August/September 2006

An Ambitious Vision: End Child Poverty in Wisconsin by 2020

by Martha Cranley

By the time they are 17, one in four children in the United States will have lived in or near poverty. This deprivation diminishes their ability to enjoy healthy childhoods and realize their full potential as adults. In 2004, 179,000 Wisconsin children lived in families earning below the federal poverty level, and one in three lived in families considered to be low income (below 200 percent of the federal poverty level). This unnecessary and preventable suffering costs all of us.

Wisconsin has one of the strongest work ethics in the country. Yet in the last decade, the number of families that are employed but still mired in poverty has increased. We can and must reverse this trend.

What then can be done differently to address poverty? Clearly, the current piecemeal approach, which involves inducing individuals or families to change themselves to better fit into the current economic system, is not a long-term solution. To truly eliminate poverty, it is the system that needs to change. Dr. Mark Robert Rank, in his book One Nation Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All, likens the current economic system to a game of musical chairs; the number of chairs is set to be fewer than the number of players. When the music stops, someone, based on timing, agility, or just pain luck, is going to win and someone is going to lose. There simply are not enough family supporting jobs for those who need them. We can, of course, predict who is more likely to lose based on individual characteristics--education, race and ethnicity, language etc--and it is those barriers that current policy tries to address. But that does not alter the fact that the rules of the game are the fundamental cause of the skewed outcomes we currently see.

The Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, the Wisconsin Head Start Association and the Wisconsin Community Action Program Association (WISCAP) believe that there are real solutions to poverty, and that the time has come to make the elimination of child poverty the state's top priority. Together we are launching Vision 2020: A Plan to End Child Poverty in Wisconsin by 2020, a campaign to raise awareness with advocates, policy makers and Wisconsin citizens that child poverty can be eliminated, and to create the public and political will to do so.

A survey of our collective membership along with research on best practices has lead to our four-point agenda to end poverty. Our vision includes: