by Cara Brumfield and Shamaal Sheppard | Oct 24, 2024 | Brief
Since the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022, many low-income women have nowhere to turn: they face the economic repercussions of being denied abortion care and lack access to the support they need to care for a growing family. This brief looks at how abortion bans and insufficient public benefits at the state level affect women and families. It finds that states with abortion bans often do not provide enough supportive resources for growing families, like health care, food assistance, and cash support. The brief also offers federal policy recommendations to help families meet their everyday needs—no matter what state they live in.
by Kali Grant, Cara Brumfield and Sierra Wilson | Apr 15, 2024 | Report
Everyone deserves the opportunity to lead a healthy, stable, and economically secure life. Many government programs aim to provide a stable foundation for all families, but fall short due to legacies of racism. This report puts forth a visionary framework with principles for anti-racist policymaking, focusing on Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). It includes three spotlights from leaders in Puerto Rico, Texas, and the District of Columbia applying these principles to advance racial and economic justice in their communities.
by Ayan Goran, Laura Tatum, Cara Brumfield and Aileen Carr | Jun 29, 2023 | Report
Racial and ethnic disparities in the health care system have long impeded our nation’s health and well-being. For everyone in the U.S. to achieve their full potential—and for our nation to achieve its full potential—we must ensure equitable access to high-quality health care. This report presents an anti-racist re-imagining of the Medicaid and CHIP programs that actively reckons with the racist history of health care coverage. The report offers recommendations to advance racial equity in Medicaid and CHIP. It also provides principles to guide anti-racist policy transformations that center program participants and their communities.
by Jae June Lee, Liz Lowe, Cara Brumfield and Neil Weare | Jun 6, 2023 | Blog
Millions of people living in the U.S. territories—including American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—are often excluded from federal statistical data collection. This contributes to a significant racial justice issue. Without comprehensive data, policymakers and researchers cannot fully understand the socio-economic challenges faced by all U.S. residents, including people living in the territories, who are disproportionately people of color. This blog—originally published by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights—highlights the disparities in data collection between the U.S. territories and the rest of the U.S., the need for collecting high-quality data in U.S. territories, and the negative implications of analyzing an incomplete portrait of the nation.
by Jae June Lee, Cara Brumfield and Neil Weare | Nov 29, 2022 | Brief
The U.S. cannot fully understand itself as a nation and the needs of its people without timely, complete, and accurate statistics on all of its citizens and residents. However, millions of U.S. citizens and residents living in the U.S. territories are not included in many key government data collection efforts and publications. These data disparities undermine the ability of policymakers and researchers to understand national and local challenges, including the unique risks posed by the climate emergency and pervasive social and economic inequalities. This brief—published jointly with Equally American—analyzes the implications of inadequate data collection in the U.S. territories and recommends steps federal policymakers can take to improve the timeliness and accuracy of data and understand the social, environmental, and economic challenges residents of U.S. territories face.
by Gwynne Evans-Lomayesva, Jae June Lee and Cara Brumfield | Nov 3, 2022 | Report
The United States must improve its data collection efforts in order to ensure equitable representation of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) populations. Inequitable data have deep and pervasive impacts on American social, political, and economic systems. The current lack of accurate, reliable, and sufficiently detailed data risks making AI/AN peoples invisible to policymakers and reinforcing existing dynamics of marginalization. This report explores the history of AI/AN data in federal data collections, describes some nuances of working with AI/AN population data, and highlights the undercounting and underrepresentation of AI/AN populations in federal data collections. It also recommends proposed changes to data collection to increase equitable representation for AI/AN populations, which must be done in consultation with Tribal Nations in accordance with tribal sovereignty.
by Areeba Haider, Ayan Goran, Cara Brumfield and Laura Tatum | Oct 20, 2022 | Report
An America where no one experiences poverty is possible. Already, the U.S. has programs with the potential to make this vision a reality, including programs that provide cash assistance, like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The current TANF program provides very little cash assistance and is marked by stark racial disparities, but it has the potential to reduce child poverty, increase economic security, and advance racial equity. This report offers a vision for an anti-racist approach to the TANF program, with new statutory goals and policy recommendations to advance racial justice.
by Cara Brumfield | Sep 27, 2022 | Op-Ed
Price increases for basic necessities like tampons have a real cost. Period poverty—the lack of access to sanitary products due to financial constraints—is a public health crisis deserving of a coordinated response that profit-driven private corporations are neither motivated nor prepared to provide. We need resilient supply chains that can be relied on to get basic necessities into the hands of the people who need them—and that will surely require public investment and accountability for powerful corporations.
by Cara Brumfield, Adiam Tesfaselassie, Chris Geary and Siddhartha Aneja | Mar 17, 2022 | Report
Market power exists when one or more companies can profitably set prices for goods, services, and wages; and determine the quality, accessibility, and availability of goods and services. Market power, intertwined with deeply entrenched structural racism and class inequality, can have life-or-death consequences. This report explores the real-world impact of market power on the lives of people of color and people with low incomes–as workers, consumers, and entrepreneurs–their communities, and society at large. The research shows that market power contributes to economic insecurity and hardship in low-income communities and communities of color, including by driving down wages and benefits; limiting and controlling the availability of goods, services, and jobs; and undermining American prosperity and democracy.
by Jae June Lee, Cara Brumfield and Irma Sandoval | Mar 4, 2022 | Brief
Since its inception at the turn of the 20th century, the Census Bureau has pioneered cutting edge methods and technologies to meet the vast and increasingly complex challenge of counting everyone in the United States. Civil rights organizations often work with the Census Bureau to ensure that innovations advance the accuracy and fairness of the decennial census. This brief focuses on one of the most significant areas of innovation over the past century: the use of “administrative data” (AD). AD are typically collected by government agencies and private-sector organizations while administering a program or service. For example, the U.S. Postal Services collects address information while delivering mail, creating an address dataset. This brief provides a definition of AD and a summary of how AD were used in the 2020 Census. The brief also introduces some key equity considerations regarding AD usage and offers potential next steps for civil rights groups.
