Nonprofit Girl

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s Boston Globe article, “Missing Men,” briefly outlines the history of US anti-poverty measures and points to a sector of the population that has been left out: men. Her treatment is fairly nuanced and worth a read.

Well, here’s some news. In Oregon, thanks to the Individual Development Account (IDA) Initiative, you can. If helping low-income people improve their lives by saving toward home ownership, education, and entrepreneurship goals sounds like something you wish your tax dollars did, this is your chance. You can decide. And you can even get a credit [...]

An increase in state funding for childcare is the topic of an article in today’s Oregonian, “Little-known fact: money for day care” [link]. Some interesting details emerge, and this section in particular seemed relevant to the nonprofit scene in general:
The YMCA centers in Portland offered nearly $300,000 in child-care scholarships last year to low-income families, [...]

This is disappointing news. John Edwards has truly set the pace on many issues related to domestic policy this election year. I hope that, especially on poverty, the remaining candidates continue to borrow freely from his ideas.

Stanford University has recently launched Pathways Magazine, described as “a magazine on poverty, inequality, and social policy.” The Winter 2008 issue is available in .pdf on their website, and free subscription options include email notification of new issues as well as print versions.
Winter 2008 Issue .pdf
[Via Education and Class]

For a limited time, the Oregon Health Plan will accept new adult enrollments, according to a January 7th DHS news release. OHP will be enrolling approximately 5,000 people into the Standard plan in order to replace members lost by attrition and bring the total number of enrollees back up to average levels. This is the [...]

Just got this press release from the people at NCAF.
NCAF Blasts Bush’s Veto of Labor-HHS
WASHINGTON (Nov. 13, 2007) Community Action Agencies (CAAs) that administer self-help to low-income Americans nationwide are exasperated by President Bush’s veto of the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education appropriations bill.
“This is the height of hypocrisy,” [...]

I’ve been reading Jeanne’s blog, Social Class and Quakers, since she began writing it in August. It’s one of a large number of Quaker blogs I read, a virtual substitute for the Quaker Meeting I feel I can no longer attend. Her focus is especially compelling to me, for a number of reasons, not the [...]

I’m only 29, so I hope my naiveté is forgivable. The thing is, when two parties receive a national mandate to do something differently, and yet continue to do the same thing, doesn’t that mean that voters lost again? Case in point: domestic spending budgets look no more likely to receive rational increases than they [...]

My stack of summer reads includes a couple books on poverty that I borrowed from the library. One is Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time, and the other is Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream, a collection of essays with which Senator John Edwards is loosely [...]