Eradicating Poverty One Community at a Time

Right now, we have a slew of poverty programs in the U.S.: welfare, food stamps, WIC, public housing, earned income tax credit, job training, free clinics, Headstart and all the others.

But do they work? There's a lot of skepticism — worries that we don't see any sort of large-scale change coming from our investment.

The trouble is, our poverty programs are scattershot. We have one program here, and another there, making poor families trek from program to program with many falling through the cracks.

Say there's a preschooler who's going to Headstart. Her family's on food stamps, so she gets enough to eat. But they don't have health insurance. So when she gets an earache, she can't go to the doctor, and she misses so many days from Headstart that it doesn't end up making a difference in her education.

Other kids might get good health care, but go to a lousy school. They might have a great teacher, but no supervision after school, so they're lured into joining a gang. Other promising young students might have the smarts to get into college, but lack the resources to get there.

The results? They're not good, says Judith Bell, president of Policy Link.

"More than 80 percent of black and Latino fourth graders can't read at grade level," says Bell. "Huge numbers of kids are not graduating from high school. They never end up having careers that pay a living wage."

But a new government initiative with widespread support is trying to change that. It's called "Promise Neighborhoods."

Promise Neighborhoods is modeled after that intensive anti-poverty program you may have heard of from New York: the Harlem Children's Zone. Basically, founder Geoffrey Canada created a zone within the city where kids travel through a pipeline of services to get them from cradle to college to career.

Pregnant mothers are taught how to discipline their kids effectively. Those kids get sent to a preschool program. Their families get job training, housing help and food assistance. The same kids go to a great school, an effective after-school program and get the kind of tutoring and mentoring they need to succeed in college and after.

Harlem Children's Zone is a radical success in the world of anti-poverty programs. The kids in its local charter school have closed the racial school-achievement gap, something that's almost unheard of.

Now, the Obama administration is trying to scale this idea of pooling anti-poverty programs so that they can really make a difference for kids.

The vision? "All children growing up in Promise Neighborhoods have access to effective schools and strong systems of family and community support that will prepare them to attain an excellent education and successful transition to college and career."

Communities around the nation will be vying for $10 million in planning grants to become Promise Neighborhood. The government is looking for communities far and wide — rural and urban, coast to coast — that have a distressed population and a collective will to change it.

PolicyLink has created its own Promise Neighborhoods Institute to help communities submit their proposals, which are due by June 25. The website offers resources, assistance and the chance to connect with other groups trying to do the same thing — change their community by creating a pipeline for success.

Bell says she thinks the results of Promise Neighborhoods will be long-term success for kids that would otherwise have struggled to achieve.

"We are going to focus on getting outcomes. We are going to focus on results," says Bell. "That is an incredible vision for the future. I think it will fuel a whole new movement and a whole set of approaches for fighting poverty."

Photo credit: Megan Cottrell