Progress Illinois

The urban agriculture movement received quite a boost today with the news that Will Allen -- the founder of Milwaukee-based Growing Power -- has been awarded the prestigious the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant." Distributed over five years, the grant comes with no strings attached or reporting obligations, meaning Allen gets free reign to expand his innovative farming programs:

Will Allen started a farm in a city, hired teenagers to tend the crops and now distributes the produce to some of the poorest people and priciest restaurants in Chicago and Milwaukee.

For his inventive work in local, urban agriculture, the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation dubbed Allen a genius, awarding him $500,000 to use however he wishes through its prestigious fellowship program.

For more on the burgeoning urban farming scene in Chicago, check out our feature "A Growing Movement."

New census bureau data, released today, shows that there were 37.3 million people living in poverty in 2007. That's six times the population of Arizona, presidential nominee John McCain's home state. As such, you'd think the Republican would have a plan to fight poverty, right? Not quite. Think Progress' Wonk Room has the details:

Visitors to JohnMcCain.com can learn where the Republican nominee stands on the Second Amendment, “liberal judicial activists” — even the space program. While John McCain “understands the importance of investing in key industries such as space,” he apparently does not understand the importance of helping the 37.3 million Americans living in poverty right here on Planet Earth.

You can check out Barack Obama's poverty platform here.

(H/T Matt Yglesias)

Good news is tough to come by in Springfield these days, but on Friday the governor and General Assembly made a valuable contribution to the fight against poverty:

Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed legislation Friday that creates a panel to study poverty in Illinois and make recommendations on how to eradicate it.

The Commission on the Elimination of Poverty will be tasked with developing a plan to address and reduce extreme poverty in Illinois by 50 percent or more by 2015, according to a news release from the governor's office.

The commission will focus on eight areas, including housing, food and nutrition, health care, education, transportation, wages and child care. State Rep. Robert Pritchard (R-Hinckley) tells the DeKalb Daily Chronicle that the members will determine whether programs the state currently offers are working and should develop new ones if those strategies aren't getting good results. 

The Heartland Alliance's Doug Schenkelberg adds that it's an "important victory."  As we noted back in April, a study by the Alliance found that "poverty increased in 74 of Illinois' 102 counties" between 2000 and 2006 and now "afflicts more than 1.5 million Illinoisans."

For more on this issue, read John Bouman's recent Progress Illinois column.

Declining poverty rates and nationwide efforts to decentralize poverty caused the urban poor population to fall by 27 percent during the 1990s. Unfortunately, the economic downturn of the Bush years has reversed those trends.

According to a comprehensive new study by the Brookings Institution's Alan Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone, the number of tax filers nationwide living in areas with high rates of working poverty jumped by 40 percent between tax years 1999 and 2005. During the same period, 34 large metropolitan areas experienced increased rates of concentrated working poverty (calculated by the share of Earned Income Tax Credit filers in communities with a high percentage of working poor). By contrast, 24 areas showed declines.

Cities in the Midwest and Northeast are experiencing the highest increases:

Detroit and its suburbs in 2005 had the highest concentrated working poverty rate in the Midwest: 27.5 percent, followed by St. Louis (21.6 percent), Cleveland (21.5 percent) and Chicago—plus its Illinois and Northwest Indiana suburbs—at 17.9 percent. The highest rate in the Northeast was the Philadelphia metropolitan area, at 25.5 percent.

As the landscape in Chicago demonstrates, this problem isn't limited to the inner city.

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Next Thursday, America's federal minimum wage will jump 70 cents to a total of $6.85 per hour. This boost is encouraging, especially after the wage remained at $5.15 for over nine years before the Democratic Congress initiated a raise in late 2006. But it's still well below what many consider a living wage.

According to the Living Wage Calculator, a Chicago adult working full-time as the sole provider of one child would need to earn $12.51 per hour to care for the family adequately. And two new reports released this week by the Government Accountability Office show that many minimum-wage earners have difficulty even obtaining all they are owed:

The Government Accountability Office sharply criticizes the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department in two reports to be issued on Tuesday, saying it mishandled many overtime and minimum-wage complaints and delayed investigating hundreds of cases for a year or more.

The G.A.O. also criticizes the division for greatly reducing the number of enforcement actions it takes each year and for not focusing on the low-wage industries where, one report said, it is most likely to find violations. [...]

The G.A.O., which will release its reports at a hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee, also faulted the wage division for reducing the number of enforcement actions it pursues each year to 29,584 in the 2007 fiscal year, down 37 percent from 46,758 10 years earlier.

The House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing Tuesday on the problem of wage theft. Testifying was Kim Bobo, the executive director of Chicago's Interfaith Worker Justice, an organization that mobilizes religious communities to improve wages, benefits, and working conditions for low-wage workers. Bobo, whose book on wage theft is set to be published this fall, says two million workers are paid less than the minimum wage, three million are mis-classified as independent contractors instead of employees, and millions more are illegally denied overtime pay. You can watch her testimony here.

(H/T TPMCafe)

Hunger is not only a growing problem in Chicago. In an editorial today, the Daily Herald writes that some suburbanites are struggling to put food on the table too, and food pantries that play a crucial role for strapped families aren't receiving the necessary support:

The pantries, in turn, can find it very difficult to keep up with the demand. Requests for food from area pantries is up about 20 percent this year - at a time when there is less food on the shelves to begin with. Donations from traditional sources, such as goods from school food drives, tend to come in at a lower volume in the summer months. But hundreds - in some cases thousands - of people are still coming in for help in feeding their families.

While pantries wait for some federal assistance in the form of Sen. Dick Durbin's Hunger Free Communities Act, donations are always welcome. The Herald's "Giving Garden" program is a good place to start:

The Daily Herald's Giving Garden program also provides food to the hungry by encouraging gardeners to drop off fresh produce at one of the participating food pantries and agencies. In the eight years the program has been in existence, suburban gardeners have donated tens of thousands of pounds of produce to area pantries. To inquire about donating to the Giving Garden, e-mail us at givinggarden@dailyherald.com.

(H/T Prairie State Blue)