Charities Rethink Antipoverty Goals in Recession’s Wake

Back in 2004, during an optimistic economic era that now seems like ancient history, an alliance of religious leaders in Minnesota started a drive to stamp out poverty in the state once and for all.

They were confident enough to set a deadline for making it happen—2020. The state legislature came on board, setting up a legislative commission that called for a comprehensive plan to create jobs, improve transportation and health care, expand income-tax credits, and provide more child-care aid and early-childhood education.

“We thought that if any place could actually accomplish this goal, Minnesota ought to be able to do it,” says Nancy Maeker, executive director of A Minnesota Without Poverty, a coalition of religious groups and nonprofits that is promoting the campaign. “We had a relatively low poverty rate. If we could do it, we could show others it could be done.”

However, the Minnesota effort suffered the same fate as many other ambitious crusades to help the poor that were started over the past decade: Once the Great Recession hit, the goals proved impossible to meet.

At the time the legislative commission began its work, in 2007, the poverty rate in Minnesota was 9.5 percent, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. In 2012, it was 11.4 percent, and even higher among racial minorities.

Giving Up Deadlines

As the nation commemorates the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty this year, nonprofit leaders across the country are assessing how to recalibrate antipoverty campaigns that were stymied by the economic downturn that cost millions of Americans their jobs, their houses, and their savings.

The slow recovery from that crisis, which peaked in 2007 and 2008, coincided with a political climate that has made it difficult to win increased social spending—both in Washington, where a deficit-cutting Congress faces intense pressure from Republicans for steep budget cuts, and in many state capitals, where the tough economy has taken a toll on state coffers.

Some advocates have had to give up on deadlines that once seemed realistic.

Catholic Charities USA, for example, no longer mentions a goal it set in 2007 to cut poverty in the United States in half by 2020. It made that decision as it watched the national poverty rate rise from 12.5 percent when the campaign started to 15.1 percent in 2010, a level that has barely budged since then.

“We wanted to be realistic about this,” says the Rev. Larry Snyder, the charity’s chief executive. “Otherwise, people are like, We’re not going to work for something that’s obviously not possible.”

Share Our Strength, an antihunger group, has scrubbed its materials of an ambitious deadline it set in 2008 to end child hunger by 2015.

Bill Shore, the chief executive, says the group concluded at the beginning of 2013 that it was not going to achieve its goal in all 50 states, given that the number of people receiving food stamps had grown from 26 million in 2006 to 46 million.

“It gave us some sense that just at a time when we were making this incredible progress, this tidal wave of people needing assistance was much larger than our calculations,” he says.

An Economic ‘Tornado’

Connecticut won plaudits for its intensive focus on poor children after the legislature vowed in 2004 to cut child poverty by half in 10 years. It created a Child Poverty and Prevention Council, which summoned liberal, conservative, and centrist poverty experts—and adopted 12 recommendations that they all supported in areas including housing subsidies, child care, and education.

After the economy nose-dived, the House speaker set up a task force to propose ways to help children weather the storm.

Despite all that effort, the share of poor children rose to 14.8 percent in 2012—up from 10.5 percent in 2004.

“I think it’s always helpful to have a goal and a percentage you’re looking toward,” says Elaine Zimmerman, executive director of the Connecticut Commission on Children, a state panel that promotes policies to help children.

However, she says, the recession was a “tornado” that pushed 35,000 children, largely from middle-income families, into poverty.

“We said 10 years,” she says. “Maybe we need to say 20 years.”

But, she says, Connecticut has adopted some key laws to help alleviate the problem, for example, by raising the minimum wage to $9 in 2015 and expanding subsidized housing.

Medicaid Expansion

Antipoverty activists in Illinois are also considering whether to adjust their deadline for cutting “extreme poverty” in half by 2015.

When the legislature created the Illinois Commission on the Elimination of Poverty in 2008, 5.4 percent of Illinois residents were extremely poor, or making less than 50 percent of the federal poverty rate. In 2012, the figure was 6.5 percent.

“We’ve always said from the beginning that cutting extreme poverty in half is an achievable goal,” says Kimberly Drew, an antipoverty coordinator for the Heartland Alliance, a charity that co-chairs the commission along with the governor’s office, “I don’t know if we can do it in the next year, but we’ll absolutely continue to work towards the overall goal.”

Despite the slow progress, Ms. Drew says she is optimistic that the tide may be turning. The number of extremely poor people in Illinois fell to 767,000 in the period 2011-12, about 55,000 fewer than in 2009-10.

Furthermore, after years of gridlock in the state General Assembly, the body passed four bills in 2013 that the commission supported, including measures to expand Medicaid and protect tenants during foreclosure proceedings.

Getting Easier

The poverty fight could get easier as the economy improves. Unemployment in the San Francisco metropolitan area, for example, fell from 9.1 percent in 2010 to 5 percent in 2013, notes Eric McDonnell, executive vice president of United Way of the Bay Area, which started a campaign in 2009 to cut poverty in California’s nine-county Bay Area in half by 2020.

United Way, which has raised about $575,000 for the effort, pegged the poverty rate for the area at 22 percent in 2007, using a calculation method that, unlike the Census Bureau’s, takes into account the area’s high cost of living.

In 2010, the most recent year for which data are available, that figure rose to 28.7 percent.

Thanks to increased tax revenue, some states have projected budget surpluses for 2014. Those state include Minnesota, which could free up some money for social programs—although competition for the revenue will no doubt be fierce.

A Minnesota Without Poverty still hopes it can meet its 2020 deadline, but has decided it needs to do more to win public support. Ms. Maeker says the group plans to hire a consultant to help develop a marketing campaign modeled partly on a successful effort to legalize gay marriage in Minnesota.

Among the winning tactics used by that campaign, she says: It promoted its issue as one of “love of family” and conducted one-on-one telephone conversations with voters.

Like many antipoverty activists, A Minnesota Without Poverty gives top priority to raising the state minimum wage above the federal level of $7.25 an hour—an issue that opponents argue will hurt workers by making it more expensive for employers to keep them. The group dubs its effort “ketchup to the cost of living” and distributes ketchup bottles with custom labels that offer data about the difficulties low-wage workers have making ends meet.

New Efforts

While Catholic Charities and Share Our Strength have dropped their earlier national deadlines, they are both focusing on state or local efforts.

Catholic Charities is working to set up pilot projects in Chicago, Fort Worth, Honolulu, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and San Jose to test a new way of distributing money from safety-net programs, which entails pooling the money at the local level and tailoring programs to individual needs. A bill the charity promoted in Congress to set up pilot projects went nowhere, but the group is working with cities and individual members of Congress who support the approach.

Catholic Charities also organized this month a coalition of seven major antipoverty groups, including Feeding America, the Salvation Army, and United Way Worldwide, to educate people about the challenges faced by poor people, highlight innovative solutions, and act to put them into effect.

“We’re still convinced that if we really wanted to, we could cut poverty in half in this country,” Father Snyder says.

Mr. Shore of Share Our Strength says the recession was not entirely to blame for the group’s failure to meet its original goal of ending child hunger nationwide by 2015. He says the effort also turned out to be more complicated than expected.

The charity—which measures progress by the number of low-income children who are enrolled in federally subsidized school-breakfast and summer-meal plans—has decided to intensify its work in two states that have made a strong commitment to ending child hunger, Arkansas and Maryland.

Share Our Strength’s new goal is to ensure by 2015 that 70 percent of children in both states who are in the federal school-lunch program also get school breakfasts. Last year, 58 percent of children in Arkansas and 57 percent in Maryland were in that category.

If successful, Mr. Shore says, his group will apply what it learned to other states.

Despite the uphill struggles that poverty campaigns have faced, they win an A for effort from Michael Katz, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania who has written several books about the history of U.S. antipoverty efforts.

“It’s wonderful to see that kind of optimism,” he says. “For so long, poverty became kind of invisible, even worse than invisible—it became a sort of toxic subject in American politics.”

See all of our coverage timed to the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty in this special section.

See all of our coverage timed to the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty in this special section.