United Way Report Featured in SF Chronicle Editorial

Rising Numbers of Children Living in Poverty

The number of families with children going hungry is on the rise

According to an alarming article in today’s USA Today, “the rate of children living in poverty this year will climb to nearly 22%, the highest rate in two decades, according to an analysis by the non-profit Foundation for Child Development. Nearly 17% of children were living in poverty in 2006, before the recession began.”

The report tracked 28 key statistics relating to children such as health insurance coverage, infant mortality, and preschool.

The worry, of course, is that the so-called ‘Great Recession’ could wipe out many of the gains that families with children had made over the previous two decades. The rise of poverty amongst this population can have far-reaching consequences since being poor sometimes yields even more poverty. For instance, children suffering food insecurity may show up hungry to their classes, which could inhibit their concentration causing them to fall behind in their academic work.

Though this report certainly doesn’t tell the whole story about poverty, it raises a lot of interesting concerns for us here as well. Though the specific numbers cited in this article are national, the reality is quite similar in the Bay Area. According to our recent report on the issue, more than 440,000 households are struggling to make ends meet. And having a job is not enough. Most of these families – 86% in fact – have at least one wage earner but still can’t pay for their household’s basic needs.
Read the full article here.

To learn more about the problems facing Bay Area families take a look at United Way’s report, Struggling To Make Ends Meet.

United Way Report Featured in SF Chronicle Editorial

United Way’s “Struggling to Make Ends Meet in the Bay Area” report was featured in The San Francisco Chronicle editorial, “Poor are educated and employed.” Below is an excerpt from the piece:

Want to have enough money to meet your basic needs in California?

Then don’t be a woman, don’t be a parent, and don’t be a person of color. All of these groups are disproportionately less likely to have enough income to meet their basic needs, according to a new report from the United Way of the Bay Area.

Some of these categories are not surprising: It’s expensive to raise children, and gender and racial discrimination still lurk in our job markets. What is surprising about the United Way’s findings is that having a job and even an education isn’t a ticket to making ends meet in California. The poor, it turns out, are just like the rest of us. They just struggle more.

The analysis is based on the Self-Sufficiency Standard, a formula developed by social scientist Diana Pearce to reflect the actual cost of people’s real needs in a given area. (The Federal Poverty Level doesn’t accurately reflect the growing costs of health care, energy and housing, among other things.) According to the report, about 22 percent of Bay Area households were struggling even before the economic disaster began in 2008.

The Bay Area is doing better than the state overall, where nearly a third of households don’t have enough income to meet their basic needs for food, housing, transportation, child care and health care. But as this season of sharing comes to a close, it’s sobering to learn just how hard some of us are working to keep our households afloat.

Read the complete editorial.

Read more about United Way’s “Struggling to Make Ends Meet in the Bay Area” report.