- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen, I work here
at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW-Extension, Cooperative Extension,
and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers,
Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the UW-Madison Science Alliance,
thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce
to you, Hilary Shager.
She's the associate director here on campus
of the Institute for Research on Poverty.
She was born in San Antonio, Texas,
and then moved up to Wisconsin,
and went to high school at Mosinee,
came here to UW-Madison to study secondary education,
with emphases in English and psychology.
And she got her master's in public affairs
at the La Follette School and got
her PhD in public policy at the La Follette School.
And what is the difference between a public affair and a public policy?
- Academic nomenclature, people wanting to name things
their own thing (chuckles), no difference.
(Hilary and audience members laugh)
- Now, there's a lot more opportunities to doing that.
(Hilary laughs)
Then, she was at the La Follette School for many years,
and then in March 2018 went over
to the Institute for Research on Poverty,
where she is the Associate Director
of the Institute for Research on Poverty.
It's in the College of Letters & Science here at UW-Madison.
Tonight, she's going to talk with us about reducing poverty
by researcher, practitioner, and community partnerships.
Please join me in welcoming Hilary Shager
to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you so much, Tom,
and thank you everyone for coming.
I'm so thrilled to be here and to talk with you
about the Institute for Research on Poverty,
and I just want to talk about my title for a minute.
So we're so excited about all the resources
that the university brings to bear,
but when we're talking about poverty,
this is not an ivory tower-only endeavor.
So, I'm going to talk about what we do at IRP,
but how we work with the community,
how we work with researchers,
how we work with practitioners and policy makers,
and the public to try to make a difference.
So, just to start right in,
what is the Institute for Research on Poverty?
So, this is a picture.
We're located in the Social Science Building on campus.
We were established in 1966 as part of the War on Poverty,
and I'll talk a little bit about the history there.
We function as an independent and multidisciplinary center.
We're located, as Tom said,
in the College of Letters & Science at UW-Madison.
We don't grant degrees.
We're an interdisciplinary research unit,
but we do have opportunities for students and training,
which I'll talk about as well.
Our core infrastructure funding is
primarily through UW-Madison,
but also the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
I'll talk a little bit about we are the only federally-funded
poverty research center in the country at the moment,
and we have a cooperative agreement
with the Department of Health and Human Services,
and we also administer about $29 million
in research projects, and that's funding from foundations,
from state and federal agencies,
and different local organizations.
So, just to give you a little bit of history about how IRP,
I'll call it IRP from now on, was created.
So, UW-Madison has a very long history
going way, way back into the early 1900s
of having expertise in what was then
the new field of social science.
So, there was a group of economists that were part
of something called the Wisconsin School,
and they did a lot of applied work,
which was somewhat controversial.
There was concern, like how could you
not just do pure academic work.
Why would you want to work on real-world problems?
But here economists at UW worked on things like
and helped develop workers comp,
unemployment compensation, the state income tax.
They worked on Roosevelt's Committee on Economic Security,
Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act,
so these were some of the early pioneers
like Edwin Witte and those type of folks.
And then, Robert Lampman, so he was
really the first director and founder of IRP.
That's a picture of him there.
This is when basically the Council of Economic Advisors
under Kennedy and then later under Johnson, said,
"We want to wage a war on poverty.
"How do we do that?" and somebody there told them,
"Well, you need RAND.
"You need a RAND for poverty.
"You need a group of people who can tell you what works
"and who aren't going to be embedded
"in the sort of the political machine and structure,
"who can really try to go at it
"from that more objective research sort of framework."
So, IRP was established as an independent research center
to try to do some program evaluation
and see the impact of policies over time.
Again, this was somewhat controversial at the time
because it was looked at as not academic,
you know that this was more applied research,
but as we know, at UW we have something called
the Wisconsin Idea where what we do here
is for the good of the world.
And so, it was embraced here at UW,
and we've been around ever since.
So, how do we realize the Wisconsin Idea?
I just want to talk a little bit about our mission.
It's multi-pronged, so we are a research institute,
and that is first and foremost what we do,
but also to really make this work and make an impact,
we have parts of our work that involves training scholars
that we engage actively with policy makers
and practitioners, and we're also very interested
in making sure that our research
and our work is disseminated widely.
And again, our vision, or the goal that we're working toward
is that we try to have policies and practice
that are informed by evidence and lead
to the reduction of poverty and inequality in the U.S.
And so, how we do this?
What do we actually do day-to-day at IRP?
So, we're explicitly trying to connect all these pieces,
the research, the training, the policy, and the practice.
So, we have about 25 staff,
anywhere from 25 to 30 depending on how
many projects we're working on at one time,
and we have about 200 affiliates,
so those are scholars and practitioners,
about 100 on campus and 100 throughout the country,
and we work with them and support them.
As I said, we oversee over $20 million
of research grants annually.
We have very close relationships
with policy makers and practitioners,
which I'll talk about a little bit more.
And then, another piece of our work is
trying to train and support a diverse
and multidisciplinary corps of poverty researchers.
So, like I said, this is not an ivory tower-only endeavor,
so we have a logic of collaboration.
We can't do this without the help of local,
state, federal agencies and other partners.
They help us understand what policy issues are important.
They talk to us about innovative programs.
They share their experience that we need to learn from,
and we need to see on the ground how things are working.
They provide us with data to do research,
and they've sometimes provide us with funding.
And then what we bring to bear again is our wonderful
corps of researchers and staff, our technical expertise.
We have sort of the long-term horizon that maybe legislators
can't enjoy who have to vote the next day,
and we also provide funding
for different aspects of the work.
This is our current leadership.
Just really quickly, I want to give a shout out
to our fantastic director, Lonnie Berger,
who is a social work professor,
so the institute is run by a faculty member.
That's a rotating position, and then myself,
and Becca Schwei, we are staff positions,
so we're there, Jeff, another associate director
who runs the graduate research fellows program.
And this, not for you to see every name,
but what I just want to point out in terms of our executive committee
is that it's very multidisciplinary,
so you'll see faculty there from social work,
from economics, from the School of Human Ecology,
sociology, public affairs.
So, we are very intent, law, on making sure
that we have that interdisciplinary perspective
because a problem like poverty,
you can't come at it from just one angle.
And our org chart, again, not so interesting to look
at all the little boxes, but just to let you know
the type of people and positions that we have at IRP.
So, we have a group of people that are working
on dissemination, who are editors,
or doing podcasts, different things like that.
We have a set of researchers.
We have different students who are working for us
and all kinds of folks working together,
data programmers who run our administrative data corps,
and again, very interdisciplinary kind of place
with a lot of exciting mix of skills.
Another thing is that we are the leader
of something called the U.S. Collaborative Poverty Centers,
or the CPC, and this is fairly new,
but this is the collaborative of nine
poverty centers throughout the country.
Yeah, you can see the different schools that are
represented there, and we work together
to try to set a research agenda,
to support each other in different programming,
to come together to do publications,
and different kinds of things like that.
And we also have put together a series of thematic networks,
so these are thematic research networks
that focus on issues like poverty and geography,
family functioning, employment self-sufficiency,
transition to adulthood, and tax policy.
So again, this is trying to have
this sort of national impact and learn from each other
and give each other opportunities for training,
funding, and enriching research.
So, moving into a little bit about how
we work with the federal government in our role
as the National Poverty Research Center,
as I said, we're the only federally-funded
research center in the country.
Right now, we're in the middle
of a five-year cooperative agreement with ASPE,
the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation
at the Department of Health and Human Services.
So, we've had this role in the past.
Sometimes it's been--
Sometimes they fund several regional centers,
so we've been one of five centers that were funded.
Sometimes it's only one, but the last grant
that was put out was for one,
and we currently hold it, and the overall goal
there again, is, you know, again to increase
the effectiveness of our research by coming together
to working directly with the federal government
to identify what are some of the things
they want to know about.
We help them, here's some of the things we think
you should know about, and working to both
work with them directly on some requests
and also to support our role as a leader
in the country doing poverty research.
And again, there are these three areas that we do work in,
so research, dissemination, and then training and mentoring.
So, I'm going to go through a little bit of each,
just highlight a few things that we do in each of those areas.
So, some of our research activities, like I said,
some of these are, we might get some questions
about, you know, what can you tell
us about numbers regarding the opioid crisis?
Can you do some lit reviews on that kind of thing,
so we have some quarterly memos,
different things that we do directly.
We have topics that we say, hey, we have some great experts here.
We'd love to come talk with you about this topic,
so we might, we spend a lot of time in D.C. working with that.
We have several grant competitions that we support,
and that is trying to help scholars throughout the country.
Some of them are targeted at more senior scholars,
some at more junior scholars.
And then we have other research activities,
workshops that we do,
and different kinds of policy volumes that we put together,
so just a lot going on all the time.
And then we also do complementary research activities.
So, these are things that are not directly funded by ASPE.
It's research that our affiliates are doing
that's being administered through the center,
but certainly is supported by our role
and our leadership role throughout the country.
So, one I want to talk about is something called
Baby's First Years, and this is a really,
really exciting research project.
The person, Professor Katherine Magnuson,
is the IRP affiliate who is associated with this project,
but there are several scholars throughout the country who are.
And essentially this is a randomized control trial
that will be really one of the first studies
to explore whether income level actually has
a causative effect on brain development.
So, you may think, well don't we know
that poverty is bad for children?
Well, yeah, we think that's the case, right,
but we don't know have a lot of empirical research
that says directly that just income
has a causal effect on how the brain
develops going from birth.
So, what they're doing is they have a randomized control trial.
They have a treatment group of mothers
who are under the federal poverty line.
They're going to be receiving a card that has
$333 per month on it that they get
to spend however they want.
There's no rules about the spending, it's just a card.
And then that'll be compared to a treatment group that gets,
I can't remember if it's 10 or $20.
And so, essentially about $4,000 a year
that the treatment group will be getting,
and we'll see is there a difference.
There's going to be brain imaging.
They'll be going different kinds of surveys,
different kinds of, different tests.
There will be a qualitative component where they go and talk to families.
So, this has been in the making
for about six years, and we're really excited.
It's just starting, so I don't have any results for you yet,
but certainly the hypothesis is that income,
having more income, would be helpful.
Another really exciting program that we have
is brand-new and funded by the JPB Foundation, and this is trying to build--
It has a terrible long name (chuckles), but...
but the important piece of it
is that we have researcher-practitioner partnerships.
So this, again, is really trying to produce
policy-relevant and policy-important research.
So, trying to work with people who are collecting data,
who have data, but organizations that don't
necessarily have the capacity to use it.
And so, this is trying to provide
some academic supports behind that.
So, the first two projects that we funded,
one is actually in Wisconsin, in Milwaukee,
called, Does the Labor Market Give Credit for Learning Online?
There's been an incredible increase in the use
of online learning in high schools in Milwaukee,
and there's a question as to whether,
does that really translate to good learning?
So, it seems that there are more credits,
'cause students are getting more credits.
They may be graduating, but are they learning things
that are going to be useful to them in, for example,
the labor market and long-term outcomes?
Hasn't really been tested yet.
There's concern because these kinds of courses are
particularly taken by students of color.
And, you know, is this helping reduce the achievement gap,
or could it be exacerbating the achievement gap?
So, that's one, another, so that's a partnership
between researchers and the Milwaukee School District.
And then leveraging administrative data to increase
take-up of SNAP and the earned-income tax credit.
So that is actually an experiment.
It's actually two different studies in California.
One, where they're using some behavioral economics,
so things, maybe you've heard the word nudge,
you know where they can do little low-cost things
to help people sign up for that earned-income tax credit
and get that earned-income tax credit,
which research shows seems to be very helpful to families.
And then with SNAP, one of the issues
that we have studied in a lot of different public programs,
is how do people, so if people are eligible for a program,
how do they actually take it up?
Is there administrative burden that makes it difficult?
Is there a lot of churning kind of on and off
of the benefits and how does that impact families?
So, the SNAP eligibility study looks
at counties in California that have made it easier
to stay on SNAP in terms of not having
to do as much paperwork or giving
a certain time limit or something like that,
but they're rolling out gradually
so it kind of creates this incredible opportunity
for researchers to look at counties that are
doing that versus counties that aren't.
So, those are few examples of some of the exciting research
that we're doing right now.
Another thing that we do at times
is our faculty are asked to put together things
like collections or special editions of journals.
So, this was a very recent journal
put together, two volumes of a journal actually,
looking at anti-poverty policy innovations for the U.S.
So, if you want to read sort of what do we think works?
What does the research say on how we do this
across a lot of different policy areas,
here's your bedtime reading for the next few weeks. Okay.
Dissemination, so this is great.
If you do all this high-quality research,
but if nobody knows about it, not so helpful.
So, we put forth a lot of effort to try to make sure
that the research is getting into the hands
of the people that can actually take action, right,
and do something with it.
And I want to say something really important
about dissemination, though, it's not just
handing a report to a policy maker.
It's really about translating the research,
talking to the policy maker,
and listening to the policy maker
about what is it that I can do with this,
or here's what I need, here's the question I still have
that I need you to go answer.
Here's what's going to happen when I hand this to you,
the people on the street.
So, I started my career as actually a middle school
and high school teacher, and when I went back
to policy school and started, you know, hearing
about all these great experiments (chuckles).
I was like, have you ever been a teacher?
Do you know, have you spent time,
a day in a classroom in thinking about how this works?
So, IRP is really full of people who do think about that,
do care about that a lot, and that's why the research really works.
So, these are some of the dissemination
activities that we do.
We really do try to bring researchers and practitioners
together whenever we can because again,
we learn a lot of important things
as an institute from practitioners and policy makers,
in addition to we think we have a lot of helpful information
that could definitely improve and inform policies as well.
So, I know you can't see all the pictures,
but I wanted to take the opportunity that if you
didn't know I wanted to invite you to our weekly seminar
that we have on Thursday afternoons.
This is in the Social Science Building,
so we have different speakers every week
on any variety of topics.
Some are from UW, some are from different places
across the country, so please check that out.
We also have something called the Lampman Lecture,
after our founder, once a year.
This year, it's Bruce Western, who's going to be
talking about corrections policy,
and then we have a New Perspectives lecture
where we try to really highlight some cutting-edge research
or research that we haven't thought about
as connected to poverty before.
And this year, we're looking at sort of how
are on-the-ground non-profits and organizations
using information to inform their practice
and try to reduce poverty.
So, this is just a look at some of the different resources
that we put out from the institute,
so we have several publications.
We have Focus and Fast Focus, so those are quarterly
and monthly publications that highlight a topic of interest.
We have the wonderful Dave Chancellor
puts together podcasts for us.
Here I've highlighted one where we talked
to some folks at the Department of Public Instruction
and some professors at UW talking about their partnership.
We have a Frequently Asked Questions section
where we try to provide information
to a lot of the questions that we get,
and again, I encourage you to check out
our resources page and take a look.
So, the third arm of our work,
again, is training and mentoring,
and also increasingly we're really trying
to work on the diversity of our poverty scholar corps.
So, a lot of efforts, and diversity means a lot of things,
racial and ethnic diversity, diversity in age,
diversity in region, diversity in methodology,
diversity in all sorts of things.
So, we do have training opportunities for anywhere
from undergraduate students to grad students and faculty,
and something that I really enjoyed earlier this fall
as we worked with our-- We have quite a few opportunities
on this campus, people who are working on mentoring.
So, we did a great mentoring workshop for faculty.
We have a National Poverty Fellows Program,
which works with the federal government where we have folks,
young scholars who maybe are still trying to decide,
do I want to go into academia or am I more interested
in government or something else, spending some time
at a federal agency and doing research and evaluation
there for a few years before they make that decision.
So, lots of different opportunities,
our Graduate Research Fellows Program, also,
that supports UW grad students.
It's a wonderful program I'm a graduate of myself,
that brings together interdisciplinary,
so you can be from the School of Education,
Human Ecology, Engineering, Economics.
It's just a great discussion and way for students
to learn from each other.
And this is an example of something that is supported
by our federal grant that we're really excited about,
so we've done for two years now.
It's a Dissertation Proposal Workshop
for Underrepresented Students.
We work with Howard University in Washington, D.C.,
and so the first round I think we had 12 or 14 scholars,
then it was, the next year we got like 95 applicants,
so we upped it to about, I think there were 21.
It's been a really popular program,
a great opportunity for us and for them.
Again, complementary training activities,
so this is not funded by our federal grants
but funded by JPB
is an Emerging Scholars Fellowships,
so we have our first three this year,
Stephanie Canizales, Jacob Faber, and Jamila Michener,
and we're really excited.
Essentially, this fellowship says
here is $20,000 for professional development,
and it's not tied to a particular research project.
It's what do you need to get somewhere in your career,
and that's not a common opportunity for a young scholar.
We also pair the scholar with a mentor,
so this may be somebody at UW.
Actually I think most of our mentors are
from our partner poverty centers, but again,
this is helping-- These are scholars who are interested
in doing applied kind of work,
doing poverty research even if it's not the cool thing
to do in your sociology department,
and you may not have peers at your university,
so we're lucky here at UW.
We do applied research,
we have great interdisciplinary opportunities.
The walls are really low between colleges and schools,
but that's not the case for a lot
of scholars across the country.
So, this is a wonderful opportunity,
and on the other end, at the undergraduate level,
a new program that we've just become involved with is
the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty,
and this is trying to give undergrads an opportunity
to learn about poverty by taking courses
throughout the campus and then having
a really high-quality internship experience in the summer.
So, we're just starting with our first cohort this year,
and I'm really excited to see what happens.
The next thing I want to talk about is
the work that the institute does
with Wisconsin state agencies specifically.
So, we have a very long history of about 30 years
of working with state agencies like
the Department of Children and Families,
which is another place that I worked before
I came to the university, so again,
that's a great opportunity and shows an investment in IRP
and sort of hiring people and working with people
who have worked in agencies, which is great.
But, we have a philosophy, and the philosophy is
when we work together, it's yours, mine, and ours.
So, there are some questions,
there's some things that we do that are yours.
You just asked us to do it.
We don't have the capacity to do it.
We can help you do it,
and because we're good partners, we will do that.
Some of these things are mine.
I'm an academic, I have a question
that I theoretically have, maybe it's about theory.
I'm going to publish it in a journal.
You're probably not going to be super, super
interested (chuckles) in it, but this is important to me,
and we're good partners, so we do it.
A lot of our work is ours, so these are the kinds
of questions that are policy-relevant that are
going to be both interesting to academics
and have implications for theory
and generalization and other programs,
but they also have really direct
and interesting implications for the department
or the agency and people you're working with.
So, we mostly work in that "our" circle,
but we also have these other two circles,
and that's what makes the relationship work.
So, we do a lot of working with agencies
to set a shared research agenda.
We provide technical assistance and have research contracts.
Again, sometimes we partner in seeking federal money.
We have learning exchanges, so this is one of my favorite things to do
is to go to the agencies quarterly,
and we share research, and we get feedback on,
"Ooh yeah, yeah, that's not actually how it works (chuckles),
or "you used that data wrong or something like that,"
so that's actually really helpful, or we can really use this.
Outreach to local and state governments,
and then we act as advisors when we're asked
on different kinds of committees and boards.
And then another really important thing,
and this is such an enriching opportunity
that we have in Wisconsin that's really unique,
is that we have this incredible linked administrative data system.
So, we have something called
the Wisconsin Administrative Data Corps.
Again, something that's been built over, you know,
building trusting relationships between the university
and these state agencies where they
have shared their data, of course, in a way that's safe
and de-identified and letting,
helping us come up with some shared research questions
that are again going to be policy-relevant,
but we have linked data,
from, you know, very siloed data systems,
so Child Welfare, Child Support,
Department of Corrections, TANF,
and Welfare, and Medicaid,
wage records from Unemployment Insurance.
So, we have programmers who have figured out
a way to match all that data and do it longitudinally
so that researchers can do some
really great policy-relevant studies.
So, we have, we think at Wisconsin one
of the richest data collections in the country
to be able to do this, and again,
this is something that has
been built through that partnership,
and we really relish that opportunity.
So, some other examples of the research that we do
with that linked administrative data corps,
and with these partnerships that we've built with agencies,
child support is one of the major areas
where we've done work for a long time.
So, we've done some studies that suggest,
for example, if you-- So a lot of times
families who are poor
may, for example, when they owe child support
are also basically billed say for a Medicaid birth,
and they owe money not only to the family, to their child,
but also back payment to the state.
Well, it turns out that
when they fall behind or are in arrears
that if you pass through,
if you forgive that money to the state,
they're more likely to actually give money to the family.
So, that's an example where that's had implications.
That research has had implications throughout the country.
A lot of states have changed their policies around that.
Families Forward was a project that I worked on
when I was graduate student,
and that was looking at again, for noncustodial parents
who have fallen way behind in child support.
Again, perhaps through barriers to employment
or for whatever reason.
How do we get them paying again?
How do we get them involved with their families again?
And this was an opportunity to look at,
you know what if we forgave some of that state debt,
or what if even custodial parents
were willing to forgive some debt.
If they agreed to that, like for every dollar paid,
can we forgive 50 cents of debt,
so that that's another opportunity.
That did show positive results.
That did bring people back into the system.
We've also looked at things like interactions
between child support and child welfare.
So, same kind of thing, that if a child is
placed in foster care,
the noncustodial parent may be paying
for those state costs,
and it turns out that that's actually not good for kids.
It takes longer for kids to be reunited with their families,
if that's the case, so interaction between
two policy areas you didn't even really think about,
so how do we think about that?
And the last bullet point here, the Child Support Noncustodial
Parent Employment Demonstration,
that is a randomized control trial.
It's been in eight states.
It's been going on for, oh,
I think we're in our sixth year now,
but that's looking at again, for parents who are
having trouble paying child support,
what if we sort of changed the focus
of the child support office into helping with employment,
helping with parenting, and really taking
a kind of a client-centered focus
on child support as opposed to just a collections
or, you know, sort of a
more criminal justice kind of focus on it.
And so, that's being studied right now,
is what if we really changed the culture
of an organization like that, does that help to bring forth
more child support, better employment outcomes,
and better outcomes for families?
Another thing that we collaborate on is something
called the Wisconsin Poverty Report.
So, Professor Tim Smeeding from IRP is
the lead author on this, has been for many years,
and this puts forth-- The official poverty measure,
right, is something that's kind of old,
and it's got a very specific definition,
and this is trying to come up with a poverty measure
that really takes a little bit more into account
and tries to give us better answers
about how policies are impacting the poverty rates
in different counties in Wisconsin.
So, the latest report found stalled progress.
So, basically poverty has been going down
over the last few years, but this year was slightly up.
And by this year, I should say the 2018 publication,
but this is 2016 data.
There's always a lag in how clean the data is, right?
So, there's kind of a stall there,
and it's a question of why is this happening
if we have sort of a booming economy?
And you know, what can we do about it,
so there's, one hypothesis is well,
yes, unemployment is down but wages aren't up
as maybe as high as we would expect
given the tight labor market.
Another is that maybe unemployment is,
you know, is low,
but there's still a group of potential workers
that are not able to access this good labor market.
So, what do we do specifically for that group,
so putting forth questions like that
and working with Wisconsin policy makers about that.
This last year, Tim also did a supplement
where he was looking specialty about race
and ethnic disparities in poverty,
and in Milwaukee finds much higher rates
of poverty for blacks and Hispanics.
Okay, now I want to talk
about a project, a really exciting project
that I'm working on, that's really kind of a new direction
for the Institute for Research on Poverty.
So, we were approached, kind of a cold call (chuckles) to UW,
from an organization called Schmidt Futures,
and Schmidt Futures identifies itself
as a venture facility for public benefit,
not a foundation, but don't ask me exactly what that means.
I'm just using their language because I have permission to.
And it's headed by Eric Schmidt, who you may recognize
as the former CEO of Google.
They've done a lot of work with science fellowships
and technology funding, and now they're getting
into the kind of philanthropy where
they're looking at economic prosperity.
So, we were very excited.
Basically, Eric Schmidt or someone from his organization
called the chancellor and said,
"We're thinking about putting together
"this challenge called The Alliance for the American Dream,
"and we want to increase the income
"of folks in the middle class, and you know,
"do you think UW can help with that?
"Do you think they can do that?"
And Chancellor Blake said, "I know just the folks for you.
"I know people who can do applied policy research
"and get out there in the community,"
and brought it to the Institute for Research on Poverty,
and we were really proud and excited to be
one of the four inaugural partners.
You can see the other three there.
So to tell you a little bit about--
We have rebranded our own local version
of this challenge as an opportunity called
DreamUp Wisconsin, and the specific challenge
we were given by Schmidt Futures is
how do we raise the income
of 10,000 middle-class, Dane County
families by 10% by the year 2020.
So, it is an audacious challenge,
and I just want to play a quick video for you
to show you how we're approaching it.
(peaceful music)
- [Announcer] Dane County has beautiful landscapes,
vibrant communities, a strong economy,
and a thriving labor market,
but many families find themselves strapped
and struggling to make ends meet.
Increases in the cost of housing, child care,
and education stretch family budgets,
while wages for some seem stuck.
These struggles are especially prominent
for people of color who have unemployment rates
that are often double, and median household incomes
that are substantially lower
than those of white people in Dane County.
Opportunities also vary by education level and geography,
leaving too many people in our county
out of the middle class,
but think of how much stronger our community
would be if we could expand Dane County's middle class.
DreamUp Wisconsin aims to do this
by building on current efforts,
combining university and community partners,
and using funding from Schmidt Futures
to find ways to boost the incomes
of 10,000 Dane County families
by 10% or around $4,000.
- That's $40 million dollars a year that we're
going to see ripple through our economy.
That's spending in local businesses,
that's people saving, people investing.
- What does it mean to be middle class, and what can we do in this project
to expand the number of middle-class families
here in Dane County are just fascinating questions
and deeply, deeply important for our community.
- We're excited to learn from you
about what the ideas are that'll help
the middle class here and elsewhere.
- The strategies used here in Dane County are scalable,
and scalable particularly if you're
tied to industry partnerships.
- And we're excited to support those ideas
and hopefully give them access to the market
and the capital that they need to thrive.
- I hope there is a more cohesive, collaborative community vision
for who we want to be and how we're going to get there.
- We're really trying to start by listening to the community.
We're going to listen.
We're going to work with faith-based organizations,
with local business, with policy makers, with teachers, with unions,
with everybody in the county who's worried about the issues of the middle class.
- The community already has a lot of answers and systems
in place about how to make things work.
Now, I think our role
as a whole city is to make sure that those voices are heard
and those solutions are amplified.
- That's the sort of the miracle of the middle class
is that they can become the engine that really drives growth in our community.
- I think to be able to pull this together quickly and then go,
it's going to feel very different in Dane County,
but I'm personally very excited about that.
I think we'll get some new energy.
I think we'll get some great ideas.
- This is a community with one of the longest histories
of research into what interventions actually work
when it comes to building a strong middle class
and supporting distressed communities.
- When the goal is finding better ways
to stabilize and expand the middle class,
the stakes are particularly high.
- I think that the energy's here in this community,
the will is here in this community, the smarts are in this community,
and to get people together in new and innovative ways
to think differently and to learn quicker,
and to try things faster, that's going to be what really gets us
from here to there, and that's what we need.
- [Announcer] We want you to get involved.
Come to a community forum.
Submit your ideas, join a team.
We will help build at least 10 teams
from members of the community and campus
around the strongest ideas.
One of these ideas will receive additional funding
from Schmidt Futures in 2019.
To learn more and share your ideas,
visit our website.
(uplifting music)
- So, there's the audacious challenge.
So, we actually received the funding
at the end of April, kicked it off in May.
We had to narrow it down to three ideas
by this week, that we have
three full proposals that are into Schmidt Futures
that are going to be pitching their ideas
in Arizona at the end of this month.
So, it was really a challenge
to get things together that fast,
and I can tell you that this is not how academia works usually.
Any of you who are involved,
or have been or have friends who are.
So, it has put us outside our comfort zone,
but it's been a really, really great thing.
So, what we're looking for,
the strongest solutions that Schmidt Futures
was looking for is to include some--
I should say this is a combination.
Schmidt Futures put out and said, okay,
we want ideas that are going to benefit,
come from and benefit a diverse set of people,
that they're interdisciplinary and multi-sector,
that they're evidence-based, that they use technology,
but we also absolutely,
absolutely required that it be
a university-community partnership.
So, we have no teams and no proposals
that are just from faculty or just from the community,
that that was part of what we were going to build here is that partnership.
And the other thing is that we wanted
to make sure that we are dealing with proposals and ideas
that are going to be responsive specifically
to the needs in Dane County. So, what does that mean?
The first thing we did is we went
and put together a fact sheet and tried
to learn more about the population of Dane County.
And what we noticed right away is that Dane County,
if you look at all of our averages, we look great.
We are a prosperous county,
but I don't know if anything jumps out at you here,
but definitely what jumped out to us
and was highlighted in the video is that there
are some really, really troubling disparities
when it comes to income,
when it comes to educational outcomes,
employment, disparities by race in this county.
So, we know from other community organizations,
the Race to Equity report, you know, this is a problem here.
So, we needed to attach our challenge
and our way to address the challenge
to make sure that we were thinking about this as well.
And so, one of the first things that people in the community,
when we first started talking about this,
like, well you can't say middle class
and expect communities of color to be excited about this
because you're leaving out a lot of people if you say that.
If you're defining middle class as like $50,000 a year,
that's not even the median income
for some of these populations, right?
So, we started talking about,
there's a missing middle class in Dane County.
There's an emerging middle class in Dane County,
that there are people, there's a fragile middle class in Dane County.
People are doing just fine today.
They have a house, a job, and a car,
but car breaks down,
I get laid off, I have a medical incident,
and suddenly you go from pretty stable
to being potentially in a very dire, spiraling situation.
So, we tended to focus--
Schmidt Futures did not say you have
to choose a particular income point.
Some other schools did it that way.
Some other schools decided that they
were going to use different catchment areas.
Some other schools decided we're
going to have faculty-led groups,
but we really felt it was important that we pay attention
to what the data were telling us,
and that we pay attention to the community
and make sure that ideas were community-led.
So, the other thing that we did is we
went out and talked to people, and I shouldn't say we,
I should say our fabulous graduate students,
who went to grocery stores, to libraries,
to bus stops, to all the many wonderful exciting festivals
that we have in Dane County, and talked to folks and said,
"What is holding your family back?
"What costs a lot?
"What's hard for you to afford?"
And you can see that some of things that they talked
about were things like child care,
racial discrimination, benefits, education,
so these are the things that as we were
brainstorming and putting together a proposal process
that we were thinking about.
So, essentially we put out a wide call,
and we said, we're going to have an ideation process.
That's what Schmidt Futures has asked us to lead,
so put out an open call for ideas,
had a public kickoff with organizations.
We had a kickoff on campus with faculty,
where we had over 100 faculty show up to learn about it,
and then throughout this summer,
we held office hours, both on campus
and also at the UW South Madison Partnership Building
over by Urban League,
and we talked with a lot of people
from the community about ideas that they had,
things that they were doing in trying to create
partnerships where there hadn't been
or to foster existing partnerships to come up with ideas
that would meet this challenge.
So, we got 47 proposals to start with,
at the end of August.
We narrowed that down to 11 proposals,
and then we narrowed it down to three,
and I'm going to tell you a little bit about our three finalists
who will be traveling to Schmidt Futures,
or to Phoenix to pitch their ideas in front of a board
put together by Schmidt Futures in just two weeks.
So, the first team is called Lift Dane,
a clever acronym there,
Legal Interventions for Transforming Dane.
So, this is a partnership between Legal Action of Wisconsin,
the UW Law School, and the Employment and Training
Association of Dane County.
And essentially, what they're trying to do
is use data and technology to help people
overcome their civil-legal barriers.
They look at things like
expungement of corrections records,
not having a driver's license,
having child support orders and arrears that are too high,
that they can't pay or arrears,
all sorts of different civil, legal issues,
but issues that they say are fixable,
right, like these are things that if you had a lawyer,
you probably could get some help doing.
Now, if you're very low income, you might have access
to free legal aid, but there's a gap.
There's, you know, a group that are not eligible
for free legal aid, but they're not well-off enough
to have a lawyer on retainer.
And this is trying to extend some of the services,
for example, that legal action people
that they work with to that group.
It's very clever, it's trying to come up with basically
a legal checkup where we can use public data,
you can look up, kind of type in your information.
They can look up, use public data to say okay,
here are some of the things that we could help you with.
Can we help make you an appointment with a lawyer,
or can we help point you to a different service here.
So, it has the opportunity, you know, to both
reduce barriers to employment,
and also empower people to kind of do their own work
and have access to the same kind of things
that people with more money would have access to.
The second group is called We Care for Dane Kids,
so this is a partnership with the,
the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association,
Reach Dane, several faculty from UW,
the city of Madison, and Madison Out-of-School Time.
So, this is a group that's really trying to help parents,
but also help workers in the childcare sector.
So, they look at the issue of childcare.
Childcare is very costly, but also,
childcare workers are still very poorly paid.
So, there's a supply and a demand problem here.
And so, they have four-pronged approach.
One is trying to get businesses to help
families who are interested in looking
at dependent care accounts and taking advantage of that.
They're trying to get more families to use that,
and get businesses to potentially to help support those,
trying to get more families who are eligible
for childcare subsidies, who signed up for those subsidies.
There's a very low take-up rate of those.
And then, on the workers' side,
trying to help, you know most childcare centers
are actually pretty small businesses,
and there are potential efficiencies
that if they could work together, if they had a cooperative for some
of their back-office services or trying to buy supplies,
trying to have substitutes for when people are sick
or want to go on vacation, so trying to bring
a shared services network together that would
help support those local businesses.
And, also, to help supplement worker wages,
'cause the bottom line is that most childcare providers,
like I said, are very low paid.
So, it's a four-piece puzzle that really tries
to address it as the complicated system that it is.
And then the third finalist is called
EARNdane, Digital Transformation initiative.
So, this is a partnership with way too many groups
for me to name all of them,
but this is the, as a consortium,
you can kind of think of them as
the Dane County employment and training network,
so this is an amazing group of people and organizations
that have worked together for a long time
but also kind of trying to create some new partnerships
with the university and with the private sector as well.
And essentially, so they've had programs
in the past of getting workers a job,
so getting the unemployed employed.
Now, it's how do we move people up the ladder,
so up the ladder into the middle class to their next job.
What are the barriers, what are the mentoring
and coaching and different kinds of professional development
opportunities that they could have.
And then, how can we use technology
to communicate with each other
so that we're more efficient in providing services,
so we can provide more services to more people,
and so we can help the workers that we're working with.
You know, they need to be able to use technology as well,
so, and it's also using things like behavioral science
where workers are signing up for a training program.
They might get a text from a peer,
you know that little nudge like oh,
you did great in class or don't forget
to come to class tomorrow, things like that.
So, again, just a really exciting
opportunity for Dane County.
So this initiative, like I said, has taken IRP
into sort of a new direction.
This is, we have a long-standing
role as a federal poverty center
in working with state agencies,
and this has really given an opportunity to go more local,
and we couldn't be more excited by what
we're doing with the community right now.
So, our long-term goals here are again,
improving the lives of families,
fostering and building new infrastructure
that helps to solve local problems,
and really engaging researchers in this community work,
and hopefully impressing Schmidt Futures so they
want to continue to support our efforts in the future.
And, I should say that we are, like I said,
we're at the, we've picked three finalists now
who get to go pitch their idea.
At least one of them, possibly two,
will move to the next round of competition,
which means that in June they will get to compete
for a large bucket of capital funding.
We don't have an exact dollar amount,
but we're talking like a million or more.
So, we're very, very excited about that,
but we're also excited about the portfolio that we've built,
so even all the ideas that don't get funded by Schmidt Futures.
We also are excited because there's
a round two of this challenge.
We don't know exactly what the challenge is yet.
We don't have the 10,000 by 10% by 2020 exact numbers.
We're talking with Schmidt about that,
but we should have that announcement in February.
So, I just want to end the talk here.
I'm really excited to take your questions,
with just reminding you that poverty is
one of our thorniest problems that we have
in the United States and in Wisconsin,
and it takes efforts from everybody.
So, we really welcome public engagement with IRP.
I hope that you're excited,
as excited about DreamUp Wisconsin as I am.
If you had never heard about it before,
I encourage you to visit our website
and join our listserv, where you will get lots of news.
Please come to our seminars, help us spread the word
by reading and sharing our publications,
and you know, let us know how else we can work with you.
One thing we've learned with DreamUp is that there's
a lot of amazing work going on in this community,
so we're excited to hear about it as well.
And with that, I'd love some questions.
(audience applauds)