“This report tracks the federally funded Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) appropriations across the Department of Human Resources. As TANF caseloads have dropped, higher funding priority has been directed toward child welfare programs rather than child care, transportation, and job training programs that would directly help families achieve economic self-sufficiency. As the TANF budget faces federal funding shortfalls in the coming years, policy makers will have to decide between further reducing work assistance programs and/or making larger investments of state funds to critical child welfare programs.”

To read the full Georgia Budget and Policy Institute click here.

Child poverty and family economic hardship: 10 important questions.

The National Center for Children in Poverty questions how poverty is measured, saying the federal guidelines designed in the 1960s are outdated. To read about the questions this group at Columbia University is posing, click here.

Virginia Williamson has gone to the Savannah Baptist Center for about 30 years for help with her grocery needs.

Williamson, 74, lives on a pension from her late husband and a small Social Security check and depends on the center to help keep food in the house.

But with food and fuel costs rising, the center and other food providers are finding their cupboards more bare than usual. To read the full story, click here.

For a variety of Savannah-area businesses, entry-level employees are key to overall operations.

“They’re critical to giving the patient the type of care they expect,” said Paul P. Hinchey, president and CEO of St. Joseph’s/Candler.

An overriding question for St. Joseph’s/Candler, other businesses and the employees themselves is how can they live on those wages.

StepUp Savannah’s Poverty Reduction Initiative works to bring area businesses to the table to try to break the city’s chronic cycle of poverty.

To read the full article, click here

This report issued by Pew Center on the States and the Public Safety Performance Project reveals that the last 30 years of growth in the prison population in the U.S. has brought us to the point where more than one in every 100 adults is now incarcerated in an American jail or prison.

Georgia is in the highest fifth among the states in increasing numbers of prison inmates; from 2006-2008, the state has added 2,413 inmates or an increase of 4.6% in its prison population. To read the full report, click here.

Addressing group members meeting at the Savannah Morning News building, Mayor Otis Johnson said the Step Up Savannah’s Poverty Reduction Initiative was all about building a just and caring community. He noted that Savannah’s poverty rate is between 22 and 27 percent.

To read the full Savannah Morning News article, click here.

Drive through Detroit’s east side, the north side of Philadelphia, the south side of Chicago or Milwaukee’s near north side. Parts of urban America look like battle zones — burned-out buildings, decaying streets, vacant lots strewn with trash, empty factories and abandoned homes. There are blocks where it’s much easier to buy alcohol than apples, where life expectancy is similar to that in a Third World nation’s, where far more young men go to prison than to college.

To read the full Detroit Free Press editorial and its take on Savannah’s poverty reduction efforts, click here.  

“Entrepreneurs and small businesses in need of loans have a new resource in Savannah. International microfinance pioneer Accion is opening a new lending office in Savannah.”

to read the full Savannah Morning News article, click here.

“Hundreds of dollars in annual savings could potentially be created for millions of moderate- and lower-income workers today by doing nothing more than shifting them from the high-costs basic financial services that they currently rely upon to lower-cost services.”

The research brief was issued January 2008 for the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings Institution.

To read the full report by authors Matt Fellowes and Mia Mabanta, click here.

The American dream is founded on the belief that people who work hard and play by the rules will be able to earn a good living, raise a family in comfort and retire with dignity.

But that dream is harder to achieve for millions of Americans because they spend too much of their hard-earned money on fees to cash their paychecks or pay off high-priced loans meant to carry them over until they get paid at work.

To read the full Wall Street Journal opinion piece, click here.