Self sufficiency standard calculator1/14/2024 ![]() ![]() Ten percent of this total is added for miscellaneous costs. Read more about the Official Poverty Measure and how it differs from the Standardįirst, the basic costs for each family type (which vary by number and age of children, and by number of adults) are added in each county. This measure describes how much income families of various sizes and compositions need to make ends meet without public or private assistance in each county in Washington State. The Self-Sufficiency Standard is a measure of income adequacy that is based on the real cost of all basic needs, for working families: housing, child care, food, health care, transportation, and miscellaneous items, as well as the cost of taxes and the impact of tax credits. the Standard varies for each county or area in a state. Finally, while the OPM is the same throughout the entire continental U.S. Unlike the OPM’s one-size-fits-all model which varies costs just by the size of the family and number of children, the Standard costs also vary by the age of the children-for example, child care costs differ dramatically by age. The Standard is based on the costs of all basic needs of a working family-not just food, but also housing, child care, health care, transportation, miscellaneous costs, plus taxes and tax credits. The OPM calculation is based only on the cost of food-assuming that food is one-third of a family’s budget. The official poverty measure (OPM), developed half a century ago, is now methodologically out of date and no longer accurately measures the ability to provide for oneself and one’s family-at best it measures deprivation. Since many of the women (but few men) were single parents, this measure would then make clear that they needed enough to support a family, not just a single person.” “The Standard grew out of my early work on ‘the feminization of poverty’– that is that women are disproportionately bearing the burden of poverty…with welfare reform pushing some women into the workforce without sufficient training and education, I was asked by women’s advocates to devise a ‘performance’ measure that was specific to individuals. First calculated for Iowa in 1996, it experienced a major expansion with funding by the Ford Foundation in the early 2000s, and today, the Standard can be found in 41 states and the District of Columbia. It was a measure that provided realistic and detailed data on what clients individually needed to be self-sufficient. The Standard was intended initially as a performance measure for the goal of “self-sufficiency” in federal job training programs. Diana Pearce, who at that time was Director of the Women and Poverty Project at Wider Opportunities for Women. The Self-Sufficiency Standard was created in the mid-1990s by Dr.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |