A Measure of Decency for Economic Mobility

Everyone deserves an opportunity to achieve the building blocks of a good life - a quality education, financial stability, and good health.

Unfortunately, for far too many California families – over one in three households in California, representing 3.5 million families – even a modest level of security remains elusive. These struggling families reflect the diversity of California; they come from every household composition, represent every racial and ethnic group, and they overwhelmingly already are working.

California's United Ways produce the Real Cost Measure in order enable communities to set a universal goal for all families – to afford a decent standard of living, to live with dignity and agency – and to see which families struggle, in which communities, so that we, our partners and policymakers can develop strategies targeted to their specific circumstances. Such a targeted universalism approach, championed by john a. powell at the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, is essential to advancing equity and dismantling systemic racial injustice, since we know a rising tide really doesn’t necessarily lift all boats.

To help struggling families gain agency, dignity, and mobility – to move up – we need a poverty measure that points the way to a decent standard of living, not one that just tell us how low some incomes are relative to others, as do the federal poverty level and similar approaches.

The purpose of the Real Cost Measure is to support, with data-informed insights, efforts to help struggling families gain agency, dignity, and mobility. A key feature of our study is it provides more visibility about who is struggling (seniors, families with young children), where (county and neighborhood), and what the key cost barriers are (housing, food, child care). These insights are critical for figuring out what to do about low incomes, for figuring out why people are struggling and thinking about solutions.

Once we have a clearer picture of which families struggle, and where, the next question is what we can do to help them.

Families living below the Real Cost Measure are doing their part; they are overwhelmingly working families. But as our data make clear, hard work alone is not enough to get ahead. While it’s reasonable to expect families to do what they can to move up, it is both hard-hearted and unscientific to expect them to overcome the odds through heroic efforts alone.

We all stand to benefit if more struggling families and individuals move up so they can meet a basic standard of living.

So what can communities do to help these families? Volunteering, funding and providing charitable services to struggling families is one obvious way communities can help. Philanthropy is a very important way to help our neighbors and improve our communities, but the highest impact we can create is to change the environment for families to increase the odds they can succeed. 

There are steps we can take to help struggling families, some well proven, others with high potential but needing development. We offer some suggestions for policy makers, community, business, civic, nonprofit and philanthropic leaders to consider in our report, and also in a companion guide, Building Economic Inclusion: Putting the Real Cost Measure into Action. These are presented in order from more technical challenges (we know what to do, we just need more will to do it) to adaptive challenges (we need to discover what needs to be done and how to do it).

• Preserve and expand subsidized health coverage
• Provide childcare and preschool for struggling families
• Maximize current income supports such as the earned income tax credit (EITC) and CalFresh
• Help adults level up their education
• Smooth the decline of income supports
• Help families build assets and protect them from payday loans and other predatory financial services
• Integrate and naturalize immigrants
• Increase housing stock and prioritize support for renters
• Make work pay
• Adapt to the changing nature of work

Some tips for getting started:

• Focus on families and their particular situations—are we talking about families with toddlers, householders with unpredictable hours and large swings in income, or something else?
• Policies and programs may be siloed, but household budgets and family lives are not. Assisting with any one factor can provide relief in other areas; for example, providing housing assistance can allow greater resources for food or continuing education, or providing quality childcare and preschool can likewise allow families to earn more, spend more on food or housing
• Get in the fight — take some action to help, from volunteering with a nonprofit health or social services organization, to engaging fellow citizens to vote and keep economic mobility in mind when doing so.