Child poverty is not a fact of nature. Together, we’ll make sure ALL our children are healthy, fed, and housed.
Before the pandemic we had approximately 2 million children in poverty and 450,000 childrenin extreme poverty. The pandemic has exacerbated the situation for families working hard toget ahead. In 2019 the state budget invested $4.8 Billion in End Child Poverty Plan recommendations and preserved and built on them in 2020. We still have much work to do.
#EndChildPovertyCA 2021 Movement Priorities
Coordination of Services: Continue to improve the cost-effectiveness of programs that support families, focusing on community-based, collaborative, research-based solutions.
Child Care: Improve access and availability to childcare and address the childcare crisisas exacerbated by the Pandemicby adequately meeting the business needs of child careproviders. Child care is a lifeline to keep parents working and families stable.
Housing: Increase overall housing availability and reduce evictions so that children and families don’t face the trauma and stress of homelessness, exacerbated by the pandemic recession.
Health Care: Strengthen and expand community based and school-based health careclinics to meet families where they are so that they can get the care they need. Within anequity framework provide COVID vaccines in high needs communities and ensure healthaccess for ALL families and children irregardless of immigration status.
Safety Net: Continue to expand on the CAEITC the Young Child Tax Credit. Supportefforts to expand Pandemic EBT sothat families can feed their families, during thiseconomic crisis. Increase cash policies so that families can meet basic needs (i.e.,increase SSI payments, UI for ITIN filers, etc.…)
Download a printable version of the 2021 #EndChildPovertyCA Priorities
The End Child Poverty in California campaign is sponsored by GRACE (Gather, Respect, Advocate, Change, Engage) and the End Child Poverty Institute to end extreme child poverty and reduce overall child poverty in California. In close partnership with the Dolores Huerta Foundation, we are working to increase support and community engagement across the state. We invite you to be part of the movement to address the highest child poverty rate in the nation by implementing simple solutions to a complex issue.
Soon after achieving her dream of owning a hair salon, Jacquelyne Gettone encountered a problem familiar to many parents: She couldn’t find affordable child care that she trusted close to home.
“I had to close my business because I couldn’t afford child care,” she says.
Jacquelyne has now been on California’s subsidized child care waiting list for over a year — and she’s still waiting. “For many families, the waiting list is really the No Hope List,” she says. “It leaves me heartbroken. Eighty-five percent of [children on the waiting list] are children of color. My son Matthew is one of them. The odds are stacking up against him as an African-American boy.”
“Being on the waitlist means spending three to four hours per day commuting, not being able to afford a reliable car, loss of time to spend with my children, having to miss out on my kids’ school and sports activities…It means living paycheck-to-paycheck. It’s made me feel hopeless, frustrated, and stressed.” – Jacquelyne Gettone, Parent Voices
Jacquelyne is fighting to create more opportunities for families like hers. She’s a member of Parent Voices, one of our End Child Poverty California partners, and traveled from Contra Costa to Sacramento this spring to share her story with state legislators.
Parent Voices is a parent-led organization dedicated to making quality child care accessible and affordable to all families. They work hard to put the experiences of parents at the center of policy decisions, and provide powerful reminders of what’s at stake in our state: Parents are losing jobs and quitting school because of a lack of child care.
When the voices of parents unite with those of policy makers, partners, and allies like you, big things happen. Together, just this year, we got $5 billion of the End Child Poverty Plan into the state budget, including 12,500 new childcare slots, 10,000 full-day preschool slots, and childcare guarantees without interruption!
Jacquelyne (left) and other Parent Voices parent leaders attending a budget hearing at the Capitol.
I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together with partners like Parent Voices. There’s more work to do to #EndChildPovertyCA, and I look forward to showing up with you — and all our amazing partners — to get even more done in 2020.
Yours,
Jackie Thu-Huong Wong Vice President of Policy and Advocacy End Child Poverty CA
Brian King of the Fresno Street Saints, speaks in Fresno on May 18, 2019, as part of the End Child Poverty Bus Tour. Read Brian’s full speech below. Photo credit: Fernando Rios
Brian King is the director and co-founder of the Fresno Economic Opportunities Commission Street Saints. He grew up in poverty on Chicago’s South Side. Brian served as a member of California’s statewide Lifting Children and Families Out of Poverty Task Force that created the End Child Poverty Plan. As our CEO Conway Collis said, “It’s with Brian King’s leadership that we’re going to get this done.”
Brian joined us for the entire 2019 End Child Poverty in California Bus Tour, and spoke multiple times, including this powerful speech in front of his hometown crowd in Fresno.
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Praise God. I’m appointed to speak to you guys first about
what I’m experiencing. So first without any further ado, let me give thanks to
God for me even being here. It’s only through Him that I’m here. You know, they
wrote me off and said I would never live to be 15, but it’s only thanks to God
that I’m here a couple ticks away from 60.
Then I want to give thanks to my mother and mothers like her who went to bed hungry so that we couldn’t taste what poverty felt like. And so for the mothers who have put themselves in those positions and continue to do so to this day, I want to salute you guys: mothers who have went without so that we can.
Brian King, director, Fresno EOC Street Saints, May 2019
I want to talk to you on a couple of deals – with two hats –
the first hat is poverty. I am a direct descendent of poverty. I have
experienced all the DNA of poverty. I’ve went from an 8-year-old gang member,
to 14-year-old drug addict, to an incarcerated teenager, to a 21-year-old
homeless addict walking around on the South Side of Chicago just waiting to
die.
I have cleaned up, and went back to the streets and became
one of the most significant and largest drug dealers in the city of Chicago. I
have everything that’s made up of a young African-American male that’s walked
the impoverished community.
But then I came to Fresno and I found a man name Jesus. And now the other hat I wear is a battle against poverty.
And my question to us in Fresno is “How do we feed the world, but starve our kids?”
It is a tragedy that we live in the second highest concentrated poverty area in the nation. And we’re not alone. In our travels, I’ve been able to go through San Diego to here. And what I’ve seen has really broke my spirit. I met a young 26-year-old lady in San Diego named Monique that has all the DNA that I have from these impoverished neighborhoods. But she has a 4-year-old kid that she’s trying to raise on $540 a month.
But she’s fighting.
And she was so excited to see the [End] Childhood Poverty bus come up that she encouraged me to keep on. Because sometimes this deal gets hard. But as we continue to go on, I’ve seen the governor come to a community where the community came around and said, “No more.” We’re going to stand, and we’re going to fight, and we’re going to figure this whole deal out.”
Then we went and met a senator that’s working with a group of ladies that held hands and talked about how we can overcome.
And so as we continue to walk through this path of created suffering—through Pomona and through our travel halfway across this state, I’ve been able to sit an hour with people on the bus and sit in hotels in the evening and just look at the glimmer of hope that we come together to try to end poverty throughout the whole state.
There is a battle ahead of us. But coming from impoverished neighborhoods, we battle every day.
And we know this ain’t nothing but a step. So we’re here today to say, “Fresno, we need you. We need you to go out and use your influence. We need you to begin to go. And those of you who’ve not registered to vote, we need you to go register. We need you guys that sit in City Hall and that sit in these lobbying seats to begin to lobby. We need our elected officials to come together and hold hands with San Diego, with L.A., with Weedpatch.
We were there this morning. And I sat there and I watched a community that had almost nothing, give us their best. They cooked breakfast burritos for us. They had chips for us, water for us, and they don’t even have their own clean drinking water. But they took part, and they took place in this fight that we’re having.
Members of the Fresno EOC Street Saints at the Fresno stop on the End Child Poverty Bus Tour, May 18, 2019.
And so as we begin and continue our journey, I want to first salute you guys for coming out and taking time out your busy days to be a part of this deal. And from our Fresno Street Saints family, I love you guys. Thanks for showing up for us.
We are truly in a time and space in history, that we can right it. And so as you continue to hear the speakers that’s coming up today, I ask that you open your hearts, that you listen, because this is a message that’s coming from across the state – a universal message that we have to begin to save our children. And like all you guys, I am 1,300% with us lifting our children out of poverty.
But again, my biggest concern is our children are dying poverty. So we just ask that you listen patiently, and that you hear that there is a solution, and we want to give you that solution.
***
California has 450,000 children living in deep poverty.
We’re also the only state with a plan to END it. Already in 2019, $3.4 billion
has been put toward the End Child Poverty Plan in the 2019-2020 state budget.
Investments to end child poverty will pay for themselves over time as parents
and children become healthier in body, mind, and spirit, and are able to have
higher lifetime earnings.
There’s more work to do. We have the research, the plan, and
the momentum to end child poverty. Now we need the political and moral courage
to see it through.
