Foster care families are better and cost less than group homes, so why the shortage in Western Mass.?, By Michelle Williams, June 10, 2015, MassLive: “For most children in Massachusetts placed in emergency foster care, the process starts with a phone call. The reasons vary: a parent goes into the hospital and are unable to care for a child; a child is found to be a victim of sexual or physical violence and taken from a home. From there, the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families works with partner organizations to place the child in a new residence as soon as possible. Ideally, a child is placed in a single-family home with one other foster child, but the lack of foster parents have made this goal challenging…”
Tag: Massachusetts
Financial Opportunity Centers
Boston centers help low-income residents with budgeting, By Katie Johnson, March 20, 2015, Boston Globe: “Making money isn’t the problem for Adalziza Campbell. Managing it is. Campbell works two jobs, as a hairdresser and a certified nursing assistant, but still can’t get ahead. She got turned down for a bank loan to buy a house and had to borrow from her dwindling savings account to pay her bills. ‘I’m making money,’ she said. ‘Why don’t I have it?’ Like many people, Campbell, 35, of Charlestown, had never created a budget or tried to improve her credit score. But she has started learning these skills at the new Roxbury Center for Financial Empowerment in Dudley Square, one of two such sites to open in October as part of the city’s new Office of Financial Empowerment…”
Earned Income Tax Credit – Massachusetts
Wide support for lifting earned-income credit, By Katie Johnson, March 4, 2015, Boston Globe: “Quanda Burrell, a single mother of two, works full time as a day-care teacher, earns $24,000 a year, and juggles the bills that inevitably pile up in her Boston home. But each year around this time, she says, she is able to ‘clear the slate,’ paying her debts with an income tax refund bolstered by an $800 state credit. Burrell, 29, is among more than 400,000 low-income workers in Massachusetts who would benefit from a proposed increase in the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, widely viewed as one of most effective antipoverty programs and supported by lawmakers and policy makers across the political spectrum…”