Support community economic success programs

Top strategies, resources, and advice from Geoff Biggs, family economic success trainer at Strategies, California’s training and technical assistance agency for family resource centers:

• Earn It, Keep It, Save It! and Voluntary Income Tax Assistance, A United Way/federal government partnership that provides free income tax assistance. “It’s easy for staff to implement and the results are apparent really quickly.”
  
  
• Any income tax assistance helping people claim the Earned Income Tax Credit. “If you can put $2,000 in a poor family’s pocket, that’s wonderful.”
  
  
• Individual Development Accounts. Assets for Independence is a government program that administers IDAs: www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ocs/afi
  
  
• Budgeting classes. “Any class that makes taking care of your finances something that people can discuss, rather than dodge.”
  
  
• Workforce development. “Helping people get job training one way or another so they can get a job or a better job and (maybe) a career.
  
  
• Self-sufficiency Calculator. “It gives people a real understanding of what they need to be making to realize their goals.
  
  
• Access to all income supports. “We try to give people a lot of tools and resources to tap into the income supports that are out there.”
  
  
• Online financial education programs. Jumpstart.org (Merrill Lynch) and www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/moneysmart. “Financial institutions have a mandate as part of their charter that they do some kind of community education.”

For more ideas:

Work Supports: Helping Families Reach Self-Sufficiency, by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, www.kidscount.org/news/fes/sep2008/WorkSupports_Toolkit.pdf

Advocate for state and federal antipoverty strategies

Examples selected from agendas by the National Center for Children in Poverty and the Center for American Progress.

1. Raise the minimum wage and keep it at half the average hourly wage (as it was in the 1950s and 1960s).
2. Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit, and make the Child Tax Credit refundable (if you don’t owe taxes, you get a check).
3. Promote unionization by passing the Employee Free Choice Act (requiring employers to recognize unions when a majority of employees sign union cards).
4. Provide child care assistance for all families that need it. Raise the income ceiling.
5. Provide more housing vouchers for low-income families, and help them move to areas with good jobs and public services.
6. Make sure all children and parents have access to comprehensive, affordable health insurance.
7. Help former prisoners find stable employment and reintegrate into their communities.
8. Increase eligibility for Unemployment Insurance for low-income and part-time workers.
9. Simplify and improve public benefits such as welfare and food stamps. Focus the welfare program on helping people find sustainable jobs.
10. Improve access to affordable products and financial services in low-income communities; expand mortgage assistance and outlaw unfair lending practices.
11. Support Individual Development Accounts, which match savings for low- and moderate-income families.
12. Protect families’ assets when they enroll in public programs like health insurance and food stamps.

For more ideas:

www.spotlightonpoverty.org/anti_poverty_proposals.aspx

“With just a little bit of knowledge and an agency embracing this, there can be so much done.”

—Geoff Biggs