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 [...]

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The Long-term Effects of Early Childhood Poverty

Research indicates that children living in poverty are at risk for a whole host of poor child and adolescent outcomes, especially if that poverty occurs early in childhood.  New research also indicates that childhood poverty can have a significant impact on adult outcome measures.  Possible reasons for the increased impact of early childhood poverty are also beginning to emerge.  Two [...]

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Economic Mobility in the US, Now and in the Future

When my friends ask me about my job or what CAP does, I have a short elevator speech about ending the cycle of poverty by helping families become more economically mobile.  Some of my friends politely nod and smile, much like I do when my engineer friends try to explain their jobs.  Others have questions; they are curious about the [...]

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Turning the Tide of Childhood Hunger

Last week, the Food Research and Action Center suggested a strategy for ending childhood hunger by 2015, a goal to which President Obama committed during his Presidential campaign. The strategy includes: Restoring economic growth and creating jobs with better wages for lower-income workers Raising the incomes of the lowest-income families Strengthening the SNAP/Food Stamp Program [...]

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Stress, the Brain, and Poverty

The Economist reports on a new study linking stress to intergenerational poverty.  Research conducted a few years ago demonstrated that the “working memories” of children in poverty had less capacity than those of middle income children.  This in turn impeded the ability of children to learn, since they cannot store as much information in their RAM [...]

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Sustaining the epiphany

So, I promise I haven’t fallen off the apple cart. Micah, your building capacity post really resonated with me. The reason for my blog absence the past two weeks has been a combination of fulfilling the requirements of my 80%ish time job as a member of the CAP’s development team and attending professional development conferences. [...]

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Intragenerational Mobility

We’re mostly interested in intergenerational mobility around here, but that’s pretty well intwined with intragenerational mobility. I mean, when we talk about intergenerational mobility what we mean is that we want children whose parents are poor to grow up not to be poor themselves. In other words we want someone to move from poor to [...]

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One Family’s Story

The Tulsa World is doing a series on a family here in Tulsa. The story chronicles the journey of a single mother by the name of Margo raising her two children who have the odds severely stacked against them. Her husband, their father, is in prison until 2047. Nothing has come easy for Margo and she is doing everything [...]

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Poverty Reduction Strategies

Ah, to live in D.C. & be able to attend events like the Brookings gig Diama writes about, below. (And yes, this could technically be a Comment, but then it’d be buried & relegated to the place where only Micah & Diama venture….) Since we’re NOT in D.C., we need to listen in on webinars [...]

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Key Indicators of Economic Mobility: Social Capital

So I’m not going to have time for a post on the whole report (pdf) today, but I’ve gotten through the first section and thought I would share some thoughts. The report, from Economic Mobility Project, is authored by researchers at the Heritage Foundation, which tends to emphasize the social and family impacts on economic [...]

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