Program based on Harlem initiative shows promise, By Cassandra West, November 4, 2009, Chicago Tribune: “Former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton famously drew on an African proverb, ‘It takes a village to raise a child,’ to explain her vision for American children more than decade ago. Now the Obama administration is looking to another village — local urban communities — to serve the educational and social needs of children in poverty with its Promise Neighborhoods, an initiative modeled on the transformative and widely touted Harlem Children’s Zone. For two days next week representatives from the Chicago communities of Chicago Lawn, Logan Square and Woodlawn will be in New York attending the conference, ‘Changing the Odds: Learning from the Harlem Children’s Zone Model.’ The forum is a first step for advocates and community groups interested in replicating the New York City-based endeavor, which President Barack Obama has called ‘an all-encompassing, all-hands-on-deck anti-poverty effort…’”

More districts use income, not race, as basis for busing, By Jordan Schrader, November 2, 2009, USA Today: “Struggling to improve schools that have large populations of poor and minority students and under legal pressure to avoid racial busing, a small but growing group of school districts are integrating schools by income. More than 60 school systems now use socioeconomic status as a factor in school assignments, says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, which studies income inequality. Students in Champaign, Ill.; Kalamazoo, Mich.; and Louisville have returned this year to income-based assignments…”

Inner-city L.A. hungers for good grocery stores, By Daniel B. Wood, October 10, 2009, Christian Science Monitor: “East L.A. resident Olga Perez has to take two buses to a store about eight miles away to get fresh fruits and vegetables, or decent cuts of meat, for her family. ‘The only thing I can get at my corner store are spoiled or expired,’ explains Ms. Perez, a dental assistant and single mother who lives in a two-bedroom apartment with two daughters and a granddaughter. The round trip costs her $5 and limits what she can carry home. ‘I can only get so much milk and when I get home the eggs are cracked and the bread is smashed,’ she says. And because she works until 6:30 p.m. most nights, Perez doesn’t often have the time to make the trip and get home in time to cook for her family. Her solution: ‘Open a can of ravioli or make hot dogs,’ but that sometimes keeps her daughter and granddaughter up at night, complaining of insomnia and stomach aches. It’s a situation the Alliance for Healthy and Responsible Grocery Stores, a city-wide coalition of 25 community, faith-based and environmental organizations, is trying to change. They formed a Blue Ribbon Commission in early 2007 to address the chronic absence of quality grocery stores in several L.A. neighborhoods including East L.A. and South Central - and are now trying to draw such stores to these underserved areas…”

Scattered in suburbs, and in need, By Julie Bosman, October 2, 2009, New York Times: “It is hard enough for the unemployed and others struggling financially to figure out how to obtain social services like food stamps, counseling and utility assistance for the first time. It can be even harder in the suburbs. There, many residents, including middle-class people unversed in the welfare system, have trouble making use of the shelters, government offices and nonprofit agencies that are less visible than in cities, spread out across a larger area and harder to reach using public transportation. So needy people are commonly sharing rides, walking and riding buses, often with small children in tow, in larger numbers than before the recession, officials said. And for advice on how to get help in the first place, they are seeking out priests, school nurses and small-town mayors, turning them into de facto social workers…”

A plan to add supermarkets to poor areas, with healthy results, By Diane Cardwell, September 23, 2009, New York Times: “The Bloomberg administration, in its ever-expanding campaign to make New Yorkers eat better, has already clamped down on trans fats, deployed fruit vendors to produce-poor neighborhoods and prodded corner bodegas to sell leafy green vegetables and low-fat milk. Now, in a city known more for hot dogs and egg creams than the apple of its nickname, officials want to establish an even bigger beachhead for healthy food - new supermarkets in areas where fresh produce is scarce and where poverty, obesity and diabetes run high. Under a proposal the City Planning Commission unanimously approved on Wednesday, the city would offer zoning and tax incentives to spur the development of full-service grocery stores that devote a certain amount of space to fresh produce, meats, dairy and other perishables…”

L.A. plans revival for center of crime, poverty, By Jacob Adelman, (AP), September 2, 2009, San Francisco Chronicle: “Juanita Sims has lived in the notorious Jordan Downs project in Watts for almost four decades, raising eight children behind the barred windows of the cramped barracks-like apartments. She moved in shortly after the Watts riots in the 1960s left almost three dozen people dead and made the South Los Angeles community a national symbol of urban decay. Now Sims fears she’ll have to leave, just as Watts emerges from years of neglect with a proposed urban village of shops, homes and businesses that would force the demolition of Jordan Downs…”

Hope, reality collide in post-Katrina New Orleans, By Becky Bohrer and Peter Prengaman (AP), August 26, 2009, Washington Post: “Shelia Phillips doesn’t see the New Orleans that Mayor Ray Nagin talks about, the one on its way to having just as many people and a more diverse economy than it did before Hurricane Katrina. How could she? From the front porch of her house in the devastated Lower 9th Ward, it’s hard to see past the vegetation slowly swallowing the property across the way. Nearby homes are boarded up or still bear the fading tattoos left by search and rescue teams nearly four years ago. The fence around a playground a few blocks down is padlocked. ‘I just want to see people again,’ she said recently, swatting bugs in the muggy heat. On paper, the city’s economy appears to be thriving, with relatively low unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy rates. But in post-Katrina New Orleans, residents’ perceptions of their city’s recovery tends to depend on where they live, their vantage point of it. Swaths of some neighborhoods are sparsely populated, even desolate, and federal rebuilding dollars have provided much of the economic resilience…”

Hunger hits Detroit’s middle class, By Steve Hargreaves, August 6, 2009, CNNMoney.com: “On a side street in an old industrial neighborhood, a delivery man stacks a dolly of goods outside a store. Ten feet away stands another man clad in military fatigues, combat boots and what appears to be a flak jacket. He looks straight out of Baghdad. But this isn’t Iraq. It’s southeast Detroit, and he’s there to guard the groceries. ‘No pictures, put the camera down,’ he yells. My companion and I, on a tour of how people in this city are using urban farms to grow their own food, speed off. In this recession-racked town, the lack of food is a serious problem. It’s a theme that comes up again and again in conversations in Detroit. There isn’t a single major chain supermarket in the city, forcing residents to buy food from corner stores. Often less healthy and more expensive food…”

Harlem program singled out as model, By Robin Shulman, August 2, 2009, Washington Post: “On a recent Saturday morning in Harlem, a few dozen pregnant women in a parenting class made resolutions for life after the baby’s birth. Avoid cursing. Provide healthy foods. Develop a sleeping routine for the infant. “I want my son to be perfect,” said Naquell Williams, 22, who is unemployed and pregnant with a child whose father is in prison. This is the starting point for the Harlem Children’s Zone: the womb. Geoffrey Canada’s nonprofit has created a web of programs that begin before birth, end with college graduation and reach almost every child growing up in 97 blocks carved out of the struggling central Harlem neighborhood…”

Neighborhoods key to future income, study finds, By Alec MacGillis, July 27, 2009, Washington Post: “Researchers have found that being raised in poor neighborhoods plays a major role in explaining why African American children from middle-income families are far more likely than white children to slip down the income ladder as adults.  The Pew Charitable Trusts Economic Mobility Project caused a stir two years ago by reporting that nearly half of African American children born to middle-class parents in the 1950s and ’60s had fallen to a lower economic status as adults, a rate of downward mobility far higher than that for whites.  This week, Pew will release findings of a study that helps explain that economic fragility, pointing to the fact that middle-class blacks are far more likely than whites to live in high-poverty neighborhoods, which has a negative effect on even the better-off children raised there. The impact of neighborhoods is greater than other factors in children’s backgrounds, Pew concludes…”

• Groceries more costly for Valley’s poor, By Barbara Anderson and Bethany Clough, July 25, 2009, Fresno Bee: “For thousands of people in the central San Joaquin Valley, a tomato costs at least a dollar. So does a single roll of toilet paper. That’s the price of being poor.  It’s a well-known but unsolved paradox: Poor people often spend more than their middle-class neighbors for groceries…”
• Programs ensure needy have access to fresh foods, By Ingrid Stegemoeller, July 27, 2009, Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “Amid the crowds shopping for produce at the Richland Farmers’ Market, Carolyn Merrell and her mother-in-law Linda Herrera carefully selected corn, tomatoes, onions, cherries and blueberries from the colorful bounty.  But rather than handing over cash for their purchases, the West Richland women paid with Women, Infants and Children (WIC) vouchers from the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program…”

• Stimulus Watch: Neediest areas not first for money, By April Castro (AP), July 20, 2009, Washington Post: “Under the Obama administration’s economic stimulus plan, needy communities were supposed to be first in line for money to rebuild highways and jump start the economy. It hasn’t worked out that way.  The rules required that states give priority to counties considered “economically distressed.” Yet less than half the federal highway money announced so far is directed toward those high-unemployment, low-income areas, according to an Associated Press analysis of more than $16 billion in spending announced by the U.S. Transportation Department…”
• Pa. trails N.J., others in plans for stimulus spending, By Tom Infield, July 20 , 2009, Philadelphia Inquirer: “Five months into the federal stimulus program, Pennsylvania is lagging behind its neighbor New Jersey and other states in preparing for a deluge of money to do energy-saving home improvements for low-income families.  The state has received about $25 million of $253 million it expects to get over three years for the massive expansion of its Weatherization Assistance Program, which dates to the ’70s…”