Income Security
At the Casey Foundation, we believe that children’s ability to thrive is powerfully influenced by the economic circumstances in which they grow up. Improvements in child well-being are closely tied to improvements in the economic security and success of their families. Because of this, we support programs and policies that help parents secure a steady income and build assets so that they are better able to meet the physical, emotional, and educational needs of their children.
The Foundation’s investments in income security seek to accomplish the following:
- Address the need to make work work and make work pay by ensuring public policies and programs help low-income parents find and keep jobs, as well as protect against unforeseeable life events that present financial setbacks;
- Encourage the use of federal and state tax and budget policies to increase support for low-income working families with children; and
- Ensure families can rely on a strong public safety net when they experience emergencies and periods of hardship by working with states to make good decisions about programs and policies.
We believe that federal and state-level policy decisions are powerful determinates of family and child economic well-being. For this reason, we focus our work on policies and programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), federal nutrition programs, and unemployment insurance, all of which have huge impacts on families’ economic success. Since 1999, we have been working with several dozen grantees and funding partners through a State Fiscal Analysis Initiative to explore ways to reform the U.S. and state tax systems in order to help struggling working parents in the bottom third of the nation’s families.
Results of our work and that of our grantees include helping to expand the EITC at a state and federal level; encouraging states to adapt food stamp systems to better serve families in need; and reforming policy on unemployment insurance to help low-income families during economic hard times.
Casey Funding in Action
- We support these and other grantees for their work in helping families achieve income security:
• The National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University for their development of a tool that helps state agencies and policy makers better understand how a family’s eligibility for certain work supports (like food stamps, child care subsidies, etc.) interacts with modest increases in a parent’s income.
• The Heartland Alliance for Human Need and Human Rights for their coordination of the National Transitional Jobs Network—a coalition of more than 200 transitional jobs programs, policy organizations, and others that help people with multiple barriers to employment find and keep their jobs.
• The Food Research and Action Center’s efforts to assure that the Food Stamp Program and other federal nutrition programs reach and function well for low-income working families.
• The National Employment Law Project, Inc. for their work on the Unemployment Insurance Safety Net Project.
• The Center for Law and Social Policy to conduct policy analysis, technical assistance, and advocacy to improve the economic security and work-family balance of working families.
• The Brookings Institution for their Center for Children and Families, which addresses issues of domestic social policy debates around improving outcomes for low-income working families.