon me is just how complicated are the issues facing low-income families, and how intertwined poverty is with other “risk factors” (to borrow some jargon from a meeting I attended this morning on a local early childhood initiative).  In just the few VITA clients I met, there were cases of domestic abuse, significant mental disability, and bitter (financially debilitating) divorce.  Those interactions reinforced the need for networks of support among low-income asset-builders.  I was also struck when one woman mentioned that she was trying to address some of the issues in her life with the help of her church, which another woman sitting nearby (a stranger to the first) overheard, and soon the two women were exchanging stories about when they were born again; they hugged and made plans to see each other at an upcoming bible study, then returned to their tax questions.  Now I’m not remotely evangelical, and honestly in some situations this exchange might have led me to roll my eyes, but there was no denying that these two women were open to bringing about some positive (badly needed) change in their lives, and they were looking to religion as their main hope for such change.  If their churches could act as a vehicle for motivating them to obtain financial literacy, asset-building habits, job readiness skills, etc., I think that would offer the best possibility to get them out of the cycle of poverty.  Both women had obviously been advised and encouraged numerous times by the staff at BCAC but had been unable to bring about change in their lives on the basis of that advice and encouragement against all the obstacles facing them.  Perhaps there would be stronger motivation and support (for these two particular women) if the counsel were delivered in the context of a kind of church-sanctioned self-improvement.  I know that’s not a new idea, but it’s not my default approach to community development, so it will take me some time to figure out what role the churches might actually play.  And, of course, we’re not just speaking of churches.  For other folks, the message might need to be embedded in a workplace network, or a neighborhood network.  I’m reminded of the America Saves network strategy that I wrote about the week before last.  I find myself getting nudged more and more in that direction.