News Clips

• Mar 09, 2010  |  The Huffington Post Senate Drops Funding for Summer Jobs Programs and Enhanced Subsidies for Families with Children Elizabeth Lower-Basch, a senior policy analyst at CLASP, said advocates will pressure Democrats to reintroduce the TANF funding before the enhanced program expires in September. She said the fate of state summer jobs programs is less certain.
• Feb 25, 2010  |  USA Today Work Share Program That Cuts Jobs v. Hours Could Grow "The (work share) program has played an important role during this recession, and it should be available to workers in more states," says Neil Ridley, senior policy analyst at CLASP.
• Feb 17, 2010  |  Slate Will Obama Help You Get Decent Child Care There's even more money-$1.6 billion-for increasing child care subsidies for low-income parents. Besides Head Start, this program that helps parents on the lower end of the economic ladder get affordable care is pretty much the closest we've come to a systemic government approach to child care. Yet it's so underfunded that it assists only, at most, one in seven children who need help. That means that more than 16 million others qualify for assistance and don't get it, according to research by CLASP.
• Feb 02, 2010  |  Youth Today GAO Faults Labor on Quality, Delays of Evaluations The Youth Opportunity grants, also known as YO! grants, were meant to enable local agencies to collaborate to get youths in high-poverty areas re-engaged in education and employment. "If you're going to make expenditures on research and development, there has to be a certain level of transparency and requirements that these research studies find their way out into the public domain to fuel what needs to go on," said Linda Harris, director of youth policy at CLASP. "This is a population that we need to learn as much as we can about how we accelerate their learning and connections and movement."
• Feb 02, 2010  |  McClatchy Washington Bureau Jobs Funding Set to Expire Before It Has Chance to Work As the ranks of the unemployed continue to swell, more states want to use TANF Emergency Fund money for subsidized job programs that hire TANF recipients and TANF-eligible adults for up to a year. States were slow to seek the money initially because many state legislatures adjourned shortly after passage of the stimulus bill. In addition, the Department of Health and Human Services didn't make application forms for the money available until July, said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, a senior policy analyst at the CLASP.
• Jan 31, 2010  |  The San Francisco Chronicle Employers Wanted: Federal Funds up for Grabs Nearly a year ago, the federal government, through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, gave states a big pot of money to pay employers in the public, private and nonprofit sectors to hire low-income parents. The program reimburses up to 100 percent of the employee's wages. Yet only a few counties - including San Francisco and Los Angeles - have launched large-scale programs and even in those places, many employers are unaware of them or unwilling to participate.The program got off to a slow start because many state legislatures recessed shortly after the recovery act was passed. Forms to apply for funds were not available until July, and a funding question was not answered until fall, according to Elizabeth Lower-Basch, senior policy analyst at CLASP.
• Jan 20, 2010  |  The Montgomery Advertiser Poverty Reduction Expert Challenges Alabama "We should refuse to accept the perception that Alabama is always going to be poor," said Jodie Levin-Epstein, deputy director of CLASP.
• Jan 11, 2010  |  The New York Times A Meager Existence on Food Stamps A recent article in the New York Times safety net series focused on Americans who are living on nothing but food stamps. The article analyzed state data and reported that 6 million Americans receiving food stamps reported that they have no other income. The New York Times published reader responses to the article, including a letter to the editor by Elizabeth Lower-Basch noting the poor response of Temporary Assistance in the recession.
• Jan 04, 2010  |  The Press Democrat New Program Will Bring 400 Jobs to Sonoma County Residents Hundreds of low-income Sonoma County residents will get jobs this year with the federal government paying their wages through September. People eligible are legally able to work in the United States, receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and have minor children. People who are not on TANF but who have minor children are also eligible if their income is less than 200 percent of the federal poverty guidelines.The subsidized employment program is funded by the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which passed in February and was meant to right a staggering national economy. The nine-month program is expected to place about 400 people - many of them welfare recipients - in prevailing wage jobs at non-profit organizations, public agencies and private companies. "These programs have been quite successful in helping people build a track record so they have recent employment and contacts in the labor market," said Evelyn Ganzglass, director of workforce development at CLASP.
• Jan 04, 2010  |  Huffington Post Paid Leave Makes Horse Sense It's time for Congress and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to pony-up to the value of vacation for two-legged workers.
• Dec 18, 2009  |  Inside Higher Education New Approaches to Job Training Thomas Hilliard, senior policy analyst at CLASP, offered a number of revisions the organization would like to see in a new version of the law that were echoed throughout the meeting by representations from other think tanks and associations. Chief among the recommendations, he argued that connections between workforce development and adult education systems should be strengthened so that the teaching of basic skills, such as reading and writing, is better integrated with occupational-specific training.
• Nov 14, 2009  |  SouthCoastToday.com Early Childhood Education is Economic Issue Partners in Early Childhood and Economic Development held a conference last week to discuss early education programs as an economic issue. Danielle Ewen, director of Child Care and Early Education at CLASP, said public and private partnerships are important and there is a need for better data about outcome, impact and providers in early child care.
• Nov 12, 2009  |  Mobile Press-Register Study Adjusts Poverty Rates "We really just wanted to provide this information to states to advance the dialogue on the need for a modern measure," said Dorothy Smith, a legal fellow at CLASP, referring to the CLASP report, Measure by Measure: the Current Poverty Measure v. the NAS Measures.
• Nov 11, 2009  |  McClatchy Newspapers Obama Urged to Turn Succesful State Job Program National As job losses continue to slow the nation's economic recovery, labor experts and economists are urging Congress and the Obama administration to boost funding for a little-known program that 17 states are using to avert layoffs and keep workers in their jobs. Neil Ridley, senior policy analyst at CLASP, said work sharing should be an option in every state, though it will not work for all employers.
• Nov 04, 2009  |  The Sacramento Bee California May Have the Nation's Highest Poverty Rate California has long had one of the nation's higher poverty rates, as calculated by the federal government for decades on a formula tied to food prices. But it may actually be the highest in the nation under one proposed new way of calculating it.
• Oct 01, 2009  |  Progress Illinois Legal Aid Safety Net Stretched Thin Across the United States there is a vast, unmet need for legal services for low-income Americans. The Legal Services Corporation recently released a report on what they call the "justice gap," the difference between need and available services. Their report shows that legal aid clinics turn down approximately half of potential low-income clients due to insufficient funds. Their findings are supported by research published this July by CLASP which suggest that less than 20 percent of the legal needs of the lowest-income Americans are currently being met.
• Sep 18, 2009  |  Education Week (subscription required) Early Education Issue Returns to Spotlight The recent release of the U.S. Census Bureau's statistics on poverty has highlighted the need for increased action on childhood poverty and early-education. Although progress is being made on these issues in some states and at the federal level, due to the current economic troubles, many states are only able to increase funding to one early-childhood program by making cuts to another, according to Danielle Ewen, the director of child care and early education at CLASP.
• Sep 13, 2009  |  Amarillo.com Poverty Level Rises in Region The U.S. Census Bureau released its annual poverty report last week. Included were some disturbing statistics, most notably the fact that the official U.S. poverty rate rose from 12.5 percent to 13.2 percent. "This report says that one of every eight of us was living in poverty last year. The story here is that for a very rich nation we start out with a high poverty rate," said CLASP deputy director, Jodie Levin-Epstein.
• Sep 09, 2009  |  The Kansas City Star The Flu is Coming to Work, too As another flu season approaches, and with it the added threat of a possible H1N1 epidemic, officials are concerned that current sick-day policies are only going to exacerbate the problem. In the current economic climate, many workers will come to work ill because they feel they cannot afford not to. One problem, according to CLASP, is that the majority of private-sector workers no longer have paid-sick days.
• Sep 02, 2009  |  Washington Employment Law Blawg Shared-Work Programs: A Little Used Alternative to Layoffs In today's economy, many employers are faced with the challenge of retaining their employees but reducing costs. According to CLASP, even if economic growth resumes, the job market is not likely to fully recover until mid-2010 or beyond. Shared-work programs offer employers an alternative to layoffs. These programs enable employers to reduce workers' hours while allowing these employees to retain their benefits and to be partially reimbursed for lost hours.