The Conclusion from “United Against Poverty” Conference:
Women & Children (Hit) First – and Hardest

By Rickey Gard Diamond

Photo: Ellen Shapiro

Former Vice-Presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) has come and gone, but Vermonters like Burlington’s mayoral candidate Hinda Miller face tough challenges ahead combatting poverty in our state.

There was far more to “United Against Poverty” – the February 8th conference on poverty in Burlington – than the presence of keynote speaker Senator John Edwards (D-NC), who dominated local media coverage.

For one thing, there was the subject of women.

Women and children remain persistently poor in this country, and Vermont women are no exception. Over the last ten years, Vermont has seen an increase in the percentage of families headed by single mothers, from 37 percent in 1994 (the national rate was 49 percent) to 51 percent by 2004, matching the national rate. According to the Vermont Job Gap Study, almost one-third of these Vermont families headed by single mothers live in poverty. In the wider picture, 35 percent of all Vermont women who worked full-time in 1999 did not earn a livable wage for a single person, compared to only nineteen percent of men.

While Vermont ranks 8th out of the 50 states in its care for the poor, said Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle in his welcome address, in Burlington one in five children still lives in poverty. In the city’s Old North End, closer to two out of five children are poor, he said, despite the fact that about half of parents in poverty have jobs.

Jane Knitzer, director of the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University, emphasized the importance of this increase in the working poor. “Real median household income has decreased every year since 2000,” she said. Child poverty rates declined for a decade until 2000, when they began climbing again. Despite growing recognition of the critical need of healthy development in young children, Knitzer’s statistics show that in Vermont and across the nation, the younger the child, the more likely that child is living in poverty.

Welfare reform under President Clinton did emphasize employment, said Knitzer, but the current poverty line, about $20,000 for a family of four, fails to take into account the costs of going to work, including transportation and daycare. A more realistic poverty line for such a family would be twice that amount, she said, and even more in urban areas.

But even $40,000 for a family of four falls well below the livable wage level, sometimes used here in Vermont as a more accurate economic measure than the poverty line. Realistically, a family of four with two wage-earners living in Vermont, where housing, heating, and vehicle maintenance costs are high, needs an income of about $62,000 to live well enough to set five percent aside in savings. Vermonters have sensed that our young families are in trouble and recently supported a higher minimum wage ($7.25) than our national standard – but Vermont’s average annual wage still lags behind that of the rest of the nation.

Vermont’s growing incarceration rate, especially among women, is another factor in poverty. Calling our prisons “a poverty machine,” Cornelius Hogan, senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, said that currently one in five Vermont children are in some kind of legal custody. Hogan formerly served as director of Vermont Health and Human Services under Governors Snelling and Dean. Other presenters who work with the growing numbers of women in jail said that women are most often imprisoned because of an addiction or for writing bad checks. The cost of jailing a woman is more than the livable wage – and far more if she has children who must then go into foster care.

Poverty goes hand in hand with poor health as well. Hogan pointed out that Vermont’s health care costs went up 45 percent between 2000 and 2003. He argued that, since all Vermonters are affected by the failing health of fellow Vermonters, young or old, anything short of a state health care plan that counts everyone in will be unaffordable.

Hogan also pointed out that those in financial trouble, or on the brink of it, increasingly come from the middle class. Levels of personal debt are the highest ever on record, up 36 percent in the past four years, while savings are the lowest since the Great Depression. Bankruptcy rates are increasing – one case for every 156 Vermont households most recently, and half of these are medically related. Little of this shrinkage of middle class assets shows up in current poverty accounting, but Hogan called these matters “a ticking time-bomb.”

And what if a family is trying to buy a home? Just this month, the Vermont Housing Finance Agency (VHFA) reported that the cost of a typical Vermont home climbed to $182,000 (up 10 percent from last year and 87 percent over the last ten years) while Vermonters’ ability to afford such a house slipped last year. To afford a typical house, a family would have to have an income of $65,000, a figure not reached by nearly three-fourths of all households in the state.

David Murphey, a senior policy analyst for the Vermont Agency of Human Services, said that this growing and persistent gap between the state’s median wages and median home prices is an important indicator of problems ahead. Over the past 20 years, Vermonters’ average income has gone up, and at first glance, this makes it harder to understand how child poverty can be increasing. The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey of 2000-2004 even reports Vermont poverty rates going down by nearly 2 percent. But as Murphey explained, when you break it down, the bottom fifth of Vermonters gained 27 percent in income over the past 20 years, while the top fifth gained 72 percent.

Imagine a single mom making $20,000, which puts her family below the poverty line. Twenty years later, she is making $25,400, still not enough to buy a house. Another family in town, beginning with an income of $100,000, gained an extra $72,000 during the same 20 years. This is what has been happening in Vermont, said Murphey.

Women Act

Senator Edwards, to be fair, did say that most of the people he has met at poverty centers across the country have been women. But at this conference, women emerged not only as one of the largest sectors of the poor, but as the muscle behind movements to overcome poverty. The media had it right, understanding this was essentially a political event, but I wished for more concerned Republicans, like State Sen. Vincent Illuzzi, who was in attendance.

The conference was hosted by the City of Burlington, the University of Vermont Political Science Department, the Vermont chapter of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), and Democracy for America (DFA). One of the major coordinators for the conference was UVM senior Lakshmi Barot, who had earlier built and managed the DFA contact database for Dean’s DNC chair campaign. Women’s leadership was richly represented in the over 20 Vermont nonprofits and other organizations presenting at the conference, including CASH (Coalition: Creating Assets, Savings and Hope), the Neighborhood Pantry Express, Beginning Again, and Opportunities Credit Union.

As a participant in the earlier “War on Poverty” conference, I was particularly struck by differences in language among the 300 attendees (600 at Edwards’ speech). This time, it wasn’t about “doing battle” but about “collaboration,” “partnerships,” and “relationships” – women’s terms all.

And, after hearing facts on poverty in Vermont, meeting with organizations working in the community, and listening to Edwards, 16 small groups, facilitated largely by women, posed questions and discussed issues and goals, aiming to come up with practical solutions.

Failure to address women’s needs in particular will, as Hogan said about other issues, ultimately cost us all. We Vermonters, taking our cue from the conference participants and presenters, must lead with bold ideas about relationships, collaborative innovations and, yes, fair pay for women’s work. It is time we become our own champions – or, as Edwards put it, “become the leaders we dream of.”

Rickey Gard Diamond is Contributing Editor of Vermont Woman and lives and writes in Montpelier.