Stimulus funds to help low-income working families with child care

Child care is a luxury that many parents are not able to afford. Help, however, is on the way with new government funding.

The Tennessee Department of Human Services has received funding for the Child Care Development Fund through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

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New IRS Data Shows 88 Percent of EITC Benefits in 2007 Were Paid to Low Income Families

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The annual Individual Income Tax Returns report released yesterday by the Internal Revenue Service provides more evidence that the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is actually better equipped to target poverty than other policy tools, including the July 24th federal minimum wage increase.

According to the report, Statistics of Income, tax return data from 2007 shows 88 percent of refundable EITC benefits -- a total of $37.3 million -- were paid directly to families with incomes of less than $25,000 a year. Employment Policies Institute (EPI) research from Syracuse University shows that an overwhelming majority (83 percent) of the benefits of minimum wage increases go to families above the poverty line. The average family income of those who will benefit from the 2009 minimum wage hike is over $47,000.

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Women’s Center receives $1M to prevent homelessness

AUSTIN – The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs announced a significant award of federal stimulus funding to an area nonprofit designed to mitigate and prevent the effects of homelessness for individuals who are homeless and for the communities where they are located.

TDHCA awarded $1 million to the Montgomery County Women’s Center to provide services to rapidly rehouse homeless residents or prevent individuals from falling into homelessness. The award was made through the Department’s Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program, an innovative program created by the federal American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009.

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Prolonged Aid to Unemployed Is Running Out

Over the coming months, as many as 1.5 million jobless Americans will exhaust their unemployment insurance benefits, ending what for some has been a last bulwark against foreclosures and destitution.

Because of emergency extensions already enacted by Congress, laid-off workers in nearly half the states can collect benefits for up to 79 weeks, the longest period since the unemployment insurance program was created in the 1930s. But unemployment in this recession has proved to be especially tenacious, and a wave of job-seekers is using up even this prolonged aid.

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Faults Found in Apartments for Homeless Families

An inspection of dozens of apartments where the city houses homeless families revealed leaking pipes, water damage, doors without locks, a stained bathtub and infestations of mice and roaches, according to an audit released Friday.

The audit, conducted by the city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., included one Midtown hotel and six so-called cluster housing sites — apartment buildings with social services nearby — in the Bronx.

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Harlem Program Singled Out as Model

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.

Canada was raised poor in the South Bronx and went on to earn a graduate education degree from Harvard. Years ago, he grew frustrated that his successful after-school program was not decreasing Harlem's tally of high school dropouts, juvenile arrests and unemployed youths. He set out to devise an encompassing program to "move the needle" and improve the lives of poor children in a mass, standardized, reproducible way.
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State helps low-income students attend private schools

For what it would cost Oristela Schwend to send just one of her three children to private school, she sends all of them.

Schwend of Plantation has sent her children to private schools in Broward County for several years using a state program that pays for tuition with money that would otherwise have been available for public purposes

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Law change will help low income parents get off welfare for good

Gideon Woodcook will be able to finish the welding program at Southeast Community College under a new state law aimed at helping parents get off welfare for good.

Currently, parents are allowed to attend a vocational school for just 12 months before their Aid to Dependent Children benefits end, under the state's welfare to work program.

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