Agencies must team up to serve poor better, Editorial, January 9, 2010, Detroit Free Press: “With one in seven Michigan residents now living in poverty and metro Detroit leading the nation in unemployment, state government must maintain a safety net and do more to move people out of poverty. That doesn’t always mean spending more, but it does mean working smarter — and more effectively. Government anti-poverty programs have for too long worked in silos. Narrowly focused agencies work on one set of issues, such as job training, day care or transportation. But training for a job that a worker can’t get to, for example, or can’t take because she lacks day care or has a drug problem isn’t going to help much. Michigan has aggravated the problem by gutting the adult education system over the last decade, decreasing funding from about $100 million to $22 million…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty