Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Key Discussions:

1. How to refine the model using secondary data to predict level of working poor in counties in the Midwest, with North Carolina analysis done separately to related displaced workers and the working poor.
2. The importance of theoretically and systematically chosen cases  to be done using the structural equations and models developed.
3. The difficulties of insuring the comparability of the systematic community studies. In order to ensure the analytic comparability
   Similar protocol of the information to gather
   1. Similar selection of key informants and focus groups participants
   2. Utilizing a social/spatial approach
      1. Addressing poverty spatial distribution within counties as well as between counties
      2. Determine the degree to which actions at which spatial levels reduce the number of working poor to avoid spatial aggregation bias.
   3. Single research paired with PI in each state to insure comparability of methodology and data.
4. The analytical methods to use in these nested comparisons, particularly the pluses and minuses in using the Community Capitals Framework to address local area investments that are related to a decline in working poor.
5. Integrating the household data compiled by NC-1011  Rural Families Speak when the communities selected for analysis overlap.
6. Implications of the new poverty paradigm, based on threaded discussion of our reading of Rank.
   1. Old paradigm: poverty is a personal responsibility. Liberal intervention="fix" people with job training, etc. Conservative intervention=incentivize people.
   2. New Paradigm:
      1. Poverty results from structural failings. For Rank, this is especially the core unemployment rate, which means that some job seekers will be unemployed even at "full" employment.
      2. Poverty is a conditional state that individuals move in and out of. He documents this with longitudinal data from the panel study on income dynamics showing that the majority of Americans fit the definition of poverty at some point in their lives, but that most are poor for a few years before recovering.
      3. Poverty constitutes deprivation. Here he makes the point that poverty creates lack of access to basic things such as health care.
      4. Poverty as an injustice. He presents a number of arguments that poverty goes against widely held American values of fairness and equality.
      5. The condition of poverty affects and undermines us all. Here he avoids arguments such as the cost of crime, lost opportunity of talent in the workforce due to restricted educational resources, and instead points out that most of us are at risk of poverty through the life cycle and that almost everyone has a family member or friend who is in poverty.

Rank proposes a variety of programs to address the problem: better income supplements for the working poor, better child care, better health care, and asset building programs like IDAs. Rank gives very little attention to the role of place except to acknowledge that CDCs can play a role in building community assets. Totally absent is the notion or explanation of persistent poverty in places. Perhaps this is a function of his urban location (Washington U, St. Louis, MO). Place is perhaps less important in urban areas because persistent poverty may indeed be poor people moving in to the only neighborhood they can afford and then moving out when times are better, to be replaced by a new set of poor people. But in rural areas, places with persistent poverty are probably different, with very little population churn. So place-based strategies may be more important in rural areas than Rank's set of policies would suggest. We incorporated these insights into our NRI proposal, Structural Trends and Community Agency: Toward an Understanding of the Processes that Exacerbate and Erode Uneven Rates of the Working Poor, submitted February 1, 2006. In our electronic conversations, we decided to continue developing the protocol for the field work and finding multiple funding sources

Key strategic change. Because a majority of the NC-1100 participants were unavailable for the meeting planned around the RSS meeting in Louisville August 9-13, the group determined to continue meeting virtually by phone and electronically. We will meet by phone monthly.