PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — After a series of community conversations earlier this year and a new state budget with several workforce initiatives, Jason Parent sees reasons to be optimistic about addressing the long-growing problem of Maine families and children living in poverty.
“The timing is imperative on what needs to get done,” said Parent, executive director of the Aroostook County Action Program. “We have, I think for the first time in our state, a real labor shortage issue. This is a common ground issue.”
Parent was among those leading a forum in Presque Isle Monday called “Invest in Tomorrow: Solving Child Poverty is Everyone’s Business,” a part of a statewide series exploring the problems and solutions of poverty in Maine and its impact on children and young families.
Maine’s 19 percent child poverty rate is less than the national average of 23 percent, but it increased significantly in the years after the Great Recession, according to the 2016 Kids Count report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
In 2014, 9 percent of Maine children were living in “extreme poverty,” in households earning less than the equivalent of about $12,000 a year for a family of four. And one in three Maine children — some 82,000 kids — live in households where parents lack secure employment, according to the Kids Count report.
Last spring, ACAP and the nonprofit Maine Equal Justice Partners hosted the first of a statewide series of community conversations in Presque Isle. Among other concerns, people pointed to the barriers low-income parents face in entering stable employment, including the lack of reliable transportation and affordable childcare, and the “welfare cliff,” where individuals receiving public assistance immediately lose benefits and end up bringing in less income when starting new, often low-wage jobs.
Parent recounted the story of one local woman who landed an entry-level job through ACAP’s workforce development program, but quit as a result of losing public assistance and being unable to afford groceries.
The employer was skeptical at first, but three months in “he was very pleased with her work,” Parent said. “A couple of weeks later, the individual working there quit. We did our requisite follow up and said, ‘Why? You seemed to like it, the employer liked you and things seemed to be working well.’”
According to Parent, the woman replied: “I loved what I was doing, but because of my income increasing, I lost food stamps and TANF benefits. I went from being able to shop in a grocery store using my supplemental nutrition assistance to get healthy fruits and vegetables to having to go a local food pantry to get my basic necessities.”
Parent said that the woman said she found her “health and wellbeing were suffering,” in part because her diet had deteriorated as she relied on the mostly processed foods common at the food pantry.
That type of scenario is a common one faced by lower-income parents trying to enter or re-enter the workforce, as minimum wage jobs often fail to cover the cost of childcare or transportation, Parent said.
“We want to encourage people to work for the state of the economy and their own personal fulfillment and gain. But we do have a system right now that de-incentivizes that, especially at the entry-level,” Parent said.
“Employers are constantly telling us they have the openings; it’s just a matter of getting the individuals. The missing piece is then individuals who are entering the workforce and coming off assistance are facing such a steep cliff.”
On that front, Parent and others see positive momentum, as some of the solutions proposed in the community forums earlier this year made it into the latest state budget.
One provision aimed at addressing the “welfare cliff” and now in effect provides a $400 one-time payment to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families recipients when they enter a job and stay in it for four months.
“It’s less than we had hoped but it’s a really good start,” Parent said.
Another provision created a $6 million pilot program called Working Cars for Working Families that will help working parents who’ve received TANF access a working car and pay for it on a sliding scale based on their income.
This project has the potential to benefit working parents particularly in rural communities where getting to and from a job can be almost impossible without a car, Parent said.
“There’s a lot of interest specifically in rural rim counties to find transportation solutions that are outside of the public transportation sector,” he added.
Those two policies are just the start of what Parent and other advocates hope will be more concrete changes and initiatives in the future.
Robyn Merrill, executive director of Maine Equal Justice Partners, said she and others already are starting to think about the state’s next budget, in 2019.
“We’re really looking to take some big steps together, based on what we learn, and come up with a set of statewide policy recommendations on how to create more economic security for kids.”
