Kids in our community matter. They are our future and must be taken care of. The proceeding information is data from Kalamazoo Loaves and Fishes discussing childhood poverty in our area.
While most states have seen improvements in child well-being over the past five years, families in Michigan continue to suffer with more children living in poverty now than in the last full year of the Great Recession, according to the new 2015 KIDS COUNT® Data Book released today from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. More than 524,000 Michigan children live in poverty, a rate of one in four, compared to one in five in 2008. The number of children in families where no parent has full-time employment also is up, from 31 percent to 33 percent. And the state’s rank in overall child well-being fell for the second year in a row, placing it behind 32 other states including all of its Great Lakes neighbors: Minnesota (1st), Wisconsin (13th), Illinois (20th), Ohio (23rd) and Indiana (32nd). “The economic recovery clearly has not reached everyone,” said Gilda Z. Jacobs, president & CEO of the Michigan League for Public Policy. “Michigan’s unemployment rate may be at the lowest it’s been in the past decade, but many of these new jobs are low-wage and too many families continue to struggle to make ends meet to care for their children. This report proves that Michigan is losing ground while other states prosper and this is not the direction we need to go.”
To learn more about the 2015 KIDS COUNT® Data Book, click here. To learn about recommendations to improve children’s well-being in Michigan, click here.
Information provided by
https://www.kzoolf.org/index.php/2015-kids-count-data/
