HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES
Access to affordable health and human services, ranging from healthcare and childcare to domestic violence and child welfare services, are key to our wellbeing, but also affect our ability to succeed in school and work and is essential to strengthening families. Our work on health and human services identifies and advances innovative and promising ideas–from the ground level to public policy–for integrated service delivery that serves individuals and families with critical needs.
Re-Envisioning TANF: Toward an Anti-Racist Program That Meaningfully Serves Families
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.
Equity Through Engagement
Medi-Cal covers over half—or 5.4 million—of California’s children, and covers more of California’s Latinx, Black, and Native American children than any other provider. Three-fourths of children enrolled in Medi-Cal are children of color. Making sure all children—regardless of their race or county where they live—have access to quality preventative health care and supports helps build a stronger, healthier future for California.
To advance child health equity in California, The Children’s Partnership, the California Children’s Trust, and the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality launched The Equity Through Engagement (ETE) project. This project examines opportunities to integrate community partnerships and interventions into California’s Medi-Cal financing and delivery systems to advance child health equity, including through addressing social drivers of health (SDOHs).
The Lasting Legacy of Exclusion: How the Law that Brought Us Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Excluded Immigrant Families & Institutionalized Racism in our Social Support System
In 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA) radically transformed our system of social supports. In addition to decimating cash assistance for families, the law’s immigrant exclusions exacerbated economic and racial inequities and harmed children and families in the 25 years since. This report—published jointly with the Center for the Study of Social Policy—examines the racist roots of PRWORA’s anti-immigrant exclusions and highlights the law’s role in institutionalizing and legitimizing anti-immigrant exclusion in a range of public benefits and tax credits.
Elisa Minoff, Isabella Camacho-Craft, Valery Martinez, & Indivar Dutta-Gupta
100 Days for Opportunity & Well-Being: An Executive & Administrative Action Agenda for Children & Families
The COVID-19 pandemic and recession have greatly magnified existing health and economic inequities, threatening the well-being of children and families. Children, families, and communities throughout the United States urgently need bold, equitable, and anti-racist human services to meet the extraordinary challenges facing our country. This brief summarizes the key recommendations from a GCPI research project identifying, developing, and prioritizing human services-focused federal executive actions to improve economic security and well-being for children and families in the U.S.
Home Visiting Provides Essential Services: Home Visiting Programs Require Additional Funding to Support More Families
Before the COVID-19 crisis, home visiting programs provided essential services to help support pregnant people and parents of young children, strengthen parent-child interactions, promote healthy child development, and facilitate stable family systems. During the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting recession, many families face new and increased needs that home visitors can work to address. This brief, published jointly with the Rapid Response Virtual Home Visiting collaborative provides an overview of home visiting programs, shares their successes in pivoting to virtual service models, and explains their need for increased federal funding.
Chris Geary, Jeanna Capito, &Jessica Duggan
Reimagining Behavioral Health: A New Vision for Whole-Family, Whole-Community Behavioral Health
In this joint report with Mental Health America, we present a new approach to mental health and substance use care and treatment in the United States. The report introduces a whole-family, whole-community behavioral health approach: a vision of a society that adequately supports mental health, physical health, and social and financial well-being. The report offers leaders in the health care, educational, criminal justice, child welfare and other systems a united policy agenda to ultimately improve health and economic opportunity.
Kali Grant, Sophie Khan, Indivar Dutta-Gupta, Nathaniel Counts, Madeline Reinert, & Theresa Nguyen
Building the Caring Economy: Workforce Investments to Expand Access to Affordable, High-Quality and Long-Term Care
This report proposes caregiving jobs investments to address two national needs: the pressing need for caregiving; and the equally pressing need for good jobs.
Nina Dastur, Indivar Dutta-Gupta, Laura Tatum, Peter Edelman, Kali Grant, & Casey Goldvale
America must build a caregiving infrastructure to help our families
Executive Director Indivar Dutta-Gupta and Sarita Gupta (Jobs with Justice) make the case for investing in creating new jobs through a national caregiving infrastructure plan.
Building the Caring Economy
Building the country’s caregiving infrastructure would simultaneously address two national needs: the need for care and the equally pressing need for good jobs.
Cuomo’s $1.4 Billion Plan Targets Brooklyn in Fight Against Poor Health and Poverty
GCPI Co-Executive Director Indi Dutta-Gupta was interviewed by the New York Time’s Lisa Foderaro regarding Gov. Cuomo’s planned anti-poverty initiatives.
The Evolving Fight Against Concentrated Poverty
Attacking the many issues that confront people who live in low-income neighborhoods is a longtime challenge. It is vital that we support these and other efforts so we achieve a scale large enough to make a measurable difference in the fight against poverty in America.