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>> Welcome and thank you for standing by.
At this time, all participants are on a listen only mode
until the question and answer session of today's conference.
At that time, to ask a question, press star 1 on your phone
and record your name at the prompt.
This call is being recorded.
If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time.
I will now like to turn the call over to Shannon McGarry.
Ma'am, you may begin.
>> Great. Thank you so much Ana.
Welcome everyone to the monthly webinar for VISTA.
My name is Shannon McGarry and I will be your host
for today's session on Alternative Lenses:
Poverty Beyond the Official Measure.
Today, we're joined by Dr. Stephen Pimpare who will talk
to us about the limitations of the federal definition
of poverty and we'll be exploring some of the ways
to define poverty in the US.
Also joining us today, you will find Robyn Stegman.
She's in the chat and Q & A and we'll be helping to answer some
of the questions that you may have and asking for your advice
and input as well as providing additional resources
on today's topic.
We're also joined by Suzanne Knizner
who is providing technical assistance
and has a couple of tips.
Actually, I'm going to show those tips with you
that will make it so that you can fully engage in the webinar.
A couple of tips, if you do have any questions as we're going
through the presentation for either the presenter
or anybody else, you can go ahead
and ask those using the Q & A feature located
in the bottom right-hand side of your screen.
And we will be responding to those
as quickly throughout the presentation
and also addressing those towards the end
when we have the Q & A session.
And if you want to share any tips or resources
or any other ideas that you might have as we're talking
about different things today,
you can do that using the chat feature which is located just
above the Q & A. You'll notice that right now,
the phone lines are muted.
We will be opening the lines later
at the end of the presentation.
But for right now, just keep in mind that those are muted and--
but that we will keep that conversation going
for about 30 minutes after the conclusion
of the formal presentation.
The webinar is being recorded and we will make sure
that it's available to you on the webinars for VISTA page
on demand on the VISTA Campus as well as all
of the other sessions that we've presented in the past.
And the PowerPoint slides
for today's presentation will be sent in a followup e-mail along
with some additional resources on poverty.
If at anytime you are disconnected, you can dial
in using the conference call and pass code number
that is located on the screen.
And if you get disconnected from the web portion audio,
then you can log back in using the information
that was e-mailed to you.
And now I'm going to introduce Andy King who's the training
specialist at the AmeriCorps VISTA who is going
to share some words on planning your professional development.
Andy.
>> Thank you, Shannon.
And welcome everyone.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
We're really excited to have such a terrific turnout.
As you know, poverty is central to what VISTAs do
and we're really delighted to bring to you one
of the foremost experts in policy research today,
Dr. Stephen Pimpare, and you'll hear about him in just a minute.
But I also wanted to let you know about some
of the other exciting things happening
in conjunction with this webinar.
There are about 55 VISTAs there in New York City
at Bank Street College.
And Back Street is hosting the webcast,
so Dr. Pimpare is there along with this group
of VISTA serving there.
And they're going to meet once the formal presentation is done
for additional discussion and conversation to talk
about what these measures might mean
for their local communities.
We've also got across the country 18 other groups
of VISTAs who have come together to participate as a group
in the webinar and then to hold their own discussion
groups afterwards.
And in fact, there's a group of VISTAs here at the Corporation
for National and Community Service headquarters
at Washington D.C. so they're just downstairs
from where I'm sitting.
And soon as the webinar is done, I'm going to rundown there
and we're going to have a conversation as well.
So, we really see these monthly webinars as a chance for you
to advance your own professional development and it's a great way
to get together with your VISTA colleagues whether it's
in your own project site or other VISTAs
in other organizations around your community.
But we encourage you to look at this as a way to come together
to network and introduce some shared learning.
So again, I thank you for making time today and I'm going
to turn you back over to Shannon.
>> Great. Thank you so much, Andy.
So, here is our agenda for today.
We are going to start off by talking about what's the
"Official" Poverty Measure is and what some
of the limitations are with that measure.
I will be going over what the supplemental poverty measures
are as well as some other alternatives.
So things like family budgets, life course analyses,
insecurity, mobility, capabilities, et cetera.
I will be talking about what the implications
of these measures are for your work as VISTAs.
And then we'll direct you to some of the resources
that are available to you on the VISTA campus.
Then we will be doing a Q & A chat
where you'll have a conversa-- or the opportunity to have some
of your questions answered.
And then finally, we will stay on the line
and be doing Twitter chat at the end of the presentation.
To lead us through our exciting look
at alternative poverty measures is Dr. Stephen Pimpare.
Dr. Pimpare teaches courses on social welfare policy
to graduate social work students at Columbia University,
NYU and the City University of New York.
He also writes books and articles about poverty
and inequality in the United States.
And prior to getting his Ph.D., Steven works for over a decade
at community-based soup kitchens and food pantries.
And so now I'm going to turn it over to him.
>> Thank you so much, Shannon and thank you, Andy.
Welcome everyone.
I'm thrilled to see so many people from all
over the country joining us today.
As you can see here from this list of learning objectives,
we've got about four goals that we're going to work our way
through over the next hour or so.
But mostly what it is that I'm hoping that we're going
to achieve is to get you all thinking perhaps a bit more
consciously and in a more complicated way about what it is
that poverty means and maybe to challenge a few
of your assumptions about what that is.
So, to get that thinking started, what we'd like to do is
to ask simply each of you to weigh
in on what maybe a fairly straight forward question
and you can use this.
In the chat portion, I see that Robyn has just put
up the question there on the chat board.
What does poverty mean to you?
What is poverty do you think?
What does it mean to be poor?
What is it that distinguishes people who are living in poverty
from those who are not, right?
So take a few moments.
Give that a little bit of thought
and weigh in on the chat board.
I see that Suzy said lack of agency in one's life
and inability to meet essential life means.
Whoa, that's moving quickly.
It's hard to read that, my apologies.
Lack of resources says Lauren.
Lack of support says Andrew.
A lack of justice says Mariana.
A lack of means, money, food, thought or lack of opportunity.
Deflation of spirit says Ana.
Stigma from Barbara.
Invisibility says Sarah.
Stress says Lauren.
Constant crisis management says Hallie.
A giant lack Jennifer says.
Racism. Sexism.
Unhealthy living.
Lack of fair organization of economics.
No hope for change.
Lack of sustainable resources.
Lack of power, lack of control.
Systemic inequalities, right?
We can see all sorts of interesting observations,
notice how that we seemed to be moving from sort
of the [inaudible] individual, the personal, the familial,
the neighborhood level up to sort of possibilities
for larger systemic kinds of ways of thinking,
the political economic decisions, justitution,
mental social anguish.
Okay. So, I'm going to go ahead and move
on so you should keep weighing in there, right,
because there's no shortage of things to say.
But as you can see, as we can all see
and as I suspect you all know, there are lots of different ways
of thinking about what poverty is or what it means to be poor.
And there's no right answer to that question.
Of course, there is no objective meaning,
no universally agreed upon meaning for what poverty is.
There's no such thing I would argue
and that often can surprise people.
But poverty means different things to different people
and means different things to different people
at different moments in time.
But how we define poverty and how we measure it,
what we say it is to be poor
and how we determine how many people fit in to
that definition has profound effects on what kind
of solutions we seek, on what kinds
of programs we might create on, how we determine
who might be eligible for assistance.
Or as political scientist E. E. Schattschneider put it,
as you can see here, "The definition
of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power."
So with Schattschneider firmly lodged in the back of our minds,
today what I hope that we'll do is we'll look at a handful
of different ways of defining poverty,
and ask how each different definition might alter the work
that your doing in your VISTA serving or service
or might alter your own thinking
about how we know people are poor.
And what it is that we are really saying
when we put people into that category?
What does it really mean when we say
that people are living in poverty?
So, we're going to start here, and if you look in the right,
you'll see a poll question, right?
We're going to start here with a simple question
on the Census Bureau measure, right?
What do you think the official poverty rate was
for 2011, right?
So, if you look again over here on the right, Suzanne,
you want to point people toward anything they might need to know
or Shannon, whoever is doing the instructions to folks?
>> Sure thing.
We have a poll open and we want
to know what you think the poverty rate is in America
and there are four options.
So if you can please participate in the poll,
we'd love to see your responses
and we will reveal those responses just
as soon as they're ready.
>> Okay, great.
[ Pause ]
I'm trying to look at the poll results coming in
and also read what's going on, on the chat discussion as well,
'cause there are all sorts of interesting observations
that everyone's making in there as well.
But can we move toward-- assume that folks have had a chance
to weigh in the poll and move toward closing that down
and posting the results at this point?
>> Sure thing.
>> Terrific.
[ Pause ]
That's the suspense.
It's very exciting, isn't it?
>> So and then we'll have the results ready
in about 30 seconds or so.
We're just waiting for those to be compiled.
>> Right. Meanwhile, I'm looking back up at the chat.
Of course now, what we've got instead of observations
about what poverty means is people chatting
about where they're living.
:Liz evidently is very excited to be in Detroit,
which is its own, of course, fascinating sort of place
to be thinking about and talking about poverty.
In some ways, poverty in Detroit is a very distinct thing
than it is in the rest of the country.
Okay, there we go.
So we can see results now.
All right.
So we've got a small number saying 9,
and then we've got sort of equal division give or take
between 12, 15 and 20 percent, and then a good chunk of folks
who choose their credit, didn't know and decided not to guess
and actually admit that.
So let's move on to the next slide,
and we can look at the actual answer.
The one after that, I'm sorry.
And these are the official rates of poverty
from the US Census Bureau.
And typically, when you see reports about poverty
or when read stories about poverty, and the poverty rate,
the percentage of people living in poverty,
the number of people living in poverty,
this is usually the source of the data
that most people are using, the official Census Bureau Measures.
And as you can see here, the official poverty rate for 2011
in the United States was 15 percent, which represented
over 46 million Americans living in poverty,
according to those official standards.
So let's go on to the next.
Terrific. So, as some of you will remember from your version
of the PSO, the Census Bureau determines how many are people
are poor in a fairly straightforward way
and to develop what it calls a poverty threshold.
It's a cut-off for being poor.
If your household income is below this line,
you're counted as poor.
If your household income is above this line,
even if it's only by a dollar, you are not counted as poor.
So, since the most recent data that we have available,
show us poverty rates for 2011, the arrow above here is pointing
to the 2011 threshold for a family of four,
which as you can see is just
over 23,000 dollars in gross cash income.
Now, there are lots and lots of complaints about this method
of determining how many people are poor or to return it
to Schattschneider, some complaints
about defining poverty in this particular way using this
income threshold.
And those complaints, they come
from across the political spectrum and they tend to fall
into two broad categories.
The first set of complaints have to do with problems
with the data collection method itself and then the second set
of complaints are about the very concept
of this dollar value cut-off for determining poverty.
So let's talk briefly about that, those first set
of complaints, the methodological objections first.
Now, for particular historical reasons,
when the Census Bureau adds up your income to determine
if you fall above or below that poverty line, there's a lot
that it doesn't even take into account.
It doesn't for example count near cash income things
like SNAP, what we used to call Food Stamps,
it doesn't count housing assistance,
it doesn't count the value of things
like Medicaid as your income.
And when it sets that threshold, remember a little
over 23,000 dollars for a family of four,
it uses a very old formula from the 1960s that's based
on outdated cost of living.
So it doesn't among other things account for the fact
that food is now much cheaper.
Thanks to like mass agriculture and those sorts of things.
Food is much cheaper than when a poverty measure was designed.
And it doesn't take into a fact--
count the fact that housing
and healthcare are much more expensive than they were
in the 1950s and '60s.
Moreover, that official threshold has absolutely no
geographic variation.
So it's exactly the same amount,
23,000 dollars for family of four.
It's exactly the same amount in Manhattan where I'm sitting now
as it is in Rural Mississippi or in Idaho, two of the states
with the lowest cost of living.
So there's pretty widespread agreement
that it's a pretty poor tool.
But that's not all, right?
In addition to these methodological limitations,
there are I think some questions we should ask
about the very concept
of an absolute dollar threshold to begin with.
Now, there's kind of a binary cut-off point,
it doesn't tell us how poor the people below the line are,
right?
So if your family income is 5,000 dollars a year,
that doesn't show up any differently in the poverty data
than if your income worth 15,000 dollars a year
or if it were 23,000 dollars a year, right?
You're below the line, you're below the line period.
So that is the official member--
measure may us how many people are poor
but it doesn't tell us how poor.
And as we've illustrated in this slide here, it seems odd to me,
right, that that first family with income
of 23,020 dollars a year is technically poor according
to the threshold measure.
Well, that second family, 23,022 dollars a year,
is not poor according to the Census Bureau measure.
Yet, the only thing that separates
that income is two dollars.
And there's a related worry, I think, that the--
how are such approaches ultimately kind
of arbitrary, right?
What-- why is that amount as a cut-off for poverty?
Who decides what things are necessary
to be poor or to not be poor?
Don't family needs differ from one another, right?
What about say, two families of exactly the same size but one
of whom has a child with developmental disabilities?
Do both those families need the same amount to survive?
But is that even what the threshold means?
Does it say which people are surviving?
Or is it which people are struggling?
Or is it which people are just getting by, right?
That is what does it mean when we say that 15 percent
of the American population
in 2011 had income below the poverty threshold?
What does that really tell us when all the [inaudible]?
So it's nothing else.
The next time you read or cite official poverty data
to make a point, pause and ask yourself.
What is the point that I am actually trying to make
about these families or this community?
And do this data actually speak to the point
that I'm trying to make?
All right.
Now, the Census Bureau is staffed
by some extraordinarily smart people.
So it's not as if they don't know this and it's not
as if they don't know that there are lots of problems with the
"official" poverty measure.
And as a consequence, they published all kinds of data
that we can use to help expand our thinking
about those poverty numbers, and we're only going to look
at two of those today.
So the first one is here, right?
So, one way to get around this arbitrary, binary problem,
right, in the belief among many scholars and myself included
that the "official" poverty threshold winds
up understating actual poverty.
Well, one way is to not look quite so narrowly only
at how many people are below that threshold.
How many people are at 100 percent of the poverty line
or below but to look more broadly, right?
And I'm going to try to sort of blackout the area of this
that I want to draw your attention to.
To look more broadly at the number of people
who are below 200 percent of the poverty, right?
Or saying not just right as we see--
let me see if I can get the marker here to work, right?
So this right-- this 8.4 and 6.6 percent,
you notice if you add those two up, you get 15 percent, right?
That's the official poverty threshold.
That's a 100 percent of poverty or below.
This is now right below 200 percent of poverty.
So we see 15 percent
of the population living below 23,000 dollars a years,
a 100 percent of the poverty threshold.
What this tells us is how many people are living below
twice that?
How many people are below 46,000 dollars a year
for a family of four, right?
Now the Census Bureau regularly publishes this data along
with the official measure and they call this group,
that group with income below 200--
between 200 percent of the poverty line and 100 percent
of the poverty line, right?
This group right in here, they call those low income Americans.
So, what we can see by looking at these numbers is
that there are a total of 35 percent of all Americans
in 2011 below 200 percent of the poverty line compared
to 15 percent below a 100 percent of the poverty line.
Or put differently, we can say that 15 percent
of Americans are officially poor,
20 percent are officially low income, and 35 percent are poor
or low income using official Census Bureau standards.
So one of the things that that this does is it suggest
that the scale of the poverty problem, right, whatever we mean
by that, might be different than we think.
And maybe we shouldn't think just about the people
who are poor, but also those who have low income
that may make them near poor, but perhaps still
in need of assistance, right?
And think about would this be a useful addition to you
and your agency when you think about people in your area
in need of assistance?
Should you be looking more broadly
than not just a 100 percent of the poverty line?
Should you be looking at people
who perhaps come close to the poverty line?
Now, there are in fact other options.
Still if we want to get it more satisfying kind of definition
of poverty, that gives us more accurate data
and the Census Bureau itself has begun
to publish alternative measures that take this into account.
To take into account some of the problems with that
"official" measure and we'd often will refer to them
as the Supplemental Poverty Measure
as the research Supplemental Poverty Measure.
Some people will talk about these
as the experimental poverty measures, right?
And so, in this one, the SPM,
the Supplemental Poverty Measure,
the Census has first created a new way
to set the threshold, right?
As you can see from what's going on in this chart here.
And the short version of what's going on is that it updates
that very outdated way to calculate the cost of living
that I talked about and gives us something
that pretty much everyone agrees is a huge improvement.
Although, there are still plenty of people will complaints.
And it even takes into account how the cost of living varies
from place to place are really important kind of improvement.
In addition, this new supplemental measure, the SPM,
offers a much more thorough going way to calculate the cost
of living to begin with.
So instead of just looking at the cost of food, which is what
that official measures does, it calculates the cost
of a much broader array of basic needs.
So it includes housing, and it includes utilities,
and it includes clothes among other things.
Now this alternative measure also includes more
in the income category.
So, in actually calculates in the value of things
like food stamps and it counts housing subsidies
as household income.
And at the same time, it also counts more of what's going
on in a household in terms of expenses.
So it includes the effective taxes which believe
or not the official measure doesn't include.
It calculates in the value of out
of pocket medical expenditures.
So as a result, we get a much better sense
of how much money a household really has available to it
to get through the month and to buy food
and to buy shelter, and so on.
So, all of those changes, they wined up having to big effects.
First, they give us new thresholds, right?
Instead of that 23,000 dollars, right?
We now get not only new thresholds
but different thresholds for different people
with different kinds of housing arrangements.
Because housing cost vary so much, and they constitute
such a large portion of household expenses, right?
So notice here that for some groups, the threshold
as constructed
by the supplemental measure is some 3,000 dollars higher.
Now here's the second result of this alternative approach.
Right now the new approach, the new threshold--
excuse me, as we might spent, they change the number of people
that are living in poverty, right?
They raise the percentage, right?
This is the official measure for all people.
I'm just sort of drawing a little dot here, right?
So, that's 15 percent, right,
is the official measure for 2011, right?
If you look at the supplemental measure,
it shows in fact 16 percent of the population rather
than 15 percent of the population living
in poverty according to the supplemental measure,
adding somewhere in the neighborhood
of three million people to the ranks
of people officially living at or below poverty.
But here's what else happens using the SPM.
It alters data on how poverty is distributed among different
groups, right?
So, here we see the effects on age.
Whoops, I'm doing a terrible, terrible.
You know what, I'm going to erase
that because that's officially too ugly to live one.
And I've got a bad mouth.
There we go.
Let's try that one more time.
That's really not a whole lot better, is it?
I'm going to live with that.
So we're looking at here the effects on age, right?
Since the supplemental measure, right, account for the value
of things like the school lunch program.
It counts in like things like the earned income tax credit,
which have huge effects on children especially.
It shows childhood poverty, right?
As significantly lower than the official measures as it is.
But by contrast, look what's going on over here.
Because the supplemental measure factors in the expenses
of medical cost especially which even with medicare tend
to be much, much higher among older people.
The supplemental measure tells us that the poverty rate
for people over 65 is much,
much higher than the official rate tells us it is.
Now these, I think, have really important implications
for policy makers, right?
Knowing whether poverty among children,
or poverty among the elderly is the more pressing problem can
tell us where we should be allocating our resources,
or where we should be focusing our analysis, right?
This could matter in your agencies too if you're trying
to target scarce resources to the neediest clientele, right?
Going back to Schattschneider,
if we define the problem incorrectly,
not only may we not be able to solve it.
We may not even be able to recognize it.
All right.
So, how else could we define poverty and then figure
out how many Americans are poor, right, whatever we mean by that?
So, here's yet one more approach.
And focus your attention on the two sort
of bold categories on either end, right?
So it's still thinking about poverty as having a threshold,
right, is this absolute dollar value cut-off point,
but this arguably a bit more sophisticated
with more variation from place to place depending on the cost
of living and a lot of that shows
up in housing as you can see here.
So notice here that this calculation shows that even
in the least expensive place evaluated, Casper,
Wyoming in this instance.
A family budget needed to support a family
of four would be 1.63 times higher
than the official threshold tells us it would be.
In the most expensive city in this exercise, right,
and that's Boston, Dr. Sylvia Allegretto
who did this study concludes
that a family would need 3.38 times the official threshold
to have what it needs to get
through the month to not be poor.
So one implication of these kinds of exercises,
and you know most wind up showing more
or less similar results is that actual poverty might
in fact be three times higher in some places
than the official measures would have us believe.
Now, right, this may or may not be the best way
to calculate how much income people need to get by,
and I'm offering it here simply as one example.
There are lots and lots and lots of these kinds of efforts
that people have engaged in.
But it's a way to emphasize that it's not necessarily obvious
where the poverty line should be drawn
and it's not necessarily easy to figure out what people need.
Now, part of the problem, of course,
is who gets to decide what's necessary.
What necessary expenses are, right?
And we'll turn to that conundrum a little bit down the road.
All right, so let's look at a similar kind of exercise
and get you guys involved a little bit in what we're doing.
So if you look over in your WebEx screen, and Shannon,
should they looking in the chat box?
You should be finding a link to the family budget calculator.
Where should they be looking?
>> Ah yes, have them take a look in the chat and there it is.
Robyn Stegman just posted it.
>> Open and just rolled by.
>> Yeah.
>> So you guys may have to scroll
up a little bit to get that link.
>> And I will post it again as--
>> Yeah, that would be great.
Though you have-- and there it is,m one more time, right?
So follow that link, right, and type in your state
and your area name, right, and see what comes up.
You're going to get all sorts
of what I think is really interesting information,
an information where you're located.
But if you want, then go in to the chat board and just share
with everybody the housing cost for where you're located, right,
so that we can look at that.
All right.
Though when you're ready-- when you guys--
this will take a few minutes, right,
these folks sort of log in.
And I think in some
of the supplemental materials we'll be sending around later,
we'll be sending you some links to some other kinds
of calculators that do similar kinds of exercises.
So there we go.
We've got point Portland, Oregon 757 a month, right?
So this is just looking at sort of average housing cost, right?
So someone is asking sort of about family size.
So this is just going to be sort of-- 757 in Portland, Oregon.
So, who else, anybody else ready to weigh
in on what their monthly housing cost?
Two bedroom in Mobile, Alabama, 650.
800 to a thousand in Atlanta, right?
726 in Indianapolis, 650 in Lincoln, 848 in Minneapolis,
a thousand, wow, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
840 in Indianapolis, 600 in Tennessee.
Wow, someone-- somebody had 600 with utilities.
I am so living in the wrong place.
A thousand for Baltimore, Maryland, right?
A thousand here would be just utilities.
750, 570 in rural Virginia.
I saw a 400, there's a 525, a thousand in Seattle,
1400 in Burlington, Vermont, 1100 in Philadelphia.
You get the idea and you should sort of keep,
well, weighing in there.
Just in terms of housing, right,
there's enormous variation from place to place.
And those are like sort of crude average calculations
so they're not taking into account family size, right?
And if you've got, you know, a family of four or five kids,
right, and you've got boys versus girls and you may want
to separate out their bedrooms, right,
it's probably going to cost you more.
You're going to need more space, right?
That kind of variation is important to think
about when we think about well what does it cost for a family
to live and where are they
and how do we take that into account?
Okay. You should feel free to keep weighing in on that.
But we're going to ahead and take on and look for, yet,
another way to complicate our thinking about poverty
and to find more ways to highlight the limitations
of that official measure.
So, let's move on to the next slide if we could.
So, there's another problem with that "official" measure
that we haven't talk about yet.
And that is that it's a snapshot, right?
And it means that it tells us how many people were poor during
the time the survey was conducted, right,
and that's how the Census Bureau gathers that
"official" poverty data through survey,
very sophisticated surveys but it's opinion surveys, right?
Well, we know that the official data show that 15 percent
of all Americans were poor in 2011,
16 percent if we use the supplemental measure
at the time the survey was conducted, right?
But that doesn't tell us
about the duration of anybody's poverty.
Were they poor for all of 2011?
For six months?
For one month?
We can't know from looking at those data.
But one of the things that we do know from other research is
that people move in and out of poverty over time.
So if we step back and look at, say, a two-year period
as this chart does and ask how many people were poor at all
and for how long, we get a very different picture of poverty
and of how many people it touches.
In this two year-period, from 2008 to 2009,
32 percent of all Americans were poor at least one month.
Not 15 percent as the official measure would have it,
not 16 percent
of the supplemental has it, but twice that.
But what we see is that while many more people are poor
than official data suggest, they tend to be poor
for relatively short spells, right?
Notice here that while 32.2 percent of Americans were poor
at least once in this two year-period,
only 4.6 percent were poor for the entire two year-period.
This tells us I think something profoundly important.
Both about the length of poverty spells
and about how many people we can expect to have one.
Poverty is a bigger problem than we think
but it's a different problem than we think, too.
So again, right, use this as an opportunity to ask yourself,
what this might indicate about the need in your area?
How much poverty is there really?
Is it short-term?
Is it long-term?
Do you know about the experience of families in your area
and how long on average their poverty spells last?
And will knowing that improve your ability
to deliver services.
Now, we're going to step back even further
and ask how many people are poor not for a year and not
over a two-year period but over the course
of their entire lives.
And here is what we find.
59 percent of Americans are poor for a total of a year or more
over the course of their adult lives.
A majority of Americans experience poverty.
They tend to do so for short periods of time, a month,
a year, three months there, six months there but it is, in fact,
a common experience in United States.
Now, this also could have some profound possible implications
in the way that we think about poverty since we tend to think
of it as something that other people experience.
That however terrible it may be, it's the minority
who are affected and are relatively small minority
of that, right?
That's not, in fact, the case.
Now what does that mean for how we think about poverty
and what does it mean for how we think
about who people living in poverty?
Who that category really gives?
Now, there are, yet, more ways we can approach this question
of what does it mean to be poor.
Now, all on the ways that we've looked at so far to try
to measure the account
to identify poverty have been absolute measures of income.
Everything we've looked at so far, right?
But that's not actually how most
of the rich democracies typically measure their poverty
and it's not how international comparisons
of poverty are usually done.
Often, poverty is identified as having an income of half
of what the median income is, right.
Now, median income, that's the midpoint, right?
So it means half people earn more than the median
and half people-- half the member
of households earn less, right?
So that median is the midpoint, right?
So this is asking how many people's income is half
of that median?
So by this measure, poverty wasn't 15 percent in 2--
this is 2010 year-- numbers for 2010
and 2011 don't wind up changing too much.
They were essentially flat for both of those years.
But it wasn't 15 percent of the official measure would have,
it's wasn't 16 percent of the official measure would have,
it was almost 20 percent, it was 19 percent using that half
of the median income standard.
Now and using that measure, we can see how we compare
to other rich democracies and what we find is
that we have much higher poverty rates, or more people, right,
living below the median, right?
And ask yourself again, "Is that a useful way for you
to be thinking or for your agency
to be thinking about poverty?"
Now, still another way.
We can figure out what it means
to be poor beyond either these absolute measures of income
or evaluations of status, right?
It's comparing people to other families or groups,
which is what the median income winds up doing.
We can talk about risk, right?
That is how susceptible are people to being harmed
by life events, by natural disaster, by job loss,
by injury, by illness, by the birth of a child, right?
These kinds of life events happen in all countries,
to all kinds of people.
How well can people survive them without being pushed
in the economic crisis?
That is-- maybe it's not just the state of being poor,
however, we defined that.
It matters.
But how close families are to slipping into poverty?
How fragile they are?
How vulnerable they are to at some point becoming poor?
Right, maybe if we knew more about that,
we could more effectively prevent this thing we're
calling poverty.
So here is one way that fragility shows up.
Right, and it's showing us if something happens
to disruptive family's income, if some crisis occurs,
how long could that family survive before real hardship
sets in?
And as you can see, right, almost 20 percent
of American households will be in trouble in under two weeks.
They've got no room forever in other words, right?
Maybe that's a difference we want
to think about among families.
How much breathing room they have to survive crisis
or to survive mistakes?
And then, what are the implications for what we think
of as antipoverty program?
In other words, should we focus on the prevention
of poverty before it occurs
by increasing security and stability?
Or should we focus on the alleviation of poverty
after it has already happened?
Now this is also I think begins to help us make sense of some
of the previous day that we saw on the duration of poverty
on how long poverty was, right,
the official rate maybe 15 percent or 16 percent
if we're using supplemental,
but over a two-year period remember 32 percent
of Americans are going to be poor.
Maybe looking at this slide,
maybe that helps explain why many American household can get
by as long as there are no surprises.
But at last in life there are almost always surprises.
Okay. Now, sometimes when people see
that the United States has higher rates of poverty
and higher rates of child poverty and much higher rates
of inequality too for that matter then do other rich
democracies, they'll suggest
that well maybe that's not necessarily all that bad as long
as there are opportunities for people
to escape their income level, right,
and to rise above poverty, right?
It's a quality of opportunity that matters most,
many people say, rather than that equality of outcome.
And here's what the data show
about the economic mobility available in the United States.
So notice here that mobility in the United States is
at the low end of this group of rich nations.
Now know that in this chart, a higher number is worst.
Because it says there's a higher likelihood
that a son's income will be the same as his fathers.
In places with more mobility like Denmark and Canada
and Germany, as you can see here,
there's a much better chance that things other
than family background, things like hard work,
things like education.
In those places, there's a better chance
that those other factors will determine your income
in a lower chance it's a family status that's going
to determine your faith.
There is much more mobility in other rich democracies
than there is in the United States which I think tends
to come as a really big surprise to lots and lots of Americans.
But these two, I think, it's another way for us
to complicate our thinking about poverty, to think about it
as opportunity or lack of opportunity.
All right.
And jumping off from there, there's this one last approach
to these questions that I want to touch on today.
So this is often referred to as the capabilities approach
to poverty and it comes typically
from an international economist called Amartya Sen.
And Sen has argued that what poverty really is,
is a lack of freedom.
In poor countries or in poor neighborhood
or in poor families, people have fewer choices available to them
and fewer opportunities to leave the kinds
of lives they valued in his words.
It recognizes that the poverty means different things
to different people and that to be poor means not to be able
to fulfill your potential.
Now there's relatedly a growing body of literature
on what are called happiness studies that seek to find ways
to measure people's own evaluations
of their well-being, right?
And that's arguing that that's what we should be interested.
Are people happy?
Are they satisfied?
Can they live the kinds of lives they want to live?
Were there any reason?
Are they able to fulfill their potential, right?
And as you can see, instantly, this is a much broader way
of thinking about well-being than merely measuring income.
Now this is not actually as new an approach
as it may appear, right?
So this quote here which I'll read to you in just a moment
from Adam Smith is one of the founders
of modern economics offered a way of thinking about poverty
that I think has more in common with the capabilities approach
than it does with the official poverty measure.
And Smith wrote the following in Scotland in 1776.
"Every man is rich or poor according to the degree
to which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences,
and amusements of human life.
By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities
which are indispensably necessary for the support
of life, but whatever the custom
of the country renders it indecent for creditable people,
even of the lowest order to be without.
A linen shirt strictly is, strictly speaking,
not a necessary of life.
The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably,
thought they had no linen.
But in the present times, through the greater parts
of Europe, a creditable day-laborer would be ashamed
to appear in public without a linen shirt,
belong to which would be suppose,
the want of which would be supposed to denote
that disgraceful degree of poverty, which, it is presumed,
no body can well fall into without extreme bad conduct."
This acknowledges that poverty is social and cultural
and perhaps even emotional as much as it is purely economic.
In this way of thinking to not be poor means to be able to live
as they full pledge member of the society you inhabit,
to be able to participate in the customs of the country.
All right.
So as we get set to wrap up this portion of the presentation,
why don't we pause for a minute and think
about what it would mean to take Adam Smith's approach
to defining poverty as the custom of the country.
What would it mean to take that seriously?
What are the necessaries today do you think?
What's today's equivalent of the linen shirt?
So again, whenever you're ready, go back into the chat.
I'm going to try to do a better job of trying to read responses
as the scroll by far too quickly, Smartphones,
cellphones, a car, cellphone, cellphones lots of people,
right, feeling probably to [inaudible] from,
their cellphones, showing this is important.
A house, computer, cellphone healthcare, internet from homes
for making distinction between being able to get
to library perhaps and having it in your home, iPhones,
internet acces, transportation, a car, literacy, jewelry, right?
And you know, that's sort
of thing you can imagine people saying well, that's ridiculous,
that's a luxury, why would you need jewelry?
But if you travel with a group of people or you're living
in a community where like where it's common for people to dress
in a particular kinds of way to not be able to afford to do
that could in fact mark you as an outsider in a way
that Smith was thinking about that.
And the potential implications are
that that has social costs, right?
The bad has cultural cost.
That maybe has emotional cost and what does that do then
to your ability to survive and to thrive.
By healthy food Air Jordans, right,
same sort of logic perhaps could apply.
Car, education, did someone just say happy hour?
But again, I mean you can imagine, right that what by--
look, I mean, you're getting sound silly
when you sort of hear that, right?
That's ridiculous.
But then, you think about it, right?
Do you sort of-- do you exist among a group of people
who engaged in particular kinds of social rituals, right?
I'm going to sort of sound like sociologist here for moment.
Do they engage in particular kinds of social rituals
for which they formed communities,
for which they formed networks for seeking jobs,
for which they formed other networks
that maximize their resources.
And does it cost money to participate
in those kinds of social rituals?
So if you are unable to do that, does that disadvantage you
in particular kinds of ways, right?
That's the kind of question
that Smith is asking us to think about.
Okay, so again I think folks should feel free to continue
to weighing on that and other kinds of questions.
And we're going to turn to Q & A in just a moment.
But in the meantime, right, if these things aren't complicated
for you enough, right, I want to add yet in a few more questions
for you sort of think about as we work towards sort
of wrapping up.
And maybe talking a bit amongst yourselves about any of this
that are of interests.
But really, you know, sort of put more broadly.
When we talk about people living in poverty, what do we mean?
Use that phrase a lot.
What does that mean?
Do we all mean the same thing?
Is our definition of poverty limiting our ability to think
about what it is that people need and are we creating space
for people to define that for themselves?
And who are those people who fall into this category
of people living in poverty?
Okay, so I'm going to turn you back to Sharon and Suzanne
for a moment, who have been looking through your questions.
And I think we're going to move on to doing some Q & A
from the WebEx, is that correct?
>> Yes. Thank you, Stephen.
That is correct and I know that actually Robyn is standing by
and has been keeping really good track
of what people have been asking in the Q & A feature.
So if you have questions,
feel free to continue to add to those.
We're just going to answer a couple now and any
that we aren't able to get to in the next few minutes,
we will sure to-- be sure to try and answer at the end
when we open up the phone lines.
So for now, I'm going to turn it
over Robyn who's going to walk us through.
>> Great. So I have one question coming from the Q & A. So,
is there a-- in other studies that in place in the next couple
of years to reexamine the cost of living, food, et cetera,
and possible change in the income's threshold?
>> I'm getting some feedback on your line.
So the question is-- I'm going
to take the moderator's prerogative
and recap the questions just a little bit.
And ask about are we going to continue
to do the supplemental measure and are people engaged
in continuing to think about how we can improve upon it.
The second part is yes.
Right, a part of how we got the supplemental measure
in the first place is a group of mostly policy scholars
that begun largely at the University of Michigan
in the 1980s very dissatisfied
with the official poverty measure for the reasons
that we talked about today and a lot more, so started to sort
of develop more sophisticated method.
Part of why in fact the Census Bureau has moved toward
experimenting with those alternative measures is that one
of those scholars, Rebecca Blank update--
who has Dean at the University of Michigan, actually was hired
to run the Census Bureau in the earlier years
of the Obama administration.
So she brought that kind of life long concern
about more accurate measures to her work at the Census Bureau.
It is unclear as I watch sort of budgets work their way
through whether that money will continue
to be allocated in the future.
Folks like me, for obvious reasons, are really,
really hopeful that we're not only going to continue to fund
that supplemental measure,
but that will also will build maybe two
or three supplemental measures, right?
'Cause it's really, really, really,
really hard to calculate cost of living,
especially if we're trying to take
into account variation from place to place.
And this has right profound implication,
all sorts of benefits are set, social security, cost of living,
benefits are set, using a very particular kind of calculation.
People are arguing on a regular basis
as to whether that's good or could be improved.
All sources of work going on, lots of work going
in universities especially, and I'm hopeful that this continue
to take place in the Census Bureau as well.
>> Great. Thank you so much.
So for our next question, this one is coming
from Barbara who's asking it's rare to see poverty measures
for adults with disabilities.
Do you have any suggested levels
of poverties for this population?
>> It's a great question.
And I don't and we didn't have any in our presentation today,
but there are a number of different efforts
to identify poverty rates among people with disabilities.
And, of course, to talk about people
with disabilities is an enormously broad category.
So those more sophisticated measures start to break down,
right, what is it that we mean by disability,
which particular kind of disability,
'cause different kinds
of disabilities require different kinds
of accommodations in order to get through the day.
Some of those are much more expensive than others.
One of the things that neither the official measure nor the
supplemental measure does is take into account disability.
I think we should.
To be perfectly honest, I don't know how--
it's just in the real world
as a practical matter, how to do that.
I mean this is one of the things
that I would think will be the virtue of more money on research
for better supplemental measures.
So that we start thinking about, all right,
should we have a separate threshold
for people over age of 65?
Should we have a separate threshold
for people with disability?
Should we break down by different kinds of disability?
Should we have different threshold?
Right, when you start to think about what are the kinds
of things that cause it to be much more expensive
for one particular kind of family rather than another.
How much of that is practicable for us
to try to take into account.
And again, right, the problem is a nation of 310 million people,
limited methodological tools, limited data,
and limited money to spend on that.
So great question, I wish we had better data
on those kinds of questions.
As a general rule, turn not to Census Bureau,
but turn to research organizations and scholars
that do specific works on disability, if you're looking
in getting those kinds of data.
[ Pause ]
>> Great. So for the next question that we have--
>> Shannon, one of the things we can do is we can go ahead
and see if there're any questions on the line.
Would you like me to ask the--
okay, so we'll stick with the Q & A.
>> Right. I think we'll ask another, you know,
one or two more questions here, and then we'll go
to the next person of the presentation.
So our next question is coming from Anna McDaniel [phonetic].
This one is asking what about areas experiencing booms.
She is currently in North Dakota,
which is living through--
and living to the oil boom that's happening there.
And so obviously booms will have a dramatic impact on housing,
food, energy costs, and especially
if the area doesn't have price control or price gouging laws.
So maybe you can speak a little bit about that.
>> Is that-- I mean as we talk--
sort of talk very briefly about Detroit earlier being
for Detroit, right, being its own sort of special sort
of case study about a city experiencing a very particular
kind of crisis.
North Dakota in an entirely different way is also
fascinating in this entirely unique kind of thing.
In part because, right,
you think record lowers unemployment rate
in the entire United States of America right now, right?
And this has been through four-- what four years, five years,
six years, something like that.
So you would think well this is terrific, right?
Everything and all sorts of people, right, from all sort
of other states where they have terribly high unemployment rates
and people can't get jobs moving
into North Dakota in search of work.
But as I suspect, I think this was Anna, right?
As i suspect Anna knows, not enough housing.
So my understanding and I'm not unfortunately kept up as much
as I wish I had now, in retro aspect on this.
But that housing is going through the roof, right?
That suddenly you've got people who are finding jobs
and then wages are okay.
But because of the particular set of circumstances,
housing costs are going through roof because it is
such a scarce community that you've got this, right,
this awful kind of conundrum, right?
You got place with very low levels of unemployment
because of a blooming industry, but without the sort
of infrastructures required to make it possible for people
to take those kinds of jobs.
So the outcome is not necessarily obvious, right,
to sort of think about what's going
on with those kinds of families.
And if we evaluate well-being, we need to sort
of be really specific, right, about thinking about, all right,
we-- what are the things that we need to be thinking about now
in trying to figure out whether people would be well advised
to move to North Dakota in search of a job or not.
I wish I had more sort specific data on hand about that,
but it points exactly to the difficulty
of getting really good data for the nation as whole
on these kinds questions, right,
really messy complicated kinds of issues.
>> Great. And then the last question
that I will ask right now.
What do you think about what it takes to move
out of poverty in your communities?
Sort of what you have seen in your experience?
>> That's me blowing air through my lips.
It's sort of universal sign for an exceptionally good question
and extraordinarily difficult question.
Right, I mean, because at some level that question is well,
how do we solve poverty?
As the question implies,
the answer to it is very often different in different places
for different people
at different moments in time, right?
And if we turn our commitment to thinking
in more complicated ways about how we define poverty,
one of the things that should lead us towards is thinking
with more complexity about the causes of poverty
and recognizing that different people find themselves living
in poverty for very different kinds of reasons.
And as a consequence, the solution for each
of them may be different, right?
Someone who is unemployed because they live
in upstate New York and sort
of the last remaining industry has closed down
and there are no jobs available, and they don't have a car,
right, that will allow them to do the hour and a half commute
to the place where there are nearest available jobs, right?
That's a different kind of problem than someone who is poor
because they find themselves injured and unable to work,
but are ineligible for one reason or another
for disability insurance.
That's different from the kind of poverty that's caused
by someone who has a sick parent
who they have made a commitment to take care of.
But don't have long-term care insurance, so are trying
to both provide for the means for the care
of that elderly parent, who was sick or dying,
and figure out how were they suppose to be at work
and then home caring for the parent at the same time.
I mean as you start to sort of think about people living
in poverty, ask people first.
You recognize that the answer
to that question is very often different depending
on who we're talking about,
depending on where we're talking about,
depending on when we're talking about.
[ Pause ]
>> Excellent.
Great, thank you so much.
I think we're going to wrap
up this portion of the Q & A session.
And what I'm going to do now while all
of this is still fresh is point to some additional resources
that are on the campus that can sort of help
to continue the conversation, and just really kind of help you
in your community to gain more perspective about poverty
and some of the things that you can do to kind of address that.
So, what I'm going to do and I'm going to share my desktop
with you and it might take a couple of moments here.
Okay. And so this is the VISTA Campus and I'm sure
that you have all been here before.
This is sort of the screen, the home page that you see
after you've logged in.
And if you click on the Work section and then scroll down to
where it says, Poverty in America, this provides a lot
of different resources on poverty in the United States
and offers some ideas about how you can address that.
So, I'm going to sort
of highlight four different resources here.
The first one is the Poverty in Your Community:
Developing a Community Profile, sort of step by step guide.
This really shows you how you can use relevant community data
to inform your service projects.
And in it, you'll be able to sort of learn how
to develop a community profile which will allow you
to get more information about the different people that live
in your community, sort of design
and deliver impactful service projects, and then, you know,
sort of shape how you're going to partner
with different community groups.
Also, you know, how you're going to use that information
to in list support of other people
who are already doing similar work in the community.
And then also help you develop additional resources
so that the works that you're doing is sustainable.
And so, this is sort of a great more of a micro view
to really work at the community level using the data.
The next thing to sort of point you to is more
of a macro approach and this is really presenting some
of the national data on poverty in the United States.
It's a series of short video clips
that Dr. Pimpare has put together using 2010 poverty
statistics to show how poverty in the United States varies
by group and place, and also to direct you
to where you can find additional statistics
on the most up to date data.
And then for those of you who are just coming out of PSO,
you may recall and even if you were there a few months ago,
you might recall having discussed the poverty theories
of change with some of your fellow VISTAs.
And so, in order to provide you with the resource
where you can explore this theories further,
there's this research article where former University
of California, Davis community studies professor,
Ted Bradshaw talks about how community antipoverty programs
have not so frequently examined these theories
that underlie the dominant practices
that are addressing poverty.
And so, this is just a great resource and framework that sort
of talks about some of the causes and solutions to poverty
and can be a useful tool for you as a VISTA to both analyze
and comprehend, and the antipoverty philosophy behind
your project, and then also to work
to address the specific tasks
and responsibilities that are in your VAD.
So definitely, I encourage you
to take a look at this one as well.
And then the final resource that I want to point you
to are some conversations with about poverty
with Dr. Stephen Pimpare
and there are three different presentations on poverty
that Dr. Pimpare has done in the past.
And these are just sort of a great resource to,
if you have a few minutes, you know, half an hour, an hour
or two, an hour and a half and some of them to sit down
and gain additional perspectives on, you know, poverty,
the history of poverty in America, who's poor today.
And then some of the causes of poverty, you know,
looking at the economic crisis and how that can affect you
or has affected America and the people living here
and then sort of, you know, give you some insight
about what you can do during your VISTA service.
And so, now I'm going to stop sharing my screen.
Oops, I'm not longer showing my screen.
And I am going to encourage you to take a few moments
to share your feedback.
You'll be noticing an evaluation poll that should popping
up on the right-hand side momentarily.
It really helps us to improve these sessions when you share
with us your thoughts thinking about what topics we might want
to include in future webinars so that we can make sure
to incorporate your input
into the development of these sessions.
Thank you so much for your participation.
If you have any further questions
or need additional information you can contact us
at VISTAWebinars@cns.gov.
And then I also want to encourage you to check
out the calendar on the VISTA Campus to sign
up for two really exciting upcoming webinars.
One is Passing the Torch: Ensuring the Continuity
of Your Work, and that one is scheduled for Wednesday,
April 17th at 2 p.m. And then to continue some
of the conversation today around poverty, there will be a webinar
on Mining Census Data to Explore Poverty in Your Community.
So, really getting down to the community level again,
and that is scheduled for Wednesday, May 15th also
at 2 p.m. And so, for a complete schedule of all
of the upcoming webinars,
do visit the ongoing learning page on the VISTA Campus.
We are going to continue to answer questions
for the next 20 minutes or so on the webinar.
And then Dr. Stephen Pimpare will be leaving us
to join a live conversation with some VISTAs in New York City.
So, some of you who are joining us from around the country
where you will be able to engage in some our conversations
after today's webinar, and if not, never fear,
we are continuing a virtual conversation via Twitter.
You can join that with the hashtag knowpoverty.
And Robyn is going to be putting a link to the tweet chats
which is a service that can help you to follow
and contribute to the conversation.
So, now I'm going to turn it over to Anna who's going
to tell us how to open the phone lines for questions.
>> Okay, thank you.
We will now begin the question and answer session.
To ask a question, press star 1 on your phone,
unmute your phone, and record your name clearly when prompted.
If you need to withdraw your question, press star 2.
And one moment please for any incoming questions.
>> Great and while we are waiting, we're going to turn it
over to New York City where we have some VISTAs who are sitting
and who are going to ask some questions.
And I'm going to pass it over to Kate.
[ Pause]
Kate, are you with us?
[ Pause]
Okay, well, it seems that we don't have Kate right now,
but we will work to get her.
So what we're going to do is we're to just start with some
of the Q & A that we have, and while we're waiting
for phone calls to come in from the line.
And so it looks like the first one is going to be
from Kara who's asking, I'm wondering
if poverty measures ever to take into account to debt?
[ Pause]
Dr. Pimpare, are you there?
[ Pause]
Looks like we may have lost New York, and that hopefully,
they will be coming back shortly.
I do have a couple questions on the phone.
Let me know when you're ready.
[ Pause]
Great.
>> Okay, well, we will go ahead and take some of these questions
and we will do our best to answer them.
And if we're not, we will be able to make--
to get the answers for you as soon as we can.
So why don't we take the first question.
>> Okay. The first question comes
from Pamie Webster [phonetic].
Your line is open.
>> Hi Pamie.
>> Hello. Hello?
>> Yup, we can hear you.
What's your question?
>> Okay, wonderful.
So I put a question in the Q & A section, it says that the slide
where it shows the three-- 32.2 percent of Americans live
in poverty at least one month and 44.2 percent
for the whole two years.
That's a slide that was before.
I was just wondering, is there a data on how that looks
when broken down into racial categories and if so,
how does it look or affects the data?
Yeah, that slide.
>> Okay.
>> Hold on one second, we have a--
Robyn is going to answer that question for you.
>> Okay, thank you.
>> Yeah. So, I answered that actually
in the Q & A. There is a link to census data
and there's actually a resource there that has
that information broken out by race.
So if you pull up that link, you'll be able to see,
and I will post it again in the chat, you'll be able
to see the differences that are there.
>> So there-- it does make-- it does affect it in some way?
>> Yes, it does affect the poverty race
and that there is that correlation.
So if you look at the census data, you can get kind
of a more clearer picture than we can pull up in the couple
of minutes we have here.
>> Okay, thank you.
>> Great, thank you.
Anna, do we have another question on the line?
>> Yes, your next question comes from Terry Colbeck [phonetic].
Your line is open.
>> Hello, Dr. Pimpare.
I'd like to challenge the question that Native Americans
on reservations are actually impoverished.
If we look only at the 75 percent of people
who don't have jobs certainly, we've considered that.
But when you look at quality life as you're taking about,
housing is provided, food, commodities
and food stamps provided.
Transportation here locally is great.
That you are given free land and you lease it,
you have healthcare free, there's a great transit system.
You get government payments.
You get casino payments.
Are they-- people don't move
from the reservations are moving back to it.
Why? We don't just have two years of poverty,
we have generation after generation.
Why is the quality of life is so bad?
It perhaps isn't so bad?
And something to challenge the norm way of thinking,
I just wanted your opinion.
>> That is an excellent question.
I am afraid that we have lost audio connection
with Dr. Pimpare, so we're trying to get him back.
And so we will certainly ask your question,
and if we're not able to get him back on the line today,
we will certainly followup with you via e-mail.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you very much.
>> And we do have one more question
from Katie Olsen [phonetic].
Your line is open.
>> Okay.
>> Great.
>> Yeah, I'm here from Louisville Kentucky,
and I was just wondering if you guys
or Dr. Pimpare would be able to explain why thing
like SNAP benefits and housing subsidies are included
in earned income?
So, that seems to me those are very temporary fixes,
especially government assistance for problems
that are very systemic for people who are living
in impoverish situations.
And it seems like, for at least for me the definition of poverty
or the lack there of would be something
where you would be self-reliant and not relaying on benefits
from handouts or some government agencies or organizations
to make your monthly payments or your-- to support your family.
Thank you.
>> Thank you very much.
Again, that is a wonderful question and I believe
that Kate perhaps has joined us.
Kate, are you on the line?
No. So we're still having audio issues
with our folks over in New York.
And so, because we want to make sure that we can answer all
of your questions, it looks
like what we will do is we will continue the conversation
on Twitter.
So certainly, we encourage you to join
that conversation using the hashtag knowpoverty
and we will be sure to follow up with any of your questions,
and we'll get answers to those and then send out an e-mail
with the answer to those questions.
So I really appreciate it and there's a lot
of great conversation that's been happening today.
I may apologize for the technical difficulties,
but we will get answers to all
of those questions and be in contact.
So do join us if you can for the tweet chat and keep an eye
out for an e-mail, which we should be able to get
out to some time next week.
So thank you very much and have a wonderful day.