Toolkit-4

This section includes an outline and methods for developing a CAA strategic plan for reducing poverty. A strategic plan must be based on a realistic assessment of your community and of societal factors related to poverty. This review can create the dynamics for change; it opens the door to discussion of a wide range of anti-poverty strategies. If you skip over the assessment phase then there is a 95% probability that your plan will simply revalidate the status quo.

Some elements of this chapter are underlined. If there is http or www at the start of the underlined item, clicking on it will take you to a website for additional information. If the underlined item does not have a www, then clicking on it will jump you to another document in this workbook (which may be on a CD or on the Cal-Neva web site).

To start, read through this chapter to get the general idea of the structure and contents, then go back to the top and start clicking away. Feel free to modify any of these materials for your own use. You can do some or all of these pieces, and you can do them in any order. If you have not been involved in anti-poverty planning before, you may want to look at the Background Issues in Assessment and Planning, which highlights some of the challenging aspects of doing antipoverty planning.

The Six Steps in Community Assessment

These steps always appear on paper as linear, sequential activities. The reality is that you will skip around, but hopefully over a period of two or three years will accumulate these plan components.

Each of these twelve steps is expanded on the next two pages and in subsequent sections.

A. The Six Steps in Community Assessment

Clicking on an underlined item takes you to background information and exercises that are on this CD ROM.

1. Five levels of an economy: global, national, regional; community and neighborhood

h. Typical methods for providing people what they need even if they do not earn enough money from their j-o-b. (Pick one or more of these strategies.)

a. What people believe, especially about fairness rights, civil rights, equality, who should do what for whom, are important because these drive the trends and set the boundaries for government action.

c. SPECIAL BONUS. A ‘case study’ illustrating the interaction of the economy, social values and demographics.

Step 4. Describe the physical environment. Some CAA’s include a review of the physical environment as a topic in their assessment, especially if they are from a rural area where agriculture or tourism are a major element of the economy, or where resource extraction (mining, logging) was or is a major element of their economy, or where there is scarcity (water, energy).

Review the community assessments and other people’s plans. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Since the 2000 Census was completed most public agencies have updated their community assessment and strategic plans. Review them and borrow or adapt from them.

Housing. See your local Consolidated Plan or “con plan”, and the housing element of your general plan.

Education. Every school district has a 10-year projection of the grown in enrollment and the implications for facilities and staffing.

Maybe you do most of the above through staff work or a small committee. If you have a meeting open to the public, then you should construct a framework for organizing the conversation that takes place in that community meeting. We suggest you sort community input into conditions, causes and strategies. Step 7a, below, gives you a method for doing that.

After you have the overview, then the action steps in planning might include the following.

b. Ranking You can create a set of criteria for ranking the severity of problems or the strong points of opportunities.

Step 9. Set Goals. Using the ROMA goals as agency goals and link individual strategy goals and program’s goals to them.

Step 10. Develop Outcome Measures. These are the “ends” that you want your agency, programs and strategies to achieve. These are the “results” that the funder is buying. Some people describe their desired outcomes BEFORE they set goals.

Step 11. Develop criteria for priority setting. Looking at what other organizations are doing, at your resources and capabilities, and figure out what you should be doing. This may be where you review your vision, values, purpose and mission.

Step 12. Strategy Development. A strategy is what you will do to reduce a cause of poverty or improve a condition of poverty. Strategy selection is easy to do if earlier in the planning process you have developed a good description of the causes of poverty and if you have general agreement about these causes. If you do not have agreement, then the confusion over these issues floats downward and creates disagreement on strategy selection.

ISSUE # 1. Every planning system is different. There is no standardized way to do a community assessment or to do strategic planning or any other kind of planning. At various times and in various types of planning systems, the community assessment has been called the community needs assessment, an environmental scan, and a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. You have to make up your own framework or select an approach from an existing system.

ISSUE # 2. There are two conceptual approaches to doing community assessments. One is to work deductively, starting with American society as a whole and determining how your community is the same as or different from the rest of America. The other approach is to work inductively, starting with what local people say and adding it all up.

Almost all public policy works off of a deductive framework. Most thinking about services to individuals works inductively.

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The Changing Face of California

Demographic information is available from the excellent U.S. Census Bureau website at www.census.gov. Use the American Factfinder.

For California, the Public Policy Institute of California has two excellent reports. They are found at:

http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=478 and
http://www.ppic.org/main/pulication.asp?i=153

You can find the same data elements for your county or city through your regional council of government or the State Data Center.

I. H ow Economic Opportunity Overlaps with but is Different from Civil Rights

This has been a major source of confusion because some people confuse economic poverty and political poverty, i.e., they (mis)perceive that the reason why people are poor is because they are relatively powerless. The absence of political power can help perpetuate poverty—to keep people “in their place,” but the presence of political power does not guarantee an end to economic poverty. Having full power as a citizen or as a group helps to level the playing field, to ensure that people obtain equal access to public program benefits. It may be a necessary condition to being a part of the process for ending economic poverty, but it is not a sufficient condition. You can be a fully empowered citizen and be dirt poor if you do not have the other knowledge and skills needed to perform tasks for which other people will pay you money for doing the tasks. The absence of political rights can “keep you down,” but the presence of political rights does not assure that you will be lifted up from poverty.

One cause of poverty—one reason there is an absence of economic opportunity—is that people are discriminated against. Racism and sexism are two major reasons why people do not have economic opportunity. We have legislation that seeks to prevent discrimination in hiring and promotion that is based on race or sex (or age or disability status).

Even though many of the official elements of institutional racism are gone, unfair discrimination still exists. The University of Michigan says that 30% of the differences in income between families is explained by the sex or race of the people involved. This study matched people on educational attainment, work experience and hundreds of other relevant factors, and the racial factor explained another 30% of the difference in income between families. In other words, some people, SOLELY by virtue of their membership in a group that is an ethnic minority or female, will have a lower income than those who are not in that group.

Thus, one of the fundamental reasons for the creation of the Economic Opportunity Act and the Civil Rights Acts is, unfortunately, still present in American Society. People don’t like to acknowledge this in America because it is not consistent with our national ideals. Yes, racism is inconsistent with American ideals, and that is precisely why we need organizations that will work to identify and correct this problem. We know that it takes more than “rulebook” law, either civil or religious. It takes constant vigilance, persuasion and other corrective action. In this respect, CAA’s have a “watchdog” role over American society. This is not necessarily going to thrill everybody and make the CAA popular with all elements of the community, but if done properly this is a very powerful force for positive social change. Especially since the federal government has been “backing out” of civil rights enforcement, there is a vacuum here that needs to be filled. Constant vigilance is needed to work against these negative practices wherever they occur.

Some other reasons that there is insufficient economic opportunity are explored here because they offer both challenges and opportunities for groups who are promoting economic opportunity and self-sufficiency.

Opportunity and the Economy

Economic stagnation, recession or downturns can occur in a region, city or industry because the businesses do not keep up with new management or production techniques or because of rapid technological change here or abroad. Examples include agriculture in the 1930’s, coal mining in the 1950’s, consumer electronics in the 1960s, steel making in the 1970’s, and auto making in the 1980’s. There are many reasons for these downturns, including the development of new foreign competitors or short-sightedness and lack of planning by U.S. companies.

National economic policy is important because it has a direct and major influence on whether or not jobs exist at all. The people who have been saying that the Federal budget deficit, high inflation rates, the trade deficit and high interest rates harm Americans and take away work opportunities—are right. Any local group promoting employment must be sensitive to international trends and national economic policy, otherwise they may be training people for jobs or even whole industries that are on the way out. Yes, even CAA’s should take positions on topics like the U.S. debt (which drives interest rates and home construction) and efforts by industry to modernize and remain competitive. In a global economy, support for policies to support economic growth becomes the job of everybody.

The General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and the North American Free Trade Agreement (GATT and NAFTA) help American relationship to other countries, and as a general outcome these treaties help keep prices low, stimulate innovation and benefit at least 2/3 of Americans. But new public policies are needed to make sure the other one-third of America’s residents, especially those who lose jobs to foreign competition or whose jobs are sent overseas, are not permanently left behind in this new global economy.

Economic development projects seek to expand the whole pie, to increase the total number of employment opportunities. Job retention and job creation strategies can work. It is also a strategy that takes a LOT of time and effort to be successful. It is not a quick hit, and there is no guaranteed rulebook for success, but where it is successful it puts real jobs in the community.

For jobs that do exist, there is the issue of whether the workers are able to perform them or not. This can include basic education or more specialized skill training. In the 1960’s, over ½ of the jobs in the U.S. were in manufacturing. Many required relatively few skills. Getting the family out of poverty meant getting dad a job on the assembly line or into an apprenticeship program. Today, these types of opportunities are rare, since fewer than 1/5 of the jobs are in manufacturing and most of them require literacy. Any job that can be done by an illiterate will be done by a machine or done overseas at 50 cents an hour instead of at U.S. wage rates.

In today’s information economy for most jobs basic literacy is a must. Some say that heroin or crack addicts in effect commit spiritual suicide. A school drop-out is literally committing economic suicide. People MUST have basic literacy skills to function in an information-based economy, or be forever at the edges or dependent on public assistance. The research at the University of Michigan demonstrates that 30% of the difference in income levels between families is due to differences in educational achievement—in the raw grade level achieved, e.g. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, etc. Grade level achievement is the single most important factor that explains income differences. What your Grandma knew intuitively turns out to be scientifically correct—getting a good education has an enormous impact on earning power. (On the average a college graduate over a lifetime will earn 2 million dollars more than a high-school graduate. A high school graduate will earn 1/2 million more than a drop-out, etc.)

Child care is important, as much for the child’s development as to permit the mother to work. In fact, since 1986 over 50% of females with a child under age one are in the workforce at least part time.

Another problem area is our restricted idea about how income is produced. The fixation is on something called a “job” like it was a loaf of bread on a shelf. This is often described as being in “the private sector” in “a company” or in “a business.” One has visions of offices, carpets, Xerox machines—i.e. offices like those that exist in government agencies—or in nonprofit agencies like CAA’s. Yet, a huge number of “jobs” that already exist and almost all new jobs being created are far less concrete.

They exist in the glimmer of an idea for a service, in the a hope a new product to stay on the shelf for more than a year, an inspiration of a service that some risk-taker just starts doing. A j-o-b in the results of somebody doing something useful that somebody else will find valuable and will pay for. A job starts out of a phone booth, a car-trunk or a kitchen. It takes hard work for very long hours in an effort to make it succeed. Maybe it does, and maybe it does not. But the point is that most growth in the number of “jobs” is in these types of high-risk areas where there may be a “real” salary or not.

If a guaranteed monthly paycheck are a person’s minimum requirements for considering a “job” this is a hang-over from the old manufacturing days, with large corporations and assembly lines. We can not define jobs in the information economy the same way as we did in the past or we will be excluding a large number of opportunities. A more useful concept is “doing something useful to society or to potential customers that may, hopefully, produce income.”

Another key element is the nature of work itself. Until the 1930’s, a majority of people worked to produce the basic necessities of life—the food, clothing, housing, cars, etc. Now, only 4% of the U.S., workforce are needed to produce and distribute all the food we need. Another 15% of the workforce produces the rest of the “stuff” we need, the houses, automobiles, clothes, and everything else.

About 70% of U.S. workers are now in the “information” and services businesses. Are these “real” jobs the way your grandparents defined them? No, they are not! But they are socially useful work which enable people in them to have a connection with society, to do something others find useful, and to put meaning into their own lives. We need to focus more on the meaning of work, and why it is important to the individual, family, and society and less on the economic aspects of work.

The idea that the responsibility for defining what work is and determining why work is important should be left solely to the private sector is too narrow a perspective. The idea that only the private sector can define the reward or compensation for work is a quaint notion that was relevant when every worker produced products that were necessities of life and that had some finite value. But most workers now produce services or information with a high social value but a very uncertain economic value, and the debate about what that is worth and how people will be compensated for it should be a matter of public discussion.

Both the public sector and the voluntary section should be helping to define new ways that people can be connected to society, can produce something that is meaningful to themselves and the rest of society, and can be compensated for it.

Some jobs just don’t pay very well. They don’t produce that much income for the employer, so they seek to minimize the amount of pay and benefits associated with the job. The controversies about the costs and benefits of increases in the minimum wage revolve around these jobs. This “instrumental value” of the work will never be very high for many types of work.

Every society needs to be able to compensate people both for the instrumental value and the intrinsic value of work. The intrinsic value is the value to the individual family, community and society of having the person engaged in socially constructive activity. Every society needs for its people to be connected to other people outside the family and connected to society as a whole, and work is one of the three most important mechanisms by which that happens. Fortunately we have a mechanism for compensating people for the intrinsic value of their work—the tax system. The Earned Income Tax Credit will become an increasingly important mechanism for filling the gap between the wages of a person who works full time at a low-paying job—and the amount of money they need to live a decent life. The EITC will help fill the gap between the instrumental value and the intrinsic value of work.

Chapter 4 Quiz

Questions to stimulate thinking and to identify some of the key points in Chapter Four.

4. Yes. The voters have tried to reduce or eliminate services to immigrants who do not have legal authorization to be here.

CHAPTER FOUR: Community Assessment and Planning