Stakeholders unite behind war on poverty

Regional leaders and many of the top names in education, business and government from throughout Southern California Wednesday to discuss tangible steps forward in the ongoing War on Poverty.

Fifty years after Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act, poverty remains a national, regional and local crisis. Today in Southern California, more than 3 million people live in poverty, including one in every four children.

Today’s summit, at the California Science Center, is hosted by the Southern California Association of Governments and the Southern California Leadership Council. The objective is to raise awareness, develop a broad coalition of stakeholders to help find solutions, identify specific actions needed to move people out of poverty into jobs, and come up with specific ways for attendees to get involved.

Connie Rice, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Advancement Project, and former Gov. Gray Davis are among the speakers.

“We simply can’t sit back and wait for the problem to fix itself,” said Gov. Davis, Co-Chairman of the Leadership Council. “We need to find actionable ways to create more jobs.”

Carl Morehouse, SCAG President and a Ventura Councilmember, said the summit will allow stakeholders in the areas of education, business, government and the nonprofit sector the opportunity to find common ground in the War on Poverty.

“Job creation has been and remains our biggest weapon when it comes to defeating poverty at the local and regional level,” Morehouse said. “But that doesn’t simply happen. It takes as serious commitment to workforce development and training at all levels. We need to think strategically. We need to think big.”

The summit begins with registration at 8:30 a.m. and will include workshops and panels on the relationship of poverty and workforce development, identifying and maximizing the region’s growth industries, best approaches for moving people from poverty to prosperity.

Updated research shows we’re losing ground on that last point. According to a panel of economists convened by SCAG last year, the number of people living below poverty in the six-county region grew from less than 1.9 million in 1990 to 3.2 million in 2012. Among children, rates of poverty range from 17.7 percent in Ventura County to 32.8 percent in Imperial County.

Nationwide, 15 percent of people live below the poverty line, but according to the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, true “market poverty” – reflecting what the poverty rate would be without any tax credits or other benefits – has actually risen from 27 percent to 28.7 percent over the past half century.

“Time has shown that we can’t simply throw money at the problem,” said Hasan Ikhrata, SCAG’s Executive Director. “We need to come up with real solutions that allow people to move from dependency to self-sufficiency, and that starts with jobs.”