Posted on August 24, 2015 by Rick Cohen in Nonprofit Quarterly Nonprofit Quarterly, By Rick Cohen This week is the annual conference of the Community Action Partnership, the national trade association representing the more than 1,000 local community action agencies that are the inheritors and guardians of our nation’s commitment to the War on Poverty. That national commitment to fighting poverty has been inconsistent over recent years, but it shouldn’t have been; many of us, more than you would expect, will experience poverty at some time in our lifetimes despite the array of programs from the New Deal and then the Great Society that aim to minimize and mitigate poverty in our society. Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham report in the Washington Post on the research of Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University, whose longitudinal tracking of several thousand American households since 1968 reveals that “an incredible number…(will) experience economic insecurity.” Specifically, Rank’s data show that four out of five people experience economic hardship by the time they are 60, such as enduring time unemployed, living at least a year below the poverty level, or spending time accessing government programs for the poor such as food stamps. As the chart shows below, the experience of poverty doesn’t wait until late in life, but occurs at high levels in one’s 30s and 40s as well as 50s.
