The Office of Minority Health and Community Science Webinar

Measure of America co-director Sarah Burd-Sharps will be presenting at The Office of Minority Health and Community Science Webinar: Building Community Capacity to Use Index Data on Social Determinants of Health. Sarah will be presenting information on Measure of America’s feature mapping program on Thursday, December 19, 2013, 3:30 – 5:00 EST  (click here to register).

 

The Search for Lasting Solutions

This blog post appeared as the conclusion to Bread for the World’s annual Hunger Report. You can find the Hunger Report here.

Fresno County, California, leads the nation in agricultural productivity, with an annual agricultural output valued at $6.8 billion. Fresno farms yield a cornucopia of fresh food, producing more grapes, chicken, turkey, milk, tomatoes, peaches, plums, and almonds—among others—than any other U.S. county. Paradoxically, Fresno also has a higher rate of food insecurity than any other California county. One in five residents—more than 190,000 people—experience times when they don’t have enough food for an active, healthy life.There’s no better illustration that hunger in the United States is not due to a lack of food than Fresno, a county whose workers literally feed America, yet often cannot feed themselves.

The presence of hunger amid plenty is profoundly troubling, its persistence even more so. If we’re being honest with ourselves, while the composition of the hungry population has certainly shifted over time, we have failed to move the needle on this issue in any fundamental way for more than a decade. U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics show household food insecurity hovering just under 12 percent from 1998 to 2007, after which it rose above 14 percent in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The household food insecurity rate in 2012 was 14.5 percent, which translates to nearly 49 million Americans.

The puzzling part is that this problem endures despite excellent research about the root causes of food insecu­rity, years of advocacy, important policy reforms, innovative programs on the ground to feed people, the dedication of myriad volunteers, and significant financial resources. Collectively, the government and private organizations spent about $115 billion fighting hunger in 2011. That’s $315 million every single day.

There’s so much first-rate work being done to understand and address hunger in America, and the richest country in the world certainly lacks neither money nor food. We need to figure out how to pull this work together such that it equals more than the sum of its parts.

Measure of America’s aim is to rethink the ways in which we as a society understand and mea­sure disadvantage, with a view to reframing the debate and re­engaging Americans in the search for lasting solutions. One way we do this is by using numbers to tell the story of what’s going on with everyday Americans. Measure of America’s American Human Devel­opment Index is the cornerstone of this work. Another is to highlight what’s working, not just in the United States but also around the world, to improve well-being and expand opportunity.

In September 2000, leaders from 189 countries met at the United Nations and agreed to work jointly toward eight measurable, time-bound goals to reduce global poverty—goals such as halving the percentage of people who are undernourished, reaching 100 percent elementary school enrollment, and providing access to HIV/AIDS treatment for everyone who needs it. They were called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The MDG rallying cry did not, of course, solve all of the world’s problems, but it spurred tremendous action and results. The global target to cut the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by half was reached ahead of the 2015 deadline, as were goals on access to safe water, fewer malaria deaths, and better living conditions for slum dwellers. In addition, the world is on track to meet the hunger and tuberculosis targets.

The MDGs were remarkably powerful and successful for many reasons. They helped focus governments and NGOs on achieving a limited set of clear objectives in areas that were central to human well-being, and they made it hard for those who preferred to look the other way to continue denying the existence of severe human deprivation. They gal­vanized collaboration and brought home the realization that duplication and competition among similar organizations would not get the world across the finish line. They created a more predictable environment in which recipient governments and NGOs weren’t pulled this way and that by constantly shifting donor priorities, making longer-term planning and programming possible. And most importantly, the MDG process put in place a system of accountability in which progress toward the goals was tracked annually and communicated widely. This regular, accessible reporting put persistent divides, such as those between rural and urban areas and between the very poorest and everyone else, into bold relief. The shift from measuring inputs (we lent $2 million, we installed fifty wells, we trained one hundred teachers) to measuring outputs (50 percent fewer people dying of malaria, twice as many girls enrolled in secondary school, half as many people drinking unsafe water) meant that invest­ments had to yield tangible results to count as progress.

The eighth goal involved raising the money to pay for this progress. The flow of foreign aid had dwindled during the 1990s, and the international consensus around the ambitious MDG targets provided a shot in the arm for development assistance. Total development aid went from $79 billion in 2004 to almost $129 billion in 2010 (in constant 2009 dollars).3 Though that sum fell short of what some had hoped for, and funds slowed after the global recession, such an increase had been unthinkable in the business-as-usual scenario.

The MDGs encouraged a wide range of actors to pull in the same direction and provided a clear measure of success. Could those in the United States working to reduce hunger and food insecurity commit to a small set of widely-agreed outcomes—within a set time period— that would focus efforts, increase collaboration, and maybe even stimulate some healthy competition in an area where today too many Americans are paying too little attention? We think it’s worth a try.

Black Youth at Higher Risk of “Disconnection”

November 19, 2013 Black Voice News

The Living-in-the-Basement Generation

November 19, 2013 — Detroit Metro Times

Dismal Numbers for Disconnected Youth

This blog post appeared as a commentary in the Huffington Post on July, 9, 2013. You can access the original article here.

At Measure of America, we have charted the share of 16- to 24-year olds in the 25 most populous metro areas who are not working or enrolled in school; they are America’s disconnected youth. Our latest report, “Halve the Gap by 2030: Youth Disconnection in America’s Cities,” shows that 5.8 million youth fit into this category. While youth disconnection is a national epidemic, our research reveals its disproportionate impact on young people of color.

African-American and Latino teens and young adults are far less likely to have a job or to be enrolled in a formal educational program than their white and Asian-American counterparts. The average youth disconnection rate for Latinos is 17.9 percent, compared with 11.7 percent for whites. While Latinos are roughly as likely as other young people to be employed, they are much less likely to be enrolled in school. In fact, 54.6 percent of Latino youth are enrolled in school, compared with the national average of 61.7 percent. African-American youth are nearly three times as likely as Asian-American youth and twice as likely as white youth to be disconnected from employment and school. In contrast to Latinos, the primary challenge for African-Americans is their attachment to the workforce. Nationwide, 61.9 percent of Latino youth are employed, compared with just 45.2 percent of African-American young people.

Analysis at the neighborhood level shows that communities with large percentages of African-American and Latino youth are the most disconnected. In Boston—the metro area with the lowest rate of youth disconnection overall—the rates for African-Americans (14.2 percent) and Latinos (18.6 percent) are much higher than that of whites (7.2 percent). In Washington and Minneapolis—the second- and third-most connected cities—one in every five African-Americans ages 16 to 24 is disconnected. Furthermore, disparities in disconnection rates between neighborhoods in the 25 most-populous metro areas are most pronounced in the cities where residential racial segregation is prevalent. In Detroit, New York, and Chicago—the three most racially segregated cities—disconnection rates vary by as many as 30 percentage points between neighborhoods.

Communities with large shares of African-American and Latino youth are the most disconnected because they face a host of structural and institutional barriers, including poverty and education inequality. Six characteristics strongly associated with disconnected neighborhoods are low human-development levels, high poverty, high adult unemployment, low adult educational attainment, and a high degree of residential segregation by race and ethnicity. Clearly, youth disconnection is an issue that is larger than any single young adult; the problem reflects and reinforces the conditions parents, families, and the larger community struggle with.

The institutionalized drivers of youth disconnection are even more evident when one looks at the data over an extended period. Youth disconnection rates by neighborhood from 2000 are strongly associated with youth disconnection rates today in those same areas. Our report shows that neighborhood-level youth disconnection in 2000 explains about 74 percent of the variation in disconnection in those same neighborhoods at the end of the decade (2011), even after taking into account population growth and demographic change. Entrenched youth disconnection shows that it has become a normative experience in these communities. When the young people who are disconnected today were in elementary school a decade ago, as many as three in 10 teens and young adults in their lives were not working or in school—shaping their own expectations about the future.

Solving the youth disconnection crisis requires reengaging and reconnecting young people who are disconnected today as well as preventing disconnection tomorrow by improving conditions and opportunities in disconnected communities. But to really move the needle on this issue, the actors working to put an end to youth disconnection must join together and establish measurable, time-bound targets for reducing the gaps between racial and ethnic groups and between neighborhoods.

In Philadelphia, the African-American youth disconnection rate is 25.2 percent and the white rate is 8.9 percent—a gap of 16.3 percentage points. The highest neighborhood disconnection rate is 30 percent, and the lowest is 3.2 percent—a gap of 26.8 percentage points. Halving the gap would mean no more than 8.15 percentage points separating African-Americans and whites, and no more than 13.4 percentage points separating neighborhoods. While the gaps would still be large, the needle would be moving in the right direction. Setting clear targets raises awareness, galvanizes resources and action, provides a gauge for assessing effectiveness and progress, and encourages diverse actors to pull together toward the same ends—just what this stubborn problem and the young people affected by it need.

The authors are co-directors of Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council. Their most recent report expands on their 2012 research, “One in Seven: Ranking Youth Disconnection in the 25 Largest Metro Areas.”

Dismal Numbers For Disconnected Youth

November 21, 2013National Journal

Interview with Kristen Lewis on Morning Edition

November 4, 2013WNYC

GOP Struggles in Big City Politics

October 30, 2013NPR’s The Takeaway

Minnesota Ranks High in Measurements of Well-Being

November 3, 2013Brainerd Daily Dispatch

The Top 10 Cities for Disconnected Youth Are…

October 31, 2013Bustle

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