Goodbye Post

Last week, you read a welcome post from Valerie.  Today, you are reading a goodbye post from me (Elizabeth).  For the past two years, I have been your faithful (sometimes not so faithful) blogger from the Innovation Lab, but last week was my last week as a member of the Lab.  I am now a Strategic Planning and Organizational Performance Specialist at CAP, so I will be around – possibly even blogging on occasion.  Please bear with the blog as it transfers from one blog master to another.  If you think you might have what it takes to become the next Researcher in the Innovation Lab and therefore the next blog master, click here to read the job description and apply.

It has been a joy to share this space with you!

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Welcome Valerie Osgood-Sutton to the Innovation Lab

Valerie is our new CareerAdvance® Research Coordinator with the Innovation Lab at CAP. 

I have recently joined the Innovation Lab as the new CareerAdvance® Research Coordinator. It has been a slight career change for me as I spent the previous two and a half years as a teacher in an Early Head Start classroom. However my time in the classroom provided me with invaluable experiences and knowledge of the children and families we serve at CAP. What first attracted me to CAP, and continues to excite me, is how as an agency we try to bridge the gap, primarily with education, that children from low-income families sometimes face. As an agency we also recognize that education is not the only barrier that low-income families may face and have developed many innovative wrap-around programs to support our families.

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Tracking Intergenerational Poverty

In Utah, conservative state Senator Stuart C. Reid sponsored the Intergenerational Poverty Mitigation Act.  The bill requires the state to build and maintain a system to track  intergenerational poverty in the state.  The bill received bipartisan support in the state’s legislature and from advocacy groups across the state.  No matter your political persuasion or your feelings on government spending, you have to concede that we need more data to support both decision-making and policy making surrounding poverty and the programs designed to mitigate its effects. 

As a data person and public administration nerd, I am interested to see how everything shakes out when the bill is implemented.  Someone remind me to come back to this in 6 months or a year!

For more discussion on the bill check out Jodie Levin-Epstein’s, Deputy Direct of CLASP, article “Painting a Picture of Poverty in Utah: By the Numbers” on Huffington Post. 

For the full text of the bill, click here.

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