Poverty

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include inequality, child poverty, housing, and financial products.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include international poverty, financial products, homeownership, financial education, and inequality.

A new brief from the Children's HealthWatch (CHW) research study clearly demonstrates what many in the affordable housing, public health, asset building, and anti-poverty spheres have long known: that stable housing is foundational for children's health and family well-being. (CHW is a multi-city study of the impact of economic and social policies on young children and their families. Additional studies, reports, and information about the data are available on their site here.) 

In the brief, data drawn from a sample 6,000 families with children under age four living in Massachusetts show that children whose families had moved two or more times in the past year were 59% more likely to have been hospitalized than were children in housing-secure families. Furthermore, families who were behind on their rent were more likely to struggle to feed all members of the households adequately, to have had utilities shut off, and to forgo needed health care for a child. Children from these families were 52% more likely to be at risk for developmental delays.

by Jay Pelosky

Very powerful piece by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. Day to day market fluctuations are one thing, but the search for growth may well be the next big thing in financial markets – we have had the search for yield (and it is ongoing); we are entering the search for growth. Wolf's analysis is convincing and worrisome.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include housing, banking, income and wealth inequality, and education.

Though the Assets Learning Conference is now more than a week past, one session that has stuck with me dealt with The Great Recession and its Impact on Wealth in Low-Income Communities and Communities of Color. Through deftly interwoven presentations from the Urban Institute, Woodstock Institute, and Ohio State University (moderated by the U.S.

On September 20th, Rachel Black discussed the impact of recent reforms to state asset limit policies at the Assets Learning Conference. You can find her presentation here.

I spent last Thursday and Friday attending my very first Assets Learning Conference here in D.C. With over 1,200 asset building policymakers and practitioners in attendance from 49 states (Wyoming was sadly absent), ALC 2012 was a productive and energetic meeting of incredibly smart and engaged members of the field. The Asset Building Program will be posting a series of blog entries covering some of the sessions we most enjoyed over the next week or so. Be sure to check out CFED's blog for more thorough coverage (and well done, CFED, on a great conference!) My colleague Justin King started us off on Monday by reflecting here on his favorite session: the rousing plenary speech Newark Mayor Cory Booker gave that successfully framed financial empowerment and economic opportunity as key issues of our time.

Our friends at Half in Ten are taking the lead on a Twitter campaign to get the moderators of the upcoming presidential candidate debates to ask a question about poverty (specifically child poverty). As recently released Census figures show, over one in five American children live in poverty, a rate that has changed very little over recent years. This Twitter campaign is an effort to elevate the seriousness of child poverty to the forefront and get the media and ultimately President Obama and candidate Romney talking specifically about what they would do to address this widespread problem. Half in Ten has a page set up with all the details about when the debates are, how to structure your tweets, and who to target.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the latest on poverty data, health and financial security.

Editor's Note: This edition of Asset Building News Week was authored by our new fall intern, Elliot Schreur. Elliot is a Master's of Public Policy student at the George Washington University here in D.C. Please join us in welcoming Elliot!