Letter Regarding New Report on Deep Poverty

The report’s findings affirm the importance of our child hunger strategy which focuses on the children in America who, of all those across the spectrum of poverty and food insecurity, are most vulnerable and at risk, because they are actually suffering hunger.

The report’s conclusions are a commentary on the challenges inherent in trying to reach the most voiceless and vulnerable. There is an element of hard core, deep poverty that often seems intractable. Many factors contribute to the difficulty in helping these individuals. Often they face multiple problems, including physical and mental health challenges that combine to create a complexity that is harder to resolve. They also they have less political voice and power than virtually anyone else in American society. As a result, they are often overlooked in favor of other political constituencies.

Some of the report’s findings for the period 1995-2005 include:

• Broad social insurance programs such as Social Security and food stamps, cut the number of Americans living in poverty by nearly half (44%), lifting 31 million Americans above the poverty line.
• For those who remain poor such programs increased the average disposable income from 29% of the poverty line to 64%.
• The bad news is that for families with children who have the lowest income and are in greatest need of help due to joblessness and other problems, the safety net protected a smaller share of children from deep poverty than it used to. The safety net used to lift above half the poverty line 88% of the children whose family incomes were lower than that, but now it does so for only 76%, meaning that the number of very poor children has grown from 1.1 million to 2.4 million.

The report explains that “The largest single reason why the safety net protected fewer children against deep poverty was the loss of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)…The reasons for this sharp drop in TANF cash assistance vary across states. They include a range of policies and administrative practices that led many poor families to leave the program even when they did not have a job, to be discouraged from applying at all, or to fail to successfully complete the application process. Many families lost assistance because of strict welfare-to-work rules and policies that terminated assistance to families that could not meet program requirements. While requirements to attend orientation sessions or seek work before applying for aid may seem reasonable, some families in the midst of a serious crisis and those with mental health or other health issues may be unable to comply with them…. In some states, time limits on assistance have barred some very poor families from receiving assistance.”

Share Our Strength remains committed to serving those children in deep poverty who are the hardest to reach and help, not just those who fit neatly and accessibly into traditional anti-hunger and anti-poverty programs. We make this choice knowing full well it is not the easy path. It is not the path of weekly press releases boasting of our victories, nor the path whose endpoint can be reached in months rather than years. It is not the path that guarantees the political establishment and traditional donors will understand and embrace what we’re doing. It is only the right path.