According to today’s Washington Post, the economic boom in D.C. is leaving out those who stand to benefit the most from it–low-income families.
Nearly one in three working families in Washington, D.C. is poor, says a report being released today by the DC Fiscal Policy Institute and the D.C. Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.
Nearly all of those families are minorities and two-thirds of them are headed by single women.
At the heart of the failure to transfer the economic boom to low-income residents, says the report, is a failure to appropriately train them for the jobs emerging as a result of the boom.
I have to say, this surprised me.
After learning so much about programs training low-income women for nontraditional jobs, like construction, the environmental services, or law enforcement, and hearing about how serious the commitment of these women are to their new fields–and how pleased the leaders in these industries are to have them–it’s hard for me to imagine that the city and its partners aren’t ramping them up left and right.
As we’ve learned here at The Women’s Foundation, they work.
They bring women and their children out of poverty and into higher paying jobs, with benefits, and provide employers with a trained, talented, committed source of personnel.
As Walter Smith, executive director of D.C. Appleseed reminds us, it’s just common sense for our community to invest in more programs like these. "It will help build the city’s tax base. It will help reduce the very high costs we have in this city of social services. It’s very much in the city’s interest to invest in these families."
And, with two thirds of those living in poverty being women, investing with an eye to creating programs for low-income women is bound to have the greatest return.
To see how, check out this video on Washington Area Women in the Trades’ female construction program and how it’s changing the outlook of one single mother and her family.
The D.C. Appleseed Center for Law and Justice is a Grantee Partner of The Women’s Foundation.
