How much giving by Oregon foundations is reaching Oregon’s communities of color? Find out in this report from December 2010, Prepared by the Foundation Center on behalf of Grantmakers of Oregon and Southwest Washington (GOSW).
Download Grantmaking to Communities of Color in Oregon (PDF | 4.6 MB)
Download Grantmaking to Communities of Color at Northwest Health Foundation 2008-2013 (PDF | 169k)
diversitydatakids.org is a comprehensive information system to monitor the state of wellbeing, diversity, opportunity and equity for U.S. children. You can create your own community profiles, analyze data, compare communities and build a case for investments in early life.
With the release of its latest KIDS COUNT policy report -- Race for Results: Building a Path to Opportunity for All Children -- the Annie E. Casey Foundation hosted a national discussion on kids, race and opportunity.
From The Annie E. Casey Foundation :
In this policy report, the Annie E. Casey Foundation explores the intersection of kids, race and opportunity. The report features the new Race for Results index, which compares how children are progressing on key milestones across racial and ethnic groups at the national and state level.
The index is based on 12 indicators that measure a child’s success in each stage of life, from birth to adulthood, in the areas of early childhood; education and early work; family supports; and neighborhood context. The report also makes four policy recommendations to help ensure that all children and their families achieve their full potential.
From the Coalition for a Livable Future's Connections Journal:
This paper by Michael Szporluk of the Portland Commission on Disability, discusses key equity concerns for persons with disabilities, a population that makes up approximately 15-20% of our region’s residents, including more than a third of seniors. The paper highlights disparities affecting persons with disabilities by examining six issue areas: housing, infrastructure, transit, education, employment, and health outcomes. It also discusses intersecting issues of race and gender.
From United for a Fair Economy:
UFE's eleventh annual MLK Day report–Healthcare for Whom?–explores the racial economic implications of one of the most important human rights issues and public policy debates of the day: healthcare. The report looks at both disparate health outcomes–driven largely by racial segregation and concentrated poverty–and the current state-by-state fights over implementing the Affordable Care Act.
The report also includes the latest data on racial disparities in education, employment, income, poverty and wealth that indicate the dream of racial equity, as so clearly articulated by Dr. King, remains unfinished.
For the first time, this MLK Day report includes an "organizers toolbox" with a series of interactive workshops organizers can use at local worker centers, union halls, church groups, and community groups to examine the causes and consequences of the racial wealth divide and move people to action.
From the website:
A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink will examine the rates of financial insecurity among American women and the children who depend on them, investigate the impact of it on our nation’s institutions and economic future, and promote modern solutions to help women strengthen their financial status.
Download the report and executive summary here.
More:
The most common shared story in our country today is the financial insecurity of American families. Today, more than one in three Americans—more than 100 million people—live in poverty or on the edge of it. Half of all Americans will spend at least a few months churning into and out of poverty during their lifetimes. This economic immobility and inequality is a systemic and pervasive problem that President Barack Obama recently described as “the defining challenge of our time.”
The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink reveals this national crisis through the eyes of women. In an era when women have solidified their position as half of the U.S. workforce and a whopping two-thirds of the primary or co-breadwinners in American families, the reality is that a third of all American women are living at or near a space we call “the brink of poverty.” We define this as less than 200 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $47,000 per year for a family of four.
Forty-two million women, and the 28 million children who depend on them, are living one single incident—a doctor’s bill, a late paycheck, or a broken-down car—away from economic ruin. Women make up nearly two-thirds of minimum-wage workers, the vast majority of whom receive no paid sick days. This is at a time when women earn most of the college and advanced degrees in this country, make most of the consumer spending decisions by far, and are more than half of the nation’s voters.
This report details three major cultural and economic changes over the past 50 years that work against women and our economy:
While women represent a majority of college graduates, they are also more likely to work in poorly paid “pink-collar” service and caregiving occupations that leave them financially insecure. That’s because even though this job sector is among the fastest-growing sectors in the United States, there is a shocking lack of wage increases and benefits in it.
The American family has permanently changed, and women head up more families on their own. More than half of the babies born to women ages 30 and younger are born to unmarried mothers, most of them white. In our poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans and 85 percent of Millennials believe that government should adapt to the reality of single-parent families and use its resources to help children and mothers succeed, regardless of family status.
For women today, a post-high school degree is a ticket into the middle class, but that education is increasingly harder to obtain. In our poll, women living on the brink said they overwhelmingly regret not making education a bigger priority.
Failure to adapt to these real transformations in American culture not only leaves millions of women and their families in jeopardy, it also deprives our economy of a huge spending stimulus from the tens of millions of women eager to have money to spend on their families and in their communities. Closing the wage gap between men and women would cut the poverty rate in half for working women and add nearly half a trillion dollars to the national economy. But it goes even deeper than that. Studies show that for children, the trauma and chronic stress of poverty are toxic and have lifelong health impacts—physical, emotional, and mental.
Today’s challenges require new solutions, so we present a combination of public, private, and personal recommendations that can help reignite the American Dream for women and their families. We have brought together the best and brightest minds and challenged them to collaborate with us to develop fresh thinking around these issues. Taken together, these ideas present a modern social architecture designed to make individuals, businesses, and government stronger, more innovative, and better tailored to the realities of today’s hardworking families.
The report details a set of public policies that, if adopted, would boost women’s potential as breadwinners: a higher minimum wage, improved access to work and income supports, and better opportunities to access medium- and high-paying jobs. Additionally, women need policies that support their breadwinning and caregiving responsibilities. An overwhelming 96 percent of single mothers in our poll say paid leave is the workplace policy that would help them most, and nearly 80 percent of Americans say the government should expand access to high-quality, affordable child care.
At the 2013 Oregon Leadership Summit, the Oregon Business Plan issued a report with the help of the Prosperity Initiative Team outlining the opportunities to reduce poverty in Oregon.
Community-Based Participatory Research uses a collaborative approach to research that equitably involves all partners in the research process and recognizes the unique strengths that each brings. This introduction outlines the approach, principles and methods of CBPR.
From Oregon's Center for Prevention and Health Promotion:
Health and education are deeply connected. The need for infrastructure--such as a school health coordinator and school health advisory councils—is often cited by researchers as a critical component to successful school health efforts. This detailed report examines the associations between Oregon student and school-level health and education data. The association between school health infrastructure and high school graduation is explored and utilized as the starting point for a Return- On-Investment analysis. The findings suggest that an investment to support school health infrastructure could provide longstanding social and economic benefits.
Janet Byrd, Neighborhood Partnerships, and Patrick Bresette, Public Works, presented “Making the Case for Health Equity,” for NWHF's Health Reform Advocacy Learning Cohort.
Thomas Aschenbrener, former Northwest Health Foundation president, was invited by Grantmakers in Health to write a commentary related to the theme of 2012 Annual Meeting “Health and Equity for All.”
The Community Guide to Preventive Services summarizes what is known about the effectiveness, economic efficiency, and feasibility of interventions to promote community health and prevent disease. The Task Force on Community Preventive Services makes recommendations for the use of various interventions based on the evidence gathered in rigorous scientific reviews of published studies.
The Prevention Institute’s report demonstrates how addressing specific community factors can create a healthier and more equitable society.
From the World Health Organization: "Social justice is a matter of life and death. It affects the way people live, their consequent chance of illness, and their risk of premature death. We watch in wonder as life expectancy and good health continue to increase in parts of the world and in alarm as they fail to improve in others."
From CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion:
This workbook is for community-based organizations, public health practitioners, and community health partners seeking to create health equity by addressing the social determinants of health.This workbook is for community-based organizations, public health practitioners, and community health partners seeking to create health equity by addressing the social determinants of health.
From the World Health Organization
Poorer people live shorter lives and are more often ill than the rich. This disparity has drawn attention to the remarkable sensitivity of health to the social environment.
This publication examines this social gradient in health, and explains how psychological and social influences affect physical health and longevity. It then looks at what is known about the most important social determinants of health today, and the role that public policy can play in shaping a social environment that is more conducive to better health.
From PolicyLink:
This report states that where you live determines how well you live, and that available resources are not always equally distributed. Communities of color and low-income communities face harmful community environments, such as poverty, toxins, or economic disinvestment, that compromise individual and community health. The framework described in this report provides a way to understand the relationship between community conditions and health, analyzes the connections among all the environmental factors that contribute to a healthy community, and identifies environmental effects on community health.
Northwest Health Foundation seeks to advance, support, and promote health in Oregon and southwest Washington.
By providing grants to initiatives, forming partnerships with health and community leaders, and advocating for policy change, we are furthering our vision of giving every person the opportunity to lead a healthy life.
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