University of Pennsylvania. Wesleyan. Howard. These are some of the fine institutions that the 39 graduates from Girard College, a boarding school for at-risk students in Philadelphia, will be attending in the fall.
Accomplishing an amazing feat, nearly 100 percent of the teens that received diplomas from Girard College will attend school next fall. As blogger Brad Aronson (who attended Girard’s high school graduation last month) wrote, “Most of the students are from areas of Philadelphia where it’s assumed that they won’t go to college. They’re from neighborhoods where less than 60 percent of the kids graduate high school and only a small fraction of those continue their education.”
Founded in 1848, Girard College is an independent five-day-a-week boarding school for economically disadvantaged children grades 1-12. All Girard students receive a 100 percent scholarship for tuition, room and board — valued around $40,000 a year. To qualify, students must come from a home without one or both parents and qualify as “low-income.”
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According to The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, the school has graduated more than 20,000 orphans and children from financially needy families.
While this graduation rate sounds amazing to most of us (especially considering the circumstances), it turns out that it’s not particularly noteworthy that nearly every graduating senior from the class of 2014 is headed for higher education. The school boasts a college acceptance rate is nearly 100 percent. “In the last 10 years, 89 percent of Girard graduates attended a four-year college; 7 percent attended a two-year institution and 2 percent attended a vocational or technical school,” the educational institution reports on its website. In comparison, the average college-going rate of high school students for the state of Pennsylvania is only 61 percent.
Going to college is already a big achievement, but it’s also a means to break into the middle class. Aronson also described how moved he was after meeting the students’ families: “I met parents who hadn’t graduated high school. They were crying and cheering for their children who had achieved so much more. Children who had broken the cycle in their families and given future generations a new standard to aspire to.”
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Tag: low-income families
Could Direct Payments Break the Cycle of Poverty?
A sad fact: Poverty in America is increasing.
Currently, 20 percent of children in the U.S. grow up in poverty. That’s 16 million kids struggling to get by. And sadly, the percentage of poor kids in this country continues to grow.
What to do about this problem is a hotly debated question. Some advocate universal preschool, while others vote to improve access to affordable housing.
One economist has offered a somewhat radical proposal: Austin Nichols of The Urban Institute writes that we could reduce child poverty levels to 10 percent by providing each kid with a $400 monthly stipend. Added to that, Nichols believes that if one member of a poor family received employment, earning just $15,000 a year, the poverty rate would drop to 1 percent.
The idea isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds — many countries have such programs. Germany provides $250 per child each month to families, Japan gives $130 per child monthly, and the U.K. ponies up $140 for each child every month. Interestingly, most of these benefits go to all families with children, not just poor families.
Lane Anderson of Deseret News looked into whether such cash transfer programs work. The findings? A study by the World Bank and GiveDirectly.com suggests they do. For instance, when low-income Kenyans received a stipend, they reported gains in assets and general well-being and decreases in hunger.
The Urban Institute estimates that poverty-related expenses cost the U.S. $550 billion per year. Nichols’s proposal would cost just $76 billion annually, according to an article in TalkPoverty written by Zach McDade of the Urban Institute. In theory, this would save the U.S. hundreds of millions of dollars currently spent on child poverty.
McDade writes, “Dramatically reducing poverty is in fact the financially prudent thing to do, and helping 16 million American children out of poverty is the moral thing to do as well.”
In recent years we’ve seen many examples of how housing-first programs are saving states and cities money by reducing chronic homelessness. Could a cash-benefit program for poor kids have a similar effect?
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When Student Loans Didn’t Pan Out, This Teen Turned to Crowdfunding
With skyrocketing tuition costs making it so hard for many families to afford college, dreams of higher education can, at times, feel a little out of reach. Which is why some students have to get more creative and resourceful.
That’s exactly what James Ward realized when he left for college last year. Instead of borrowing money or having a typical work-study job, Ward chose a rather unconventional method — which is perhaps quite fitting for his unusual life. In order for this homeless student to achieve his dreams of higher education, he turned to the internet and more specifically, crowdfunding.
How did he come up with this unique funding option?
A few weeks before he was to head to Washington D.C. to attend Howard University in July 2013, Ward’s Parents Plus loans were rejected, leaving him with no money for school. Thankfully, though, his mentor, Jessica Sutherland – another former homeless child and college graduate — had the idea to turn to crowdsourcing.
Within eight hours after Homeless to Howard was launched, it had already raised $8,000. Ultimately, the campaign raised enough money to send Ward to college, paying for both his tuition and expenses.
Now, Ward has successfully completed his freshman year majoring in physics, making him the first member of his family to go to college.
As Ward told Here and Now’s Jeremy Hobson in an interview, “You have to stay strong and ambitious and determined because there are a thousand reasons why you shouldn’t succeed in life, but all you need is one to get you to where you need to be.”
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How Jobs Give Low-Income Mothers More Than a Financial Boost
Are young children better off when their mothers stay home or when they go to daycare? It’s a question that has been hotly debated for decades and will likely never be settled, but a new study by Boston College researchers suggests that low-income kids with working mothers perform better in kindergarten than their counterparts whose mothers stay home.
The study, published in the journal Developmental Psychology, followed 10,700 children born in 2001, and found that when low-income mothers returned to the workforce before their babies were nine months old, their children performed better in standardized tests of reading, math and vocabulary in kindergarten. When low-income mothers returned to work when their kids were between 9 months and two years old, their children had fewer behavioral problems in kindergarten, according to teacher surveys.
Meanwhile, children of middle-income women showed no significant difference in behavior or cognitive abilities whether their mothers stayed home or not, and the kids of high-income mothers showed a slight decrease in ability when their mothers worked. Prior studies of kids born in the 80s and 90s had suggested some negative effects of childcare across all income levels.
Caitlin McPherran Lombardi, lead author of the study, told the American Psychological Association: “Different cultural attitudes, more readily available and higher-quality child care and more fathers participating in childrearing are other possible reasons for the difference.”
She also noted that continued employment seems to make a big difference in the low-income mothers’ lives too—58 percent of mothers in the study returned to work by the time their child was 9 months old.
“Most mothers today return to full-time work soon after childbirth, and they are also likely to remain in the labor market five years later, suggesting the employment decisions soon after childbirth are pivotal to determining mothers’ long-term employment,” she said. “Our findings suggest that children from families with limited economic resources may benefit from paid maternal leave policies that have been found to encourage mothers’ employment after childbearing.”
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Short on Cash? That’s No Problem at This Farmer’s Market
The way it typically works at a farmer’s market (and with just about every retailer, in fact): You pay money and in exchange, you go home with a bunch of fresh produce.
But at the go-go fresco farmer’s market in Charlotte, North Carolina, if you don’t have enough money to pay for your greens, you don’t have to worry.
Huh?
If you’re telling yourself that there must be a catch, there’s not. The farmer’s market frequently operates on the pay-what-you-can principle that’s already the basis for many cafés across the country.
Even better: You might not have to drive across town to visit go-go fresco, since it visits 10 different locations each week, with the goal of bringing fresh produce to people who might not be able to access it otherwise.
Two of the locations are designed to reach low-income families and that’s where patrons can pay what they care to — either the suggested price, a bit more to help another shopper out, or less if that’s all they’ve got. Go-go fresco also accepts food stamps and often donates produce (which it buys from local farmers) to the non-profits that host their mobile market: The YWCA and the Children and Family Services Center.
“We have good weeks and some bad weeks, but it balances out,” Nick Knock (who founded go-go fresco with Leconte Lee) told Mark Price of the Charlotte Observer. “It’s inspiring to see the hearts and generosity of people who don’t think twice about paying more so someone in need can get fresh food.”
Knock told Price that there have been a few times when he wondered if patrons were taking advantage of the pay-what-you-want option, “But then I saw that they only had $3.19 left on their (food stamp) account, and I got choked up. They were spending what little money they had left at our market. It was mind-blowing when you think they were able to get food because of us.”
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One Key to Higher Test Scores? Affordable Housing
It’s no real surprise that research shows that affordable housing increases families’ health, security, and well-being.
And now, a new study by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore discovered that another benefit: Kids that live in modest homes perform better on tests.
More specifically, “Families spending about 30 percent of their income on housing had children with the best cognitive outcomes,” Sandra J. Newman, the director of Johns Hopkins Center on Housing, Neighborhoods, and Communities, told Phys.org. “It’s worse when you pay too little and worse when you pay too much.”
The study, whose findings are reported in the Journal of Housing Economics and Housing Policy Debate found that when families used more than a third of their income to cover housing expenses — which was the case for 88 percent of the lowest-income families surveyed — they spent less on education boosters such as books, computers, lessons, and trips to museums and performances. The families that spent 20 percent or less on housing tended to live in distressed neighborhoods where the instability impacted the kids’ cognitive performance.
“The markedly poorer performance of children in families with extremely low housing cost burdens undercuts the housing policy assumption that a lower housing cost burden is always best,” Newman said. “Rather than finding a bargain in a good neighborhood, they’re living in low-quality housing with spillover effects on their children’s development.”
When families saw the percentage of income they had to pay to cover their housing decrease, the money they spent on their kids’ enrichment increased. “People are making trade-offs,” study researcher C. Scott Holupka told Phys.org, “and those trade-offs have implications for their children.”
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This Camouflaged Credit Union Saves Immigrants From Predatory Loans
If you see a neon sign on a storefront reading “cambio de cheques” (check cashing), you probably think it’s just like any other check-cashing and payday loan purveyor out there.
But while the Community Trust Prospera in East San Jose, California, is situated in a strip mall next to a beauty shop (like many other check-cashing joints), it’s anything but your typical check-to-cash operation.
The Community Trust Prospera is actually a credit union, offering its patrons (many of which are Latino) much more than just quick access to greenbacks. It provides patrons the opportunity to build their credit.
Many immigrants conduct their lives on a cash-only basis, steering clear of intimidating banks. Last year, the National Council of La Raza estimated that 20 percent of Latinos in America don’t use banks, a higher rate of bank avoidance than what is found among any other group.
In response, Self-Help Federal Credit Union has opened six branches including Community Trust Prospera in San Jose and Los Angeles to try to reach some of these underserved communities. These branches now boast 11,000 members, who have socked away a whopping $1.3 million in savings.
Community Trust Prospera offers many of the same services that check-cashing and payday loan establishments do, but without the oft-typical predatory interest rates and fees. Alexia Fernández Campbell of National Journal spoke to Darwin Morán, who uses the financial institution to wire money to his family in El Salvador and to cash checks from his landscaping work. Initially, he resisted opening a bank account, but the staff there finally convinced him to.
“I started to become friends with them and slowly I started to change my mind,” Morán told Fernández Campbell. “Fixing my credit and paying my debts was so important to me,” he said.
Improved credit and a bank account gives low-income people a greater ability to rent an apartment. And taking advantage of programs such as Community Trust Prospera’s Fresh Start Loan (which is a type of loan that requires a deposit), eliminates the need to visit payday lenders — yet another important step towards establishing a more secure financial future.
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A Life of Service: This Couple Wants Every Latino to Achieve the American Dream
Seeing young people not get their fair shake day after day can have a lasting impact on someone.
That was certainly the case with Richard Farias, who began his career as an educational liaison in the Houston, Texas juvenile justice system and now most recently, founded the Houston-based nonprofit American Latino Center for Research, Education & Justice.
“I became much more empathetic,” Richard told Lindsay Peyton of the Houston Chronicle. “I saw my job as trying to help kids, instead of trying to catch them and lock them up. I have a lot more insights on how to help them with the day-to-day.”
Moving on from the justice system, he started one of the first charter schools in Texas in an effort to address the problems he saw. Later on, Richard became the executive director of an alternative high school that gave dropouts a second chance.
Houston Mayor Annise Parker awarded Richard a lifetime achievement award in 2011, but as the launch of his new nonprofit demonstrates, he’s not done helping people yet.
Now with the help of his wife Rita, Richard is seeking to transform Houston neighborhood by neighborhood to become a city that boosts its low-income Latino youth to success. While the Latino population in northwest Houston is growing, Richard told Peyton, “there’s minimal support services for Latinos and their children here.”
Using their knowledge and experience, the couple has already started helping families at a mobile home park in the area. Describing it, Rita said, “You wouldn’t even know it’s there, and the living conditions are terrible.” As they work to transform the neighborhood, they keep the goal of their nonprofit in mind: To enrich the lives of low-income communities through education, arts, justice, and economic opportunity.
While the Fariases are zeroing in on one neighborhood, their nonprofit is also focusing on the big picture — by organizing the Latino Education Summit at Rice University in August. “It will hopefully serve as a catalyst to affect changes at the state level,” Richard told Peyton.
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There’s More Than Meets the Eye to This Picnic in the Park
During the school year, lunch often isn’t a problem for low-income kids because they benefit from subsidized meals. But when summer rolls around, well, it’s another thing: Hunger becomes a real threat.
In Idaho, that situation is a bigger problem than you might realize. In fact, more than 90,000 kids experience hunger, according to the Idaho Foodbank.
The nonprofit doesn’t want these children to spend an entire summer with rumbling stomachs, so this year they are continuing their popular Picnic in the Park program — a massive effort to provide 60,000 meals to needy kids in the Boise area.
The initiative has 27 lunch giveaways planned for the summer— the majority of which will happen in public parks. During the noontime gatherings, Parks and Recreation Department employees and volunteers will be on hand to lead kids in exercise and games and the Idaho Commission for Libraries will bring bookmobiles to the events. The Idaho State Department of Education, the Boise School District, and Old Chicago Restaurant are also involved, contributing various things.
“I don’t know if there’s a better collaborative effort than this,” said Boise Mayor Dave Bieter told George Prentice of Boise Weekly. “Getting kids moving, reading, making good friends and developing healthy habits…this just gets better every year.”
Marty Zahn of Old Chicago explained to Prentice how the events work. “As the kids are eating their lunches, we begin some interactions…some small talk, asking them about their plans for the summer and whatnot. Then, it’s just natural to ask them to play some games.”
And after a nutritious lunch, the kids certainly have plenty of energy to play, read, and make friends.
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Bringing Bhutanese Village Life to Refugees in New Hampshire
Getting down and dirty in the garden offers a multitude of health benefits.
And now, a community garden in Concord, New Hampshire is helping Bhutanese refugees with homesickness by recreating the village atmosphere they miss.
Ghana Khatiwada, a translator fluent in Nepali and English who works as a cultural liasion for the garden, told Megan Doyle of the Concord Monitor, “To them, it’s like a home feeling to come here and work in a garden,” she said.
The Sycamore Field Community Garden charges only $15 for a plot each season, so even the most impoverished refugees can participate. Organizers give away free seedlings to the immigrants.
While all this sounds great, it isn’t problem free. Each year, there’s a giant waiting list for the 138 garden plots available; this season, 70 families entered a lottery for the four open slots.
The lucky winners of plots emerge from the growing season well-fed, with extra cash in their pockets. “We are saving a lot of money,” gardener Ghana Khatiwada told Doyle. “In the winter, we spent a lot of money on vegetables like tomatoes, okra, eggplants.”
Ideally, garden manager Cheryl Bourassa would expand the garden, but she’s limited due to the amount of available water. To increase the number of plots, the nonprofit, which relies on grants and donations for its funding, would have to dig a new well — at a cost of $15,000. So recently, they filmed a video of the bustling activity in the garden to feature on Faithify, a crowdfunding website that will launch next month. Lea Smith, who shot the video, told Doyle, “Maybe somebody in Idaho will be inspired to help refugee farmers in Concord, New Hampshire.”
It’s clear that the atmosphere in The Sycamore Field Community Gardens is worth sustaining. Bourassa told Doyle that in the summer when the plants are burgeoning and the gardeners are there to tend them, “It’s almost like a little social club. It’s this real sense of life in a village.”
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