It’s never possible to argue with African Americans that if white children were facing the same disturbing facts of life that confront too many African American kids, the entire community would be up in arms.

That is surely the case.

It’s hard to think of a community that has talked as much about children and our good intentions.  While we were talking, the well-being of African American children living in persistent poverty has grown worse.

There have been plenty of trouble signs over the years, but there has never been a greater urgency for action than now.  While child poverty rates declined in the U.S. in 2016, they went up in Memphis and Shelby County.

And if there are some in the MSA who still think this is a Memphis problem, they should think again.  After all, it is the MSA – not Memphis – that ranks #1 for child poverty in the U.S.  The higher poverty rates outside Memphis are an aberration when compared to most regions and they result in the Memphis MSA having the highest child poverty ranking for all of the country’s 388 MSAs.

It’s About Parents Too

Often when we talk about turning around the lives of children who are at risk, the conversation turns to education, but in truth, the solutions are about much more than delivering great schools.  That’s because the lives of children are multi-dimensional and so must be the solutions.

That’s hard for us, because we have a tendency to chase magic answers and silver bullets or transplant the latest “best practice” from somewhere else.  What our children need is a comprehensive plan of action that addresses all parts of their lives.

Only multiple strategies on multiple planes can produce the progress we need – in education, nutrition and healthy lifestyles, cognitive development, after school programs, and much more.   After all, they are all links on a chain and one factor is connected to the others.

Often neglected in these discussions about how to improve the futures of every child is that much of it hinges on improving opportunities for their parents and increasing their salaries to a living wage so they have more resources to invest in their children in the form of tutoring, music lessons, arts and cultural events, after school programs, and more.

Measuring The Right Things

The problems that result from the lack of a living wage are compounded by the fact that since 1979, fulltime workers in the bottom tenth in income lost 16.8% of it.  While we believe that the PILOT program has long ago evolved from an incentive into an entitlement, we could support additional years of tax freezes if companies agreed to pay living wages to its employees.

It is time for every PILOT to be accompanied by a Community Benefits Agreement that sets out the returns – such as a living wage, support for pubic transit accessibility to the company’s workers, mentoring, and local hiring – pledged by the company to the community whose taxes are being invested in it.

But we digress.

Here’s the thing: we can rhapsodize about the $11 billion in construction that shows signs that our economy – which is one of a handful of cities returning last to pre-Great Recession levels – is finally reviving.  Unfortunately, the construction isn’t associated with an influx of new people and companies and too often is a shift of existing companies and employees from one location to another.

We seem to measure progress in terms of construction rather than in terms of new people and new jobs.  The focus on construction takes our eyes off the ball when the real measurements of progress are decreases in the poverty rate and with increases in per capita income improving faster than comparable cities.

Intractable Trend Lines

Another measure of success would be better educated, healthier, and happier children.  Our recent trend line shows just how high the hill is that we have to climb.  Memphis’ child poverty rate in 2011 was 42.1% but by 2016 – as the child poverty rate across the country was dropping – it climbed to 44.7%, which gave the city the second highest child poverty rate for cities with more than 500,000 people.

The decrease from 2014 to 2015 had encouraged us to expect a continued positive trend line for 2016, but it was not to be. The child poverty rates for Memphis from year to year are as follows:

2011 – 42.1 %
2012 – 44.3%
2013 – 45.7%
2014 – 46.9%
2015 – 43.0%
2016 – 44.7%

The poverty rates for the Memphis MSA follow a similar pattern and it is #1 among MSAs with more than one million people for each of the following years:

2011 – 28.9%
2012 – 29.7%
2013 – 30.6%
2014 – 30.8%
2015 – 28.8%
2016 – 30.8%

Translating Good Intentions Into A Good Plan

It is intolerable that deep poverty in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are birthrights to so many children in our community.  The depths of persistent poverty often feel third world in nature: 40,000 school children go home to families earning less than $10,000.

These child poverty numbers are the equivalent of a demographic tsunami, but unlike the seismic sea waves, we have had years of warnings to do something about it.  They will in time have a seismic effect on Memphis, Shelby County, and the Memphis MSA unless we do something different.

The good news is that there are a number of programs under way in Memphis that have targeted children as their beneficiaries.  They are sprinkled all over the city and they are doing God’s work.

There also is research under way that is specifically focusing on children – from pre-K to the effects of toxic shock, from health to juvenile justice, from wrap around social services to interventions that work, and more.

What is lacking from these good intentions is a plan that can disrupt the entrenched child poverty and bring everyone working on solutions into the same room at the same time to develop a comprehensive way forward with short and long-term goals.

Connections

Such a plan should be built on a shared principle: that every child should have a pathway to thrive and prosper as adults.

Children who are persistently poor – living in poverty for more than half of their lives – have significantly lower odds to succeed economically as adults.  In the Memphis region, a child raised in the bottom fifth of income has the worst odds of any region in the U.S. in moving to the top fifth.  The chance is 2.6%.

Keep in mind that if people of color could earn the same as Caucasians in our region, it would have a $21 billion impact on our GDP.

That brings us full circle.  We can’t talk about children without talking about resources for their families, particularly the large percentage of poverty households in Memphis headed by women.

Growing up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty that are economically segregated drives up the odds against a child’s later success in life.  Research suggests that connecting children and their parents to services as early as possible – even before a child is born – can improve the odds for poor children.   As a researcher into children and youth issues in Memphis once said to us, “Considering the depth of poverty and its challenges, it’s amazing that as many people have succeeded as they have.”

That too is research worth engaging in.  What are the factors, the events, and the pivotal forces that have allowed so many poor African American children to escape when the odds were stacked against them?  Perhaps, the answer to that question can provide us with insight that could help us develop paths out of poverty that many more children can follow.

It can begin when all of us say enough is enough, we have no margin for error, and now is the time for action.

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