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Community Action Agencies have confirmed what later research has shown: the personal and financial resource deficits which hold back low-income people as they try to become self sufficient have not appeared overnight. Poverty in the United States today is much different and wears many different faces than in 1964, when President Johnson created the War on Poverty. Today, many Americans are one or two paychecks away from poverty. One of the impacts of globalism on the American workforce ha been the erosion of the middle class.... and a feeling of security for the working American. Increasingly people are feeling more vulnerable about their jobs, more vulnerable about their financial status in the present and very vulnerable about their ability to adequately plan for and provide for retirement. In 2002, the U.S. poverty rate increased for the second year in a row reaching 12.1%, a .4% jump. In 2001, the rate had been 11.7%. Therefore, by 2002, there were 1.7 million more persons whose household incomes were at or below their poverty threshold than there had been just one year earlier. This meant a total of 34.6 million people, including nearly 12.1 million children, were officially in poverty, the equivalent of having an income at or below &15,020 for a family of three. this number included almost half a million more children than were in poverty a rear earlier. Nearly 41% of these individuals had family incomes at, or lower than, 50% of their poverty threshold, and about 4.4 million were "near poor", i.e. they had family incomes between 100% and 125% of their poverty threshold. According to the 2000 Census, Chautauqua County poverty stats exceed the national averages by far. Our statistics are as follows:
What is the impact of the changing face of poverty on our towns, villages, and cities? School budgets are increasingly being defeated. This can be looked at as a silent scream by the American taxpayer. School budgets being one of a few areas they can directly control. Taxpayers are trying to convey that they are financially stressed and unable to support themselves or their community. People are questioning the impact of dollars spent, the value added of services purchased. Can we afford to have our education system held hostage in the face of a poor economy? What is the impact of an unprepared, unskilled future workforce? By the same token, what is the impact on the future if the bulk of the nation's children are growing up in poverty? What does it say for the richest country in the world when 47% of its children are born into WIC eligible households? Does life in poverty have an impact on ambition, hope, dreams, entrepreneurship, creativity, ability to meet challenges? Are we willing to sacrifice our collective futures as a country? The Community Services Network is made up of more that 1,100 local, private, no-profit and public agencies that work to alleviate poverty and empower low income families in communities through out the Unities States. Most of these agencies are Community Action Agencies (CAA) created through Economic Opportunity Act. community Action Agencies sever over 13 million low - income people yearly in 96% of the nation's counties. Together, the leverage almost $9 billion year from all sectors to provide support services, facilities, and improvements in low income communities. Community Action was born at the enactment of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. The ambitious purpose of this statute was to eliminate the causes and consequences of poverty in the United States. The Act established a federal Office of Economic Opportunity, formed state Economic Opportunity Offices and create Community Action Agencies. From the start, CAA's were expected to act as laboratories for innovative methods of eliminating causes of poverty. |
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