OneRouge Community Check-In - Week 127

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Week #127

Join us this Friday for OneRouge Week #127 at 8:30am via Zoom. This will be a continuation of our series on the driver ‘High Number of Households with Children Living in Poverty' featuring speakers:

• Teresa Falgoust is Director of Data and Research at Agenda for Children and they have produced an impressive body of work on the data and interconnected socio-economic challenges that lead to child poverty.

• Paul Tuttle is Director of the Low Income Tax Clinic (LITC) at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services (SLLS) and has sent ahead information on the earned income tax credit (EITC) which coincidentally is credited with reducing the numbers of children living in poverty since the COVID pandemic.

• Marcela Hernandez is Program Manager for Louisiana Organization for Refugees and Immigrants (LORI), but as a social worker used to research the face of poverty.

• Owen Wilson-Chaavez is Senior Director of Analytics at Child Poverty Action Lab which was born out of the same Drivers of Poverty as OneRouge

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Quick Links: Notes, Community Announcements

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Speaker Notes

Casey Philips

At the center of a lot of the work of OneRouge is at the center of today’s topic. It is one of the most difficult truths to know that 1:4 children go to sleep hungry in our city. Generation after generation are being born into poverty, the American caste system, which we have structured with precision. Our featured speakers have been doing this work for decades and I tip my hat to them.

Pepper Roussel

Good morning. Today’s talk will be a little more structured than most weeks. We have a story arc because I’m hoping we can share a few solutions at the end. We will begin with Marcela Hernandez who will share what child poverty looks like on the ground in our “New neighbor” or immigrant communities. Then will move into the data from Teresa Falgoust with Agenda for Children in New Orleans and Owen Wilson-Chavez in Dallas because the numbers are not special to a city, a state, a region. Then at the end we will talk with Paul Tuttle with the Low Income Tax Clinic at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services and the reason is because there is a lot of information that has gone out saying that there has been a decrease in child poverty during the pandemic because of the earned income tax credit. I want to make sure that you get what you need if there is something we can share with our respective communities.

Marcela Hernandez

Good morning everyone and happy Friday. I am the programs and from LORI. I should say that I am not an expert on poverty. However, a few years ago I had the amazing opportunity to complete research in China regarding the face of poverty in third world countries. And later on because of my work as a case manager for Hispanic women in Baton Rouge, I was able to learn on a more personal level the struggle as related to poverty. So there are 3 quick facts in regards to poverty, I want to bring out today:

1. When we talk about poverty, we must be aware that the face of poverty is different in each country. There are different poverty lines and each country’s basic needs vary in terms of economics.

2. Despite the US census Bureau reported in 2020 that 11% of children were living in poverty. These numbers are inconsistent. And this is especially true for vulnerable, immigrant communities who are often times not included in the numbers. Official and unofficial research on immigrant communities living in poverty show the poverty rate is more than twice that of US natives. They are not being counted for one reason or another – usual because of their status.

3. Poverty and immigration is complicated. And socio-economic inequality is real in immigrant families. There are many factors that contribute to poverty. We can think of employment instability, lower wages, lack of benefits, lower levels of education, and lack of ability to become educated.

We talked last week about linguistic isolation and language barriers. This is a real contributor to poverty. Also many families are disqualified from receiving aid such as Medicaid, SSI, TANF. And some of those who qualify for government nutrition programs such as WIC and SNAP have a great fear of deportation if they get any type of assistance. If the immigrant is elderly or disabled, my condolences because this person is really facing poverty. And of course, lack of healthcare access. An example is that a couple of weeks ago, we got a call from a lady needing legal help. Later on she called back because she got sick and was rushed to the hospital. This lady now has an initial bill of $7,000 – and this is something we are dealing with her right now, as we speak. Single mom just arrived from Honduras. No assistance. No one else can help her. $7,000 just to go and see the doctor. Poverty is a reality My call today is a call for empathy for immigrant and vulnerable communities. We pay taxes. We contribute to the socio-economic development of the country. However, we face some of the greatest rates of poverty especially those who are not officially rated.

Teresa Falgoust

My name is Teresa Falgoust. I am Director of Data and Research at Agenda for Children. We are a child advocacy organization who also works very heavily in the early childhood space. Since 1991 we have been the Kids Count grantee in Louisiana. So we look at child wellbeing at state and local levels. We also help the Annie E. Casey Foundation get out its annual Kids Count data book. Measuring data in every state lets you compare child wellbeing across age groups and across grant domains and child well-beings. It gives a comprehensive portrait of child wellbeing. And as you can imagine, Louisiana has almost always been at the very bottom of those rankings. Traditionally 49th, which is where we currently are. In child poverty has been the major driver of our poor rankings. In order to improve child wellbeing in Louisiana, we have to focus like a laser on the child poverty issue. Looking at the most recent data, I would encourage everyone to look at the synopsis that Jan Moller shared because it is such a great synopsis of child poverty. And backing up a little bit, child well being is measured by the very outdated measure of child poverty that uses the same measure across the 48 states (a little higher in Hawaii or Alaska). But whether you are in Manhattan or in East Carroll Parish, the child poverty threshold is the same. And unfortunately, it does not look at the impact of public benefits. So the US spends a ton of money on things like SNAP, which is food assistance, none of that comes in as cash to families. So the system does not measure the impact of what we are spending the most on. The supplemental poverty measure does take into account both those geographic differences and how much it takes to make ends meet as well as the impact of those programs such as the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. To me looking at the data that cam out of the supplemental poverty measure shows that policy works. During the pandemic we invested in the child tax credit that provided monthly benefits for families with kids and enhanced benefits for families with young children who have higher costs due to the nature of childcare. And things like diapers just cost more. Child poverty in the younger years are the most detrimental. Also kids in their younger years are most likely to experience poverty. It is critical to keep that in mind. It is not that policy isn’t’ working – it is. And we really need to think about how to bring those lessons forward. The other thing that came out of the Child Trends report that Pepper had shared with me and that has gotten so much play is that because of the structure of the safety net, immigrant families are often left out of many of these protective programs. There are either extensive waiting periods for families to be able to participate. Or they are simply too afraid to participate at all. Or they are afraid to participate because of public charge rules. So in many ways, a lot of our Latino and Asian immigrant families are left out and living in this steep poverty. And that is another thing we can think about changing as a state. As well as the minimum wage has been a big protective factor in many states – and Louisiana still does not have a state level minimum wage. Marcela is bringing up that many of those immigrant families did not receive those tax credits either because they didn’t qualify or they were unaware of the benefits – and that’s true. The earned income tax credit excludes a lot of those immigrants. And is tied to the parent immigrant or work status. Where if we were really focused on decreasing child poverty, we would be looking at children and not what their parents are up to. So as we think of who is left out of the safety net – families who aren’t able to work consistently are also left out of this and then their children are as well.

Owen Wilson-Chavez

Hi everybody. I am a Senior Director at a non-profit in Dallas called the Child Action Poverty Lab. Casey asked me to come. I’ll talk a little about what we are doing here in Dallas. And we are talking where in this data standpoint because data is at the center of what we as an organization do. We work closely with our local government agencies, the City of Dallas, Dallas County, all those different apparatuses that control several billion dollars in budgeting authority across the county and they all touch aspects of child poverty and things that related to child poverty and economic viability in some way. There is often not a single prescriptive or a single focus on how they can work together to address those issues. And that is something that in 2018 or CO started really to tackle. How do we get key executive leaders in those organizations sitting together, looking at data, looking at research, and trying to think about how they can collaborate and work with their staffs and their teams – several thousand employees again with billions of dollars of budgeting authority – to think about ways we can try to undercut a problem that y’all know well. In 2014 in Dallas we had 1:4 kids (closer to almost 40% or 39% of children in Dallas) were living under the poverty line. We’ve seen some progress and changes in economic conditions over the last decade especially that great benefit that we just talked about – the benefit of the expanded child tax credit over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. With that going away there are all sorts of efforts that we are working on because we have to think of those longer term plays because we have to meet our organizational, ambitious north star. We want to cut child poverty in half within a single generation in Dallas by working across several key focus areas, centering data and research at the table of conversation so that we stop focusing on anecdotes and band aids and really use data to drive how we undercut root cause conditions and really think innovatively outside of the box. I lead our data analytics team. I also lead work that we do inside the safety and community area. And a lot of what we do when it comes to data is thinking what is the data that we can grab from the census that tells us past lagging indicators. But what is the data we need to think about to create actionable steps on the front end? How do we actually go out and do targeted, quick, timely surveys of individuals and communities so that we can link service providers with those most in need directly? A great example of that is over the course of the pandemic early on, on a housing front, we knew that evictions were gonna be something that would be a major issue in Dallas and tat the best data we had access to at that time was a 2016 year old census track level data on the eviction labs website. We knew that in the county courthouse, on county IC servers there was a lot of data on ongoing eviction filing activity. So we spent the first several months of the pandemic (almost a year really) doing a lot of back and forth in iterations with teams at the county to make sure we were able to get a real-time feed of eviction data. We started working with that making sure we were sharing aggregate high-level report to the city council people didn’t even have that data. They had no idea how it was manifesting in their communities, which apartment complexes they needed to go and try to make connections to do with landlords. Then we also worked with legal and rental assistance providers to make sure they had access to the information on eviction filings the day after a filing was happening so they could jump within a 3 week window and intercept, work with clients who needed support as soon as possible. This resulting in the Emergency Rental Assistance Act Funds 1 Dallas has paid 75% of all funds; nationally the average is 56% of all funds were dispersed. And we really believe that we were able to provide the conditions for our rental and legal assistance teams to have a greater impact with their work, making connecting of peole to resources that exist so that we are not seeing these returns where young mothers, often young single mothers are faced with eviction that continues harm on the children. Those at lower socio-economic classes who are facing instability who will then manifest other long term trends that we all know well, they stem from other displacement or eviction. We are doing some really cool work and I am excited to hear the work you all are doing in Baton Rouge. Casey has had a chance to share some of that so it is great to be invited to speak.

Paul Tuttle

I am the Director of what is called the Low Income Taxpayers’ Clinic at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services (SLLS). SLLS is a private non-profit law firm that provides free civil legal services for low income people. And though the rest of the firm serves southeast Louisiana, as the name implies, my tax clinic is actually statewide. So I help anyone in the state of Louisiana. Also we have slightly higher income and eligibility guidelines than the rest of the firm. So we do help people that are working and have some income. So our clients usually have a little more income than the clients of the rest of the firm. We do have offices throughout south Louisiana including Baton Rouge. If a client wants to go to Baton Rouge to do intake, their case would be referred to me. They can also apply for services over the phone or at our website, which is slls.org. So my tax clinic helps people with federal tax issues if they are being audited, if they have to go to tax court, if they owe money that they can’t afford to pay, if there’s liens they want to get rid of. Anything and everything dealing with federal tax, we try to help. First of all, I know that y’all are representing a lot of different organizations out there, a lot of different people in different parts of the state. If you could refer people to us if you hear that they are having federal tax issues. Secondly, I came on here today primarily to talk about the child tax credits because in 2021 in reaction to the pandemic, the President and Congress enacted what were really sweeping changes to the child tax credit. One a lot more money was made available in that credit – I believe was up to $3600 for children up to age 15 or so. And then $3000 for children above that age. So a lot of money and then they also greatly enlarged the people who were eligible for that credit. Usually it’s a low-income person credit. But his year it was enlarged to sweep up a lot more people In fact even my household was eligible for it. My wife and I both work for non-profits and we have two kids. Usually we are not eligible for this kind of stuff and we were eligible for it last year. And then the third change is that they paid half of those credits out in advance, which is highly unusual. Sometimes people get confused about this, but if you get a tax credit for 2021 you actually would not claim it until you file your 2021 return in early 2022. So last year’s taxes were due this Spring and you would ask for whatever tax credits you get. And you would get them this year. So you usually get the credit the year after it was awarded. So it’s unusual they would pay it out in advance. They paid out half of the money that you were supposed to get in advance. From July to December of last year, the IRS used information from your previous return to see if you were eligible before they started sending out checks to people and depositing money into bank accounts. But they only did half of it so this Spring if you got the credit, you should have filed a tax return and asked for the other half. If you didn’t get the credit at all, you have filed an asked for all of it. So this is in addition to the earned income tax credit, the child care credit, and other credits that you can get – these are called the child tax credit or the advanced child tax credit. So the big thing I want people to take away from all that is that you have 3 years from the due date of filing a return and claiming your credit. So the 2021 return was due April 2022. People have until April 15, 2025 to file a tax return and claim them if they didn’t get them. I noticed there was an articled today in WWL online news channel. It had kind of a misleading title that said you had until 11/15 of this year to claim those credits. So I looked at it and there is actually a an app available on the IRS website to claim these credits if you are usually a non-filer and I guess that is what is gong to end on November 15. But that is not the deadline to claim these credits. Like I said, you have 3 years (until 2025) to claim each credit. And you have to file a tax return. This is not dependent upon you working like the earned income tax credit is. The child tax credit did not require that. So if you had kids living in your household even if you had no income, even if you don’t normally file taxes, you would want to file a tax return for 2021 to get your credit. So that’s another thing I’m asking people to do is to get the credits that are out there. That you can still get them but you have to file the 2021 tax return in order to get them. Lastly I would ask people to try and direct low income people to volunteer income tax assistance (VITA). They are volunteers who ae trained tax preparers to help low income people file tax returns. There are different programs across the state sponsored by different organizations a lot of them are not active right now because they are usually active through the tax filing season. So even if people cannot find help right now they should be able to n a couple of months. Those are the big things I want people to get out of this. People are eligible; there’s a lot of money out there. You have to file a tax return and VITA services are there to help. Cause we don’t want people to go to shady preparers and have most of their refunds taken away from them. I refer people to VITA because it is free, they are knowledgeable, and they won’t take advantage of their clients.

Q/A

Is child hunger being traced at the municipal level other than at schools? Who are the agencies collecting that data? And do they collaborate?

Casey Phillips

I would think the best place to get that information would be Healthy BR and Jared Hymowitz and his team. They would likely be the most direct source to be able to get and circulate that answer.

For Paul: Can you share how do people refer clients to the LITC? And do you help people get their ITIN?

The identification tax number is something that undocumented folks need to file their tax returns. And we could help with that. Unfortunately, the bad news is that SLLS is a legal services corporation and can’t help undocumented persons. It’s one of the grant restrictions. They could get that kind of assistance from a VITA program so recommend an undocumented person go to VITA. And in the New Orleans area there is Catholic Charities who deal with immigration issues. And if there is a resource in your area that deals with immigration issues then you probably want to refer them there. If you want to refer someone to SLLS our phone number is 504.529.1000. We also have a website slls.org where people can apply for services and there is addresses for all our offices. We have Covington, Hammond, Houma, Harvey, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge people can go into if people want that service. I am based in New Orleans but if you go into any of those offices they will refer the tax case to me.

Flitcher Bell

SULC is not presently running a low income tax clinic. Have spoken with the director over the clinics and there will be an ask for immigration to be added. We just need the certification and for the Chancellor to agree to it.

Casey Philips

One of the larger organizations in town is embarking on a funder next strategic plan and there is a lot of information that has been flowing out. Lifting up the importance of the conversation as poverty has a direct correlation to violence, life expectancy, to mental health of youth. Louisianan leads the nation in infant death. We rank 49th in mental health. So unpacking the ripple effect of poverty is not just the human beings who are directly affected by poverty. But it also has a ripple effect to the whole region. This is the first time when people don’t want their kids to stay here, but to leave and find greener pastures, safer places, and more prosperous places to live. That affects the work that we all do. Thanks for the space to bring it back to center.

For Teresa: What are the poverty impacts on health and education outcomes in the numbers?

There is pretty much no metric of child wellbeing that is not affected by poverty. We know that kids who are impacted by poverty are less likely to be proficient readers. The gaps there just are astounding. As well, there are impacts on health; low-income families are much less likely to describe their kids as being in good health. At every single level kids in poverty are much less likely to have what they need to thrive. As we look forward, we know that to get a thriving Louisiana, is to have thriving children. So we need to do a lot of work on a lot of policy and investment. We really need to change the conversation with politicians from thinking about physical infrastructure alone to thinking about he human infrastructure. We are investing so much in kids, we are not investing enough. What really came out of the poverty report is all of the barriers we put up to families to making ends meet. We’ve got a ton of different programs. The EITC, the child tax credit, SNAP, WIC, LaCHIP, Medicaid, but they require families to navigate those systems and submit documents and paperwork and get it right every time. Headstart for example and child care assistance… sometimes you get put on wait lists or you forget to submit the right paper. And that’s another really key piece: helping folks undertand how to navigate processes and then also make it easier for them to do it. Things like data sharing across agencies so that if you are approved for SNAP that you are also approved for other services very easily without having to do anything.

For Marcela: Does LORI bridge gaps between folks who need help and those resources? How do we get folks who are undocumented to be able to file their taxes with assistance? Does LORI help connect the dots?

That’s our fight on a daily basis. We do offer direct services to organizations and that is one of my greatest pleasures is making sure that I am providing services to organizations around here and in the surrounding areas. To know where we can better refer our clients to obtain specific needs. Often times we meet with people who can give us information and we use that to compile our resource directory that we give to our clients. Right now we are working with a housing program and we are happy that we can close the gap between affordable housing and immigrant communities. This program is going to help our low-income, refugee, immigrant community member to get some type of access and information in regards to quality, affordable housing. So we are going to be able to provide the event at different locations and closing the gap between organizations that are already established in our communities. Last but not least, we became a Medicaid certified organization. So we are trying hard to help our community the best we can. Also having conversations with the schools and higher education. We are aware that poverty is a serious matter that impacts us all, but is complex for immigrant and refugee communities. So we are just advocating and establishing relationships so if you or any other organization believe you can contribute to what we do please, get in touch with me. I am more than willing to have a conversation and brainstorm how we can help our communities.

Patrick Tuck

One of the things I did post in the chat was about the American Rescue Plan dollars that were allotted to all the cities. So you can go in on that link and search Baton Rouge and see there is the $95.1M and much different than several months ago. Much of that funding has been allotted. I do wonder if Jared would be a resource to give us an update on where we are in the process. I know New Orleans had a community meeting last night wehe the public was able to go in and speak about what they think the important focus areas could be. Last time I looked at New Orleans, they had a structure but had not assigned actual percentages of funds. New Orleans is actually $311M plus what the county gets. And I just returned from an After School conference in DC where it was evident that at the state level that after-school programs and departments of education and boards of elementary and secondary education are actually collaborating on distribution of funds into after school programs at the state level. In Louisiana it doesn’t appear that that is happening at the state level so the art funds that are coming in for children are going directly to the local associations and then they are determining on a case by case basis which programs they will distribute funds to. And a lot of school boards are figuring out ways to keep the funds inside their systems and tutor instead of actually offering the full gamete of education programming that include tutoring, educational enrichment, and the kids are also being fed in these programs.

Can any of the speakers discuss the types of barriers to getting money to children in poverty especially those being raised by grandparents?

Paul Tuttle

For the child tax credit and earned income tax credit that is for the people that the children live with in their household. They have to be related ot the child in most cases. But if a grandparent has grandchildren living in the house they should apply on their tax returns claiming those kids for the credits including the enlarged tax credits that we talked about for last year. There are different eligibility requirements for different credits. The biggest one is the earned income tax credit and you have to be related to the child through adoption, marriage, or blood. So you file you taxes without providing any evidence to the relationship. If the IRS decides to come back and audit you, then you can submit things like birth certificates, adoption documents, proof of residency, school records, medical records. For te child tax credit and the advanced child tax credit, the child needs to live with you as well. If a grandparent is taking care of a child there is a lot of money on the table and they should be filing taes even if they normally don’t. List if they are just getting social security or something and even if you are not usually eligible for this kind of thing, this is a very special year and there are millions and millions of dollars still sitting out there. We really need to get the word out ot the rest of the community. And to these grandparents to get over to VITA, to get over to AARP to get that money for yourself and your kids. If the only year you haven’t filed is 2021 then that is one you definitely want to file. Can go back 3 years and see if there you are owed any refunds.

Does VITA serve undocumented individuals? Paul Tuttle

I believe so. There are lots of organizations that get grants from the IRS to do training of volunteer tax preparers under their guidance. AARP, United Way of Southeast Louisiana do this sort of thing. They all operate under separate rules. But it is my impression that most of them would help undocumented individuals.

Has any of the data collected what the outcomes are for COVID and lack of accessibility when there were only services that centered those who could receive it because they had privately owned vehicles? Unsure

Transportation and mobility is often an issue for caregivers. Can we bring tax services to those communities who are pedestrian?

Paul Tuttle

VITA moved their services to virtual. This is still an issue for the elderly without access to computers or a phone. But most people do have access to a smart phone. For elderly they should call their local elderly services program; they should have some sort of shuttle or van service that might be able to get them to a site.

Casey Philips

We talked early on in the OneRouge calls about bringing services to the community. When we talk about pop-up type services, farmers markets, health screenings, I believe there is a private sector solution for someone to come in and provide solutions. There is a private sector solution to get kids from school to an after-school programs cause that is a different business model. If you talk to anyone who owns a food truck, they will tell you they spend half of their time is not spent cooking food or doing their promotions – they spend it fixing the damned truck. You have to be a mechanic and a chef in order to run a food truck. There has got to be a private sector solution that can administer agnostic services, training vehicle, supply distribution. So if you have people in your world who can do this, please, know this is part of the problem. Living in poverty, ALICE population, or elderly, we have to connect services to them. What is untenable is to when you have someone based at a location to be able to make that a mobile offering is a whole new business offering.

Mary Stein

We have been doing afterschool feeding at the library. We have had a lot of food contributions, but couldn’t use most because they contained peanuts. The summer feeding is through EBR schools, but only at branches that are inline with EBR schools and don’t go every day to all locations. It is better than nothing, but want to improve that and are about ready to do Friday afternoon go bags.

Community Announcements

Friday 10/21 first part of the call will be for folks to speak on the Constitutional Amendments so you can distribute to your communities. Also MM will be giving a sneak peak for a special OneRouge Live!

Celebrating the 5th year anniversary at LORI 6:30p at the Holiday Inn on Airline Hwy.

Susan Hamilton is over the family justice center. Would be a great resource

Live at 5

Maker Faire

Latin Festival in New Orleans on Sunday called Sabores de Mi 11a to 9p at St. Mark Episcopal Church.

Shout out to the Sierra Club transit planning summit

10/17 is a public hearing on the issue of poverty and homelessness. In person and virtual. Everyone who is touching poverty and youth is a chance for us to give the state how this is playing out in real time. It is an important conversation. The second meeting is on 10/21.

19th JDC Family support center that operates out of the River Center library for families attempting to navigate the justice system. Will be on BRProud on 10/17 to highlight the work.

Press Release for Scotlandville Garden Park for GGH highlighting community garden and the work bring done in Scotlandville 1p at the dead end of Godchaux off of Scenic Hwy nexgt to Brothers’ meat market.