In the 2017 Competitive City Update, Poverty Beyond Income, the Greater Louisville Project examines the mechanisms that perpetuate generational poverty. Issues ranging from household stability to food security compound to prevent poor families and children from making achieving financial security.
The barriers that keep households in the cycle of poverty do not occur in isolation, and they cannot be addressed in isolation.
Poverty puts children at a disadvantage later in life by impacting their education, health, and quality of life. Alleviating the impacts of poverty on the 38,000 children currently growing up in poverty would unlock $200 million in economic activity each year. That would translate to an average of $9,300 per child each year.
The results of intervening in child poverty would be transformational for the lives of thousands of children and for our city as a whole.
Since the Great Recession, Louisville has reduced its child poverty rate by 25%, more than almost any of its peer cities. Now is the time to build on this momentum to continue making Louisville an equitable and competitive city.
Because the barriers that sustain generational poverty are interconnected, reducing the impact of poverty on children will require coordinated interventions across the deep drivers of change.
Acknowledgments
The Greater Louisville Project is organized by The Community Foundation of Louisville and supported by a consortium of philanthropic foundations including James Graham Brown Foundation, Brown-Forman, The C.E. & S. Foundation, Gheens Foundation, Humana Foundation, The JP Morgan Chase Foundation, Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence, Lift-A-Life Foundation, Owsley Brown II Family Funds, and the Stephen Reily and Emily Bingham Fund.
You can view the report appendix here.
To request copies of the report email glp@greaterlouisvilleproject.org.
For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.
Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).
Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.
