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As pressure increases to support social justice, coalitions try to understand their role in oppression while implementing practices to create equitable environments. Twenty-six education-focused community coalitions in the United States participated in the study. Coalition interviews and membership rosters are used to evaluate the degree to which these coalitions engage in community engagement practices conducive to empowerment. Involvement practices emphasize communication strategies and participatory design structures. Systems change practices emphasize agenda-setting processes and a level of awareness of structural sources that create social marginalization. This work investigates how these two practices create empowerment. This study uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to examine the impact of community poverty, coalition age, government representation, coalition size, school district size, and coalition governance on involvement and systems change practices. The results demonstrate combinations of these conditions in four mutually exclusive solutions for involvement practices and two mutually exclusive solutions for systems change practices. The paper ends by identifying cases that coincide with these solutions and how communities thoughtfully configure their collaborations to coincide with empowerment theory. Additionally, we identify potential trade-offs between involvement and systems change practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on relevance of poverty and inequality as factors affecting the spread and mortality of the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America. Topics include Peruvians lacking mass diagnostic testing due to the limitations intrinsic to the health system and socioeconomic inequalities; and COVID-19 vaccine strategy against vaccine hesitancy ending the pandemic and achieving sustainable recovery.

Eviction filing rates have declined in many large cities in the United States. Existing scholarship on eviction, which focuses on discrete tenant-landlord relationships, has few explanations for this decline. I consider whether community organizing by nonprofit organizations shapes the social organization of communities and causes landlords to file fewer eviction filings. In cities where tenant and anti-poverty organizing has become common, community-oriented nonprofit organizations advocate for disadvantaged communities and help residents avoid poverty. Community organizing has rarely been studied as a predictor of housing security among low-income tenants, despite studies of how community organizing shapes the use of property in wealthy neighborhoods. I estimate the causal effect of community organizations on eviction filing rates between 2000 and 2016 using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the endogeneity of nonprofits and eviction. Evidence from year-to-year models in 75 large cities spanning sixteen years estimate that an addition of ten community nonprofits in a city of 100,000 residents is associated with a ten percent reduction in eviction filing. This effect is comparable to the effect of community organizations on murder and is roughly a third of the association between eviction and concentrated disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty continues to be a significant public health crisis across the United States, and its impact is particularly prevalent among school-aged youth and their families. Many K–12 educators do not fully understand the realities associated with living in poverty. Such a lack of understanding impacts teachers' ability to meet the unique educational needs of students experiencing poverty and develop positive teacher–student relationships. This article sets the stage for further discussion on the lack of quality training, education, and professional development for teachers on poverty. The authors propose a model for professional development aimed at increasing empathy and understanding among K–12 educators through experiential learning tools such as the Community Action Poverty Simulation. The article concludes with an in-depth discussion on implications for future practice and a call to action for school social workers to bring innovative solutions to their campuses that pull from their educational background in advocacy and social justice to enhance teacher training through an interdisciplinary approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States has always prided itself as providing safe haven to those who are persecuted. Yet, the United States did not develop policy for admitting and resettling refugees until 1980. Unlike Asians and Europeans, African refugees in the 1980s were chosen primarily based on skill, but no research thus far examines whether this strategy led to greater long-term economic success for African refugees. This article examines racial differences in refugees' likelihood of living in poverty, receiving welfare income, engaging in full-time employment and wages between 1990 and 2019. I find that refugees show improvement in all four outcomes. African refugees, however, earn less than nearly all other groups in all time periods suggesting blocked mobility, particularly among men. Analyses focus on the 1982–1987 entry cohort of refugees who had access to more assistance than future cohorts. Consequently, these findings likely show the best-case scenario for refugees' long-term economic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does exposure to economic inequality undermine belief in the American dream? Scholarship has long argued that the availability of meritocratic ideologies like the American dream inoculates people against exposure to inequality by leading them to rationalize unequal outcomes by viewing wealth as due to hard work and poverty as due to indolence. The existence of inequality where the "have-nots" are working poor, however, could serve to undermine such a process because their employment status casts them as "deserving poor" and limits the applicability of agency-based explanations for poverty. Across two experiments embedded in national surveys, exposure to inequality alone did not cause significant reductions in belief in the American dream; however, exposure to inequality where the have-nots were working poor significantly reduced belief in the American dream. Moderation and mediation analyses indicate these effects were most pronounced among lower-income Americans and indirectly heightened support for government reduction of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the authors discuss the importance of the temporary assistance for needy families (TANF) program in providing support to low-income families with children in the U.S. The program replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). Other topics include the adverse effects of systemic racism on American society and how TANF is providing funds to social services of states.

Dramatic federal immigration policy proposals and executive actions appear to be a reaction to state and local governments that have taken leadership in responding to immigration. Some local governments have endorsed welcoming immigrants to stabilize high-poverty urban neighborhoods and to enhance regional economic development. Others embrace immigrant incorporation consistent with the social work grand challenge to achieve equal opportunity and justice. This research estimates the number of immigrant-friendly cities and counties in the United States. To generate this estimate, authors prepared a local government policy scan of all municipalities and counties in the United States with a population of more than 500 persons to identify policies designed to recruit or specifically serve immigrants. Authors also categorized these immigrant-friendly policies on a continuum ranging from rhetoric to outreach, integration, and facilitation. Only 7% of cities and 6% of counties were found to have immigrant-friendly policy. However, when taking population into account, nearly half of all people in the municipal sample live in a place with an immigrant-friendly policy. Article concludes with the discussion of the implications for social policy and social work practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1931, Edgar Sydenstricker, the former statistician of the US Public Health Service, challenged the common belief that the 1918 influenza outbreak had affected "the rich and the poor alike." Using data from 112,317 participants in a 1918 US national survey, he observed that, on the contrary, both morbidity and mortality from the flu had been higher among the poor than among the rich. To explain these differences, Sydenstricker stratified the analyses by 2 measures of affluence collected in the survey: "economic status" (from "very poor" to "well-to-do") and household crowding (i.e. number of people per household room). Economic status was associated with influenza attack rates within categories of crowding, but not the opposite, suggesting that characteristics of poverty other than "household congestion" were the culprit of the poor's higher influenza burden. Attack rate ratios for influenza in infants and older adults were greater for the poor or very poor. Sydenstricker reanalyzed an already 12-year-old data set in the context of the Great Depression to build the evidence base relating poverty to ill health. For this purpose he used a stratification approach to assess confounding, mediation, and interaction before the concepts were formally named. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preconception health care is heralded as an essential method of improving pregnancy health and outcomes. However, access to health care for low-income US women of reproductive age has been limited because of a lack of health insurance. Expansions of Medicaid program eligibility under the Affordable Care Act (as well as prior expansions in some states) have changed this circumstance and expanded health insurance coverage for low-income women. These Medicaid expansions provide an opportunity to assess whether obtaining health insurance coverage improves prepregnancy and pregnancy health and reduces prevalence of adverse pregnancy outcomes. We tested this hypothesis using vital statistics data from 2011–2017 on singleton births to female US residents aged 15–44 years. We examined associations between preconception exposure to Medicaid expansion and measures of prepregnancy health, pregnancy health, and pregnancy outcomes using a difference-in-differences empirical approach. Increased Medicaid eligibility was not associated with improvements in prepregnancy or pregnancy health measures and did not reduce the prevalence of adverse birth outcomes (e.g. prevalence of preterm birth increased by 0.1 percentage point (95% confidence interval: −0.2, 0.3)). Increasing Medicaid eligibility alone may be insufficient to improve prepregnancy or pregnancy health and birth outcomes. Preconception programming in combination with attention to other structural determinants of pregnancy health is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]