By Andy Carroll, Exponent Philanthropy

I regularly explore trends influencing philanthropy by spotlighting articles, reports, and essays in the media. I cast a wide net, venturing beyond philanthropy and traditional topics to consider a variety of ideas, innovations, debates, and critiques. Read previous posts in the series  

Slowly, inexorably, like the rise of inequality itself, the United States has come to recognize the depth and breadth of economic hardship across its communities. CEOs of major corporations and presidential hopefuls from both parties—Republicans and Democrats—have added their high-profile voices to growing distress about widespread poverty and deprivation, rising income inequality, diminished social mobility, and the expanding achievement gap between poorer and wealthier children. The issue has become bipartisan, mainstream, and a constant in public discussions.

Why has hardship reached the spotlight now? Several developments have come together:

• The persistence of widespread and deep poverty, despite recent job growth, and regular reporting of hardship in national and local news;
• The finding that many new jobs do not pay enough to keep families above the poverty line;
• The growing gap between rich and poor, and regular reporting of this trend in the media;
• Studies that show rates of poverty and child poverty in America higher than those in most other developed nations around the world;
• Research on brain development that illuminates the damaging, long-lasting impacts of economic stress on children, raising concern that the future for millions of American children is being compromised;
• Widespread acknowledgement, after years of questions, that deprivation does play a major role in limiting students’ ability to learn and meet benchmarks for educational attainment.

Child poverty in particular has garnered widespread attention as an urgent moral challenge for the nation.

There is growing recognition that left unchecked, hardship will expand, creating the conditions for even greater inequality. 

Let’s explore these issues through recent articles.

The Deep Costs of Child Poverty in America 

John D. Sutter, a writer at CNN, recently examined child poverty by focusing on hidden poverty in Silicon Valley, California. America has the developed world’s second highest rate of child poverty, with 1 in 5 children living below the federal poverty line. Only Romania is worse. In Silicon Valley, where housing prices have skyrocketed, two parents can work full time and still be homeless. Children growing up in poverty suffer toxic stress and are more likely to drop out of high school, go to jail, have kids out of marriage, experience lower IQs, and end up poor as adults. The costs nationally are estimated to be $500 billion a year, in economic losses, health care, and crime. Sutter asserts that child poverty is a moral issue as well as an economic and humanitarian one, because children have no power over their economic circumstances, and the consequences of poverty are likely to limit their opportunities and incomes throughout their lives. He highlights four proven strategies, which would cost less than the $500 billion that poverty exacts each year: housing subsidies, raising the minimum wage, expanded and affordable early childhood education, and cash for poor families.   

Addressing Poverty and Low Achievement by Engaging the Entire Community

In Hartsville, South Carolina, population 8,000, town leaders are working with a Yale University program to test a new approach to improving opportunity for children of poor families. In Hartsville, more than 70 percent of the town’s elementary school children receive free or reduced-price lunches. The Yale initiative trains adults who interact regularly with elementary school students, such as school bus drivers and cafeteria workers, to engage students and their parents, listen, build relationships, and set clear expectations for behavior. “This is a major departure from the old approach—typically waiting for behavioral problems to occur and then reacting to them. The results are promising. At the end of the 2013-14 school year, disciplinary referrals had dropped by 71 percent as academic achievement rose.” 

The connective tissue of those efforts is a communitywide focus on development. “Healthy development in school occurs when children form positive relationships with adults,” explained Dr. James P. Comer, who founded the Yale program more than 40 years ago. “For meaningful change to be sustainable, you need a work force of professionals that really understands child development, and you need policies that incentivize the behaviors that rely on that sort of expertise. Poverty is a disease that affects a community, and we can’t heal a community in isolation. We have to heal the whole thing by creating an ecosystem of folks on the ground.” 

Nonprofit Food Pantries See Increased Demands

A Michigan newspaper reports that nonprofit organizations around the state that provide food assistance to families have seen an increase in demand, despite a drop in statewide unemployment to its lowest level since 2002. “That disparity has left many observers perplexed. But the reasons for the heightened demand are many, say area food pantry leaders, who cite chronic underemployment, changes to government food assistance programs, and a growing wage gap as contributing factors.” Greta Faworski, an official at one of the agencies, observes, “There is unemployment, but there is also underemployment. A person’s car breaks down and they have to make choices. Utility bills are getting more expensive, so sometimes people have to choose between paying their bills and eating.” Food pantries are working to engage more volunteers and interns to cut costs and meet rising demands. 

The Price of Inequality, Causes, Ways to Address It

In a March New Yorker essay, Jill Lepore profiles several recent books and studies on economic inequality: Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, by Robert Putnam; The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, by Steve Fraser; and Inequality: What Can Be Done? by Anthony Atkinson, plus research by two scholars of comparative politics, Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz. Lepore believes many of the policy proposals by Putnam and Atkinson are sound, though she thinks few if any have a chance of being implemented in our current political dysfunction. Fraser, she notes, wants to arouse the passion and outrage of citizens to organize and take collective action, in the same way citizens did in previous eras of inequality in our history.

The approach of Stepan and Linz is different: In their study they looked for possible correlations in developed democracies around the globe between inequality and the structure of governments. The two scholars found a correlation between high inequality and a high number of “veto players” in governments, and between high inequality and a low degree of representativeness in the upper house of the legislative body. For people who wish to tackle hardship and poverty, their research suggests a strategy of revising the very structure of government.

Senior Program Director Andy Carroll writes resources, designs workshops, and facilitates seminars for funders. Andy also dedicates a significant portion of his time to managing our Leadership Initiative that defines, validates, nurtures, and celebrates the many ways philanthropists lead. Andy has 25 years of experience in nonprofit organizations, and he enjoys talking with funders about their questions, interests, passions, and plans for making a difference. Follow Andy on Twitter @andycarrollexpo.