• Structural barriers to equal opportunity-often by race, ethnicity, gender
• Addressing the needs of the truly disadvantaged
  • Disadvantages faced by poor–education, living wage, health insurance, housing, transportation
  • Big processes-globalization, increasing inequality
  • Social versus private costs and benefits
  • Educational Equity
    • KIPP as one example
    • Increase vocational-type training
    • Big part of the gap between students in lower vs upper income groups is what happens when school isn’t in session
  • ‘Skill and will’
    • Pressing need to help people develop more human capital
    • Increasing ‘will’: raising people’s self-esteem, raising their expectations, their standards, giving them a more optimistic range of possibilities, and more leverage and confidence navigating the job market.

De-stigmatize welfare (address cultural barriers)

• Mutual respect–hopefully self-explanatory by this point in the term
• Raise awareness of the structural reasons for poverty and inequality–poverty is not explicable in terms of individuals
• Offer support to all types of families–the two-parent heterosexual household represents less than 1/2 of US households
• Reframe the debate on welfare-how do we define it? What are our national priorities? Supporting people, or corporations and political processes?
• Democracy–is it in jeopardy? Does welfare policy reflect the will of the people?

Bottom-up design (political processes)

• Would incorporate the experiences of people who have to use welfare
• Recognize severe limits of ‘deserving/undeserving’ dichotomies
• If capitalism “requires” a certain level of unemployment, then should the unemployed be compensated fairly for their contribution to keeping the system going?
• wealth redistribution-it’s not about socialism, it’s about kleptocracy, oligarchy, rising rates of inequality-that is, the redistribution is towards the wealthy, not the poor (think corporate welfare, tax cuts)
• U.S. does less for its poor than any other industrialized nation
• Voting–unfortunate relationship between poverty and political participation

Flexibility, diversity

• welfare is not just a public issue–there are non-profits, private groups, informal support networks, faith-based, non faith-based, etc.
• Bureaucratic approaches serve a function, but what is that function? Can they address causes (or at least, do they)?

Community, neighborhood-based-local in character (with moral and fiscal support of feds)

• Do we want a bureaucracy providing services, or a community more likely to care? Can we have some of both?
• Diversity by region, ethnic/racial make-up, local economy, etc. Does one welfare program fit all social situations?
• Social capital–building networks of assistance locally, involving local people in process
• The common good–versus a competitive marketplace, inequality as a driving force–what are the social costs of a system where we ‘need’ undereducated people and ‘unskilled’ workers to perform the ‘dirty work?’
• Fairness–isn’t this what the American dream was all about?
• Money–it doesn’t come cheap, but rarely are the costs of poverty and underfunding welfare considered

Practical considerations

• Reforming the wage structure
• Job training
• Education  The K-12 system funding is inequitable
• Funding successful programs. Head Start, for example.
• Health insurance