A lesson in closing the economic divide
When I showed up to tour the Center for Family Opportunity at College View Elementary in southwest Denver, the Bayaud Enterprises laundry truck was in the parking lot. Bayaud was there to clean students’ clothes, on site, for free.
It never occurred to me students are more likely to skip a day of school if they don’t have clean clothes. It didn’t immediately strike me that a mounting dirty laundry pile could distract a family from the critical learning that takes place at home. But here at College View, that’s exactly the kind of thing they consider every day.
Funded by the Denver Office of Economic Development, Mile High United Way, and the Denver Public Schools Foundation, the Center for Family Opportunity is about much more than laundry. It is dedicated to considering the needs of the whole child and the circumstances of their families. It ensures each participant is paired with a social worker. Families are introduced to workforce development programs, financial coaching and other support systems, all of which are delivered right there at the school. It’s not just a Denver phenomenon. Mile High United Way operates one in Conifer as well.
Aurora and Denver Community Colleges have a similar approach in play. There, the U.S. Department of Labor and Gary Community Investments are spearheading the Strengthening Working Families Initiative to help low-income parents entering workforce training classes navigate a complicated child-care system.
All of these initiatives are examples of the “two-generation” family economic model spreading across the country. Twogeneration strategies are grounded in the belief that if you care about kids, and their development in particular, you need to care about their families. Once we begin to consider — without judgment or penalty — the circumstances of those families, we begin to realize it’s the simple things that often cause the biggest problems, and we give these children more opportunity to learn and grow and succeed. Transportation, child-care arrangements, even an internet connection can stand in the way of a brighter future.
I recently read Robert Putnam’s “Our Kids” and it left me more resolved than ever to address economic inequality from every angle possible. He portrays an America in which we live in wildly different realities not geographically far from one another. The families in poverty are
trapped in vicious cycles of misery they can’t escape, while wealthier families are able to address the challenges poor families can’t. It’s not that wealthier families aren’t afflicted by drug addiction and early pregnancies like poorer families are; it’s that they are able to deploy “social airbags” in ways poorer families, including many of today’s middle-class families, cannot.
There have always been families who have fallen upon hard times, but it wasn’t always like this. According to Putnam, in the 1950s and 1960s, these families didn’t live in different ZIP codes, they lived on the same street. They had access to the same well-funded education and extracurricular systems; equalizing benefit systems caught them when they fell; ample institutions like religious communities and civic clubs provided social networks which boosted everyone’s lives, regardless of income. America between 1949 and 1979 is defined by many things — good and bad — but relative upward social mobility was the dominant force.
Through stories and jaw-dropping charts, Putnam details the scope of a seemingly unsolvable problem, further complicated by early childbirths, skyrocketing prison rates, and rampant drug addiction. He echoes what we at the Bell Policy Center have heard from so many around our state: The gap between the rich and the poor has widened and our middle class has thinned dramatically.
All this comes at a cost, not just a moral one, but a financial one. Putnam cites a study by Harry Holzer that estimates the costs of child poverty at around $500 billion, or 4 percent of gross domestic product.
Data like this helps illustrate another dimension of the twogeneration approach: We must address the circumstances of families because the costs of doing nothing are far greater than the costs of dealing with challenges upfront.
Projects in the same vein as the Center for Family Opportunity already exist, like Valley Settlement Project in the San Luis Valley, Dahlia Campus for Health and Well-being in Park Hill, and the Nurse Family Partnership. All of these initiatives help disrupt cycles of poverty and their efforts are harbingers of innovations to come, but they require scale. Scale requires public will and significant funding — the kind of funding one might think would come from the community project we call “government.”
Cue Colorado’s abysmal, yet imminently fixable, fiscal situation. A recent Washington Post article highlights how our Department of Corrections spending has grown five times faster than our school funding between 1990 and 2013. Resources for our schools deteriorate while things like prison spending increase on virtual autopilot in a budget that cannot make room for smarter investments. This is why rethinking our state’s rigid financial constraints like TABOR and Gallagher matters so much. Because of these limitations, too many Colorado families are stuck in a vicious cycle of misery and in desperate need of intervention.