CHN’s Human Needs Watch: Tracking Hardship, November 3, 2023
CHN Staff,
November 3, 2023
The earliest years edition. During the pandemic, policymakers worked, often in historic ways, to protect and elevate the well-being of children. A temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit slashed the nation’s child poverty rate more than ever before. New laws and regulations made it easier to access nutrition assistance, including school meals even when school was not in session. No one was allowed to be kicked off Medicaid, ensuring that children (along with adults) had continuous access to health care. Emergency rental assistance and a federal ban on evictions kept families housed. Billions of dollars went to shore up the child care industry, and more money was allocated for early childhood education programs such as Head Start. Now it seems we have forgotten all that we learned.
Paid leave: ‘I benefit when my employees do not have to choose between their loved ones and a paycheck’
David Elliot,
October 27, 2023
Ben Verhoeven is a farmer and owner of Peoria Gardens, Inc., a nursery and greenhouse located in the rural Oregon town of Albany that grows flowers for distribution to retail garden centers. He employees 26 people full-time, year-round, as well as an additional 24 seasonal workers. All of Verhoeven’s employees have access to paid family and medical leave – and neither Verhoeven nor the employees have to pay much for the benefit – just 0.4 percent of payroll for Verhoeven and 0.6 percent for the employees.
School lunches should be free
CHN Staff,
October 26, 2023
During the pandemic, the government embarked on a beautiful experiment: expanding public programs to stave off poverty. One critical component was ensuring that public school students had free lunches regardless of family income. During the 2020-2021 school year, 98 percent of all school lunches were free to students. All of a sudden, public schools were allowed to treat the idea of feeding students to be as essential as educating them.
Count All Kids
Deborah Stein,
October 20, 2023
CHN helps lead Count All Kids, a campaign to improve the count of young children in census data, and also advocates to improve how the census counts other communities where many members are missed, such as communities of color. When everyone in a community is counted, the community has more political power, more funding for programs that matter for kids, and better data to manage government programs.
Use What We’ve Learned to End Child Poverty
Olivia Golden,
October 17, 2023
Child poverty more than doubled from 2021 to 2022, children and their parents are now losing health care coverage, and child care programs across the country are at heightened risk of closure — all because successful pandemic-era policies have ended or are ending. That’s the bad news, and it is devastating. Yet in thinking about how to move forward, the good news matters just as much: that the nation enacted an extraordinary package of pro-child policies in the first place.
