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.
Archives: Voices
School lunches should be free
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
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
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.
People don’t like to be played for suckers, and the Biden Administration is doing something about it
The Biden Administration has been engaged in a comprehensive effort to reduce or eliminate junk fees. Working in tandem with the independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Trade Commission, they are either persuading or requiring banks and other corporations to stop junk fees.
CHN’s Human Needs Watch: Tracking Hardship, October 6, 2023
The care is infrastructure edition. When Americans think of infrastructure, we tend to think of roads, bridges, tunnels, and railways. And it is true that much physical repair is needed – that’s why Congress passed and President Biden signed bipartisan infrastructure legislation last year. But care is infrastructure as well. When human needs advocates think about care infrastructure, they usually talk about high-quality, accessible, and affordable child care; paid family and medical leave; home- and community-based services (HCBS) and support; and the care workforce.
A wakeup call on poverty
This fall, the Census Bureau released new poverty data showing a stunning reversal in economic security over the course of last year. The findings included a record jump in the Supplemental Poverty Measure just one year after hitting a record low. Child poverty doubled.
Shutdown central.
Editor’s note: Many Americans believe that most federal workers live in or around Washington, D.C. In reality, federal workers live in every state in the country, every congressional district, and every U.S. territory. For example, the “red” states of Alabama, Utah, and West Virginia have a disproportionate number of federal workers, compared to the national average. This CHN blog post, published on January 17, 2019 during the longest shutdown in U.S. history, examines how communities in Huntsville, Alabama, Ogden, Utah, and Clarksville, West Virginia were affected.
Poverty just jumped — and it was no accident.
After hitting a record low of 7.8 percent in 2021, new data shows the government’s Supplemental Poverty Measure jumped to 12.4 percent last year. That’s a nearly 60 percent increase. And it’s all because politicians allowed proven income support programs to expire. I’m an expert on poverty. I’ve lived it most of my life in Iowa. I studied it as a Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellow in rural West Virginia and in Washington, D.C.. And now I help people experiencing poverty across the country tell their own stories to change policy.
CHN’s Human Needs Watch: Tracking Hardship, September 26, 2023
The shutdown and deep cuts twin-threat edition. A small group of House Republicans want extreme cuts and items from the right-wing wish list in federal spending bills, If Speaker McCarthy would allow a stopgap spending bill that would be acceptable on a bipartisan basis to come to the floor, it would pass. But so far he is trying for a Republican bill, and so he – and the nation – are being held hostage. The twin threats before us are a (1) shutdown that, if it lasts longer than a few days, will slow or stop services, hurt workers, and threaten the economy and (2) ever harsher cuts and restrictions demanded as the price of keeping the government open.
CHN calls on Senate to increase funds for WIC in temporary spending measure
The Coalition on Human Needs today delivered a letter to U.S. Senators calling for more funding for WIC as part of a concurrent resolution that must pass in order to keep the federal government open and running.
‘If we let critical child care stabilization funding expire, things are only going to get worse.’
Senate and House Democrats this week introduced the Child Care Stabilization Act, which would provide $16 billion in mandatory federal funds each year over the next five years to prevent tens of thousands of child care facilities across the country from having to shut their doors.