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Last year, WCCF sat down with the Head Start Association and the Wisconsin Community Action Program Association (WISCAP) to discuss joining forces to launch a bold effort: ending child poverty in Wisconsin by the year 2020. We were all motivated by the same desire to ensure that all children in Wisconsin have opportunities to prosper. Children feel poverty's effects in a myriad of ways. Poor children are more likely to lack stable housing. They're also less likely to have the early childhood preparation they need to be ready to succeed in school. Poor children have worse health care outcomes. Poor families tend to stay poor because they do not have access to educational opportunities that give them the skills they need to find and keep jobs that pay decent wages. We want to change those outcomes. On June 7, WCCF joined its Head Start and WISCAP partners in Madison, Green Bay, Milwaukee and Appleton to launch the campaign to end child poverty. Dubbed Vision 2020, the campaign will employ three strategies to reach the goal of eliminating child poverty in the next 13 years. The first is to share information regularly and widely on the effects of child poverty, and measure how Wisconsin is doing in four critical policy areas that can contribute to improving families' economic stability. Those four areas are housing, household earnings, health, and early care and education. The second strategy is to engage state and local policy makers and citizens throughout the state to pledge to end childhood poverty and create a strong statewide base of support for change. The third is to use that statewide support to advance practical local and state policy solutions to address and eliminate poverty. We'll be keeping individuals and organizations apprised of campaign developments, recent research, and local and state developments through a website launched on June 7, located at www.2020wi.org. Please visit the site today and join the Vision 2020 campaign by pledging to help ensure that all children in Wisconsin can prosper. | ||||
