The Paid Leave Podcast

The United Way Reports a Jump in Connecticut Residents Struggling to Make Ends Meet.

• The Connecticut Paid Leave Authority • Season 3 • Episode 29

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Connecticut is one of the wealthiest states, but nearly half a million people don’t know where their next meal is coming from. More than 84 thousand children live in poverty in Connecticut and 122 thousand in near poverty. About 35 percent of Connecticut households are burdened by housing costs, compared to about 32 percent nationally.

The United Way of Connecticut released its ALICE Report for 2024 in October, showing that 13% more state residents, or an additional 65,000 households, are struggling to make ends meet despite being employed and not earning enough to cover the basic cost of living. ALICE is an acronym for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, and it’s a statewide problem.

Lisa Tepper Bates, President & CEO of the United Way of Connecticut, leads the organization’s staff of 360 as a nonprofit contractor to seven Connecticut state government agencies. She says more and more residents are living paycheck to paycheck without any emergency funds saved. Lisa said the most important thing we can do us support a fully refundable, permanent child tax credit for families with kids who have that additional set of costs for raising children. Lisa says the United Way of CT is so pleased that Connecticut Paid Leave is available, because it has been an incredible benefit to the ALICE households. 

To get in touch with the United Way of CT Please go to CTunitedway.org.
For services or help dial 2-1-1.

For information or to apply for benefits go to ctpaidleave.org.

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Nancy Barrow:

Hello Connecticut, and welcome to The Paid Leave Podcast. The title basically says it all. I'm Nancy Barrow, and I will be delving into this new state program and how it can help you and your family. This podcast will give you information you should know about Connecticut Paid Leave and maybe just a little bit more. Connecticut Paid Leave brings peace of mind to your home, family and workplace. Welcome to The Paid Leave Podcast. Connecticut is one of the wealthiest states, but nearly half a million people don't know where their next meal is coming from. One in eight residents is struggling with food insecurity and about 35% of Connecticut households are burdened by housing costs, compared to about 32% nationally. The United Way of Connecticut released its latest Alice report in October showing that 13% more state residents, or an additional 65,000 households, are struggling to make ends meet despite being employed and not earning enough to cover the basic cost of living. ALICE is an acronym for asset limited, income constrained, employed, and it's a statewide problem. Lisa Tepper Bates, President and CEO of United Way of Connecticut, leads the organization, staff of 360 as a non profit contractor to seven Connecticut state government agencies, and they provide the state's 211, Health and Human Services contact center, the 988, national suicide prevention line, crisis support, administering the state of Connecticut child care subsidy, the CARE for Kids and offering associated additional services to support Connecticut residents in need. Lisa also provides coordination of the state's 14 local United Ways, and brings more than 25 years of experience working in us, diplomacy, public policy, state and nonprofit leadership to her role at United Way. Lisa holds degrees from Georgetown University and Yale School of Management. She's a board member of the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority and the Stonington board of police commissioners, and she's worked since 2009 in leadership roles on efforts to end homelessness in Connecticut. Lisa, welcome to The Paid Leave Podcast.

Lisa Tepper Bates:

Nancy, thank you very much for having me today.

Nancy Barrow:

Well, I don't know how you can fit anything else in with what you're doing. You are a busy woman!

Lisa Tepper Bates:

And you know it's a privilege. The the work that we engage in as United Way of Connecticut is so important to so many people in Connecticut who need the resources, who need the support that we can help connect them to. So you're right. It's a busy time. There's a lot of need, but it's a privilege and an honor to work with our great staff every day

Nancy Barrow:

Well, I was at the event when you revealed the on this work. ALICE report. It was a wonderful event and really well attended. A lot of people were there standing room only. What was surprising to you about the ALICE report?

Lisa Tepper Bates:

Well, I would say maybe not surprising but disappointing is the fact that our ALICE population in the state those households who are barely making ends meet, paycheck to paycheck, or in fact, falling behind that that number of households grew yet again, that to us, is a disappointment. We would love to see that curve turn the other direction. But as you noted in your introduction, between our 2021 and 2022 data, we actually saw an increase of 65,000 households struggling to make ends meet in our state. So I wish I could say it was a surprise, but indeed it was not as not a surprise, but disappointing.

Nancy Barrow:

Well, let's talk about ALICE Who is ALICE? Is it a family? Is it a person? Can you paint a picture for people who don't know what ALICE is and and are interested in maybe it's the first time they ever heard about ALICE.

Lisa Tepper Bates:

Sure, ALICE, which, as you noted, stands for asset, limited, income, constrained, employed. That's the population in our state of people who may be single and may be families with children who are working as hard as they can at the jobs available to them, and still not earning enough to pay for the cost of basics. That's really who ALICE is. And the types of jobs we're talking about are really the very backbone of our economy. We're talking about people who drive the school bus that takes our kids to school, or the child care worker who who is caring for our toddler all day while we're at work, or for the cashier at, you know, at the pharmacy who checks us out. These jobs are necessary in our economy, necessary to our everyday lives, and yet the people doing that work are barely making it, or indeed are falling behind. And when we say falling behind, what does that mean? It means they're not able to keep up with their rent. They are facing past due utility bills, even as we approach the coldest part of the year, or indeed, what we're seeing is that consumer use of credit is going up and Nancy unfortunately, that doesn't mean that people are buying durable goods. We know that what it means is that people are putting things like groceries, gasoline for their car, on their credit card. That's That's not a good sign, and it is, in fact, a sign of exactly what the Alice report tells us, that too many people in our state, 39% are simply not earning enough to make ends meet on a regular basis.

Nancy Barrow:

That's like four out of 10 people.

Lisa Tepper Bates:

It's a bigger number than most people would think. And part of the reason for that is that so many Americans think that the federal poverty line tells you who is struggling and who is not. Most lay people would think that if you're above the federal poverty line, you must be making enough to make ends meet. That would be a logical assumption. But in fact, the federal poverty line is a terrible way to think about what it takes to make ends meet. It's an artificial threshold, and this year, just as a contrast in 2024 the federal poverty line for a family of four was $31,000. Now at that rate, most people in Connecticut would tell you that you can barely afford your housing costs.

Nancy Barrow:

Right.

Lisa Tepper Bates:

In fact, in many parts of the state, at$31,000 for the year you couldn't afford your housing costs, let alone pay for food, pay for utilities, pay for transportation. So the federal poverty line is not helpful as a way to think about who is struggling and who isn't, and that's where Alice helps to fill that gap. But what Alice tells us is that, in contrast to the national federal poverty line statistics, which would tell you that about 13% of our nation are struggling, our Alice statistics will tell you that fully 40% of people in America, 39% in Connecticut are struggling every day just to meet the costs of basics. So that's an important takeaway, and when people see our data, it's a little bit of a shock to them, because they've been thinking that it's about 13% of our nation who struggle, and when we say no, in Connecticut, it's 39% across the nation, it's 40% of people that can be a little bit of a shock. But then Nancy, what we can say is that it's not just our Alice data that reflects this as I think you probably know, the Federal Reserve has done research to see who has emergency savings and who doesn't, and they have consistently found that something like 40% of Americans don't have $400 available to them in a crisis. So that external data from other types of research really comes to the same set of conclusions that the Alice research points us toward, that about 40% of our nation on any given day is struggling just to make ends meet and not able to get ahead.

Nancy Barrow:

I think that is really daunting, right? So if you have a car, say you have transportation, and the car breaks down, and it costs you$500 and if you don't have 400 extra dollars for that, you're in big trouble. And then the credit cards are a really big problem. There's so much credit card debt in America right now and in our state.

Lisa Tepper Bates:

That's right, Nancy, it's, and it's, it's, it's terribly tragic, especially on those types of emergencies, like a car breaking down, how fast a family unravels and Nancy, I ran a family shelter for families facing homelessness, and I can tell you that that was exactly the story. People would come to me and say my car broke down. I couldn't get to work. I lost my job, then I couldn't pay the rent, and now here I am with my two kids with no place to live, having run through all my savings and having to rebuild from zero.

Nancy Barrow:

And maybe this is too big a question to ask, but what can we do to help Alice families? I mean it, and they are our neighbors, right? Our co worker, someone at church like Right? So it's it could be your neighbor and you.Don't know of that, but what can we do to help?

Lisa Tepper Bates:

Well, and thank you, because Nancy, that's exactly the right question. And there, there are actually proven, practical measures that we can take as a nation, that we can take as a state, to better support these families. The the most important we believe opportunity in Connecticut is to create in our state a fully refundable, permanent child tax credit for families with kids who have that additional set of costs for raising children. You may recall that during the pandemic at the federal level, when the federal government greatly increased the Child Tax Credit, we saw child poverty in America drop like never before. Because that's really the key thing for people who are facing the high costs of basics, especially for Children. The answer to that is more resources. So putting that child tax credit in the hands of families with kids is a proven practical way to address this, and so we are advocating, together with a host of partners in the state for a $600 per child tax credit.That, again, would be permanent and would be fully refundable. And what does that mean? Fully refundable Nancy means that if you potentially make so little money that you don't have much of a tax burden that you would, in fact, get that money back from state government, rather than having it count against your taxes. If you don't have taxes, that doesn't help you. So if you do have a tax burden, then that$600 would would count against your tax burden owed to the state. And if you don't, you would have that $600 to help you support those kids. So that's what we are advocating for and again, this is a pretty simple proposition. It is to put more resources in the hands of parents who are struggling to buy diapers, to afford the cost of childcare, to afford after school programs for older kids, so that they're occupied while their parents are at work. And what we have also seen is that there's a terrific return on this investment. These are families who, when they have that money, they're going to put it to work in their community, you know, again, for an after school program, or, you know, to buy shoes, to buy sports equipment for an after school program, to pay for child care in their community, so there's a terrific return on that investment in terms of creating economic activity right here in Connecticut. So that's a good part of the story.

Nancy Barrow:

And is this what you're focusing on with the legislative session that starts in just a couple of months? Do you have any bills? Is this a bill that you're trying to pass?

Lisa Tepper Bates:

There have been bills, and we hope that there will be a bill. So right now, we don't, we don't have a bill number just yet, but once the session starts, we will be trying to do exactly that, to pass a bill in the legislature to create a permanent Child Tax Credit.

Nancy Barrow:

Yeah, it makes sense that if that can be used, you know, to help these families, I mean, that are struggling just to make ends meet, and it's paycheck to paycheck. I think a lot of people live more like that than we realize, and I think that's why this ALICE report was so astonishing, really.

Lisa Tepper Bates:

Yeah, I think you're right. And as you said, it could be your neighbor. It's almost certainly the woman or the man who drives your kids to school on the bus. It's very likely the person who serves your coffee at the place where you stop to pick it up in the morning. A child tax credit would put that the money in their pocket to replace the tires on the car before it's a crisis to pay for the heating oil they need for their home to help pay the rent over the winter while they pay the high cost of home heating. So we know that this is a solution that works, and we're very hopeful that during this upcoming session, our elected leaders will see the wisdom and support the creation of a permanent child tax credit in our state.

Nancy Barrow:

I saw that you had a simulation that allows someone to kind of step into the shoes of an ALICE family. Why did you create that?

Lisa Tepper Bates:

That's a great question, and the reason we created it was to help people who may not actually face this type of financial situation themselves to understand what it's like to walk in the shoes of an ALICE family, an ALICE mom or dad, and we found it to be very effective if.you are lucky enough that you've not had to worry about paying your mortgage or paying your rent, that you make enough that every month, even if it's a little bit tight, you know that you'll be able to pay your bills. You may not have had to think about how tough it would be to decide between buying the food that you want your family to eat and paying for the cell phone bill that you have to have as part of your job. Or between paying the electricity and paying the rent. And those are the kinds of decisions that in the ALICE simulation, you end up having to make, because the simulation says, here's how much money you have right now. Here are the bills you've got to pay. And then, oh, wait Now, it turns out that you blew out a tire, and you need two new tires.Where is that money going to come from? And you have to sit in that in that place with the theoretical Alice in the simulation, and think about, how do I make this math work, because that's really what it is. At the end of the day, Nancy, it's a math problem. Too many people in our state are not earning enough money. When you look at the high costs of what they have to pay for, starting with housing and child care, continuing to our very high cost of utilities. We have a great quality of living in many ways in Connecticut, and we appreciate that, and we appreciate so much about our great state. But we also have to acknowledge that Connecticut is consistently one of the most expensive states in the nation for housing, for child care and for utilities.

Nancy Barrow:

How do family friendly programs like Connecticut Paid Leave help the ALICE families?

Lisa Tepper Bates:

Connecticut Paid Leave is an absolute game changer for ALICE families, because if we can, you know, remember, before paid leave existed, so many people if they had some type of terrible illness of a family member, or a death, or maybe there was a complication in a pregnancy and you needed to be on bed rest. They had very little in the way of options to support them during that time. If they ran out of whatever leave benefit they might have had with their employer, used all their paid time off. What then? Yeah, and for Alice families, again, who have very little, if anything, in the way of savings, because they are living paycheck to paycheck, that's a terrible crisis. And so with with paid leave, allowing, as it does, for 12 weeks a year, if needed for workers to be out and to be able to bring home as much as $941 week. That's the 2024, weekly maximum for a lot of Alice workers that will fill in most of those foregone earnings. And that's a tremendous benefit when you are already dealing with the stress of losing a loved one, or battling with your own illness or the illness of a loved one, to know that you can pay the rent, you will have the money to make the utilities. That's an enormous stress reliever for families at these these very vulnerable moments in life. So, you know, we are so pleased that Connecticut Paid Leave is is available. It was a an incredible benefit to our ALICE households.

Nancy Barrow:

Well, thank you for saying that. That was lovely. And one of the things I love about Connecticut Paid Leave is its flexibility, right? So your length of leave, it doesn't have to be, you know, the 12 weeks all at once. It can be intermittent leave, like if you have to go to a doctor's appointment and you don't get paid for that hour or two that you're going, you can get income replacement and also reduced schedule at work. Say you have to take a half day because your child is is getting mental health taken care of. You know, these things and the flexibility, I think, are wonderful about Connecticut Paid Leave.

Lisa Tepper Bates:

Oh, for sure, for sure. And so, so, so very humane. This is how I think most of us think about our state. We think about Connecticut as a place where, you know, we care about other residents. We're a small state and a small population, and I think that that's the way we think about ourselves as a state, that we do care about the residents of Connecticut, and it's very important to remember that they, all of them like us, have families face from time to time, a crisis, and to have that support in place, I think, is consistent with the way we think about who we are as Connecticut residents, that we're able to offer that to the members of our workforce.

Nancy Barrow:

Right and being so family friendly like you know, like United Way, like Connecticut Paid Leave and a lot of other services. But tell me a little bit about 2-1-1.. Who uses this number, and what services can you offer someone who calls 2-1-1 is this also for Alice families?

Lisa Tepper Bates:

Yes, and absolutely. So 2-1-1 is our state helpline for anyone who is in need of some type of support or assistance, whether it's help to pay the utilities or information about where to find a mental health support group or grief counseling, or perhaps just where to find the right fit for a child who needs childcare through two on one, we can provide all of that type of assistance, and we can provide it in two ways. We have contact specialists who are available to have a conver.sation over the phone and at 211ct.org. Our entire database of 4000 community providers and 40,000 collective programs that they offer to be of help to the residents of Connecticut, all of that is available at 211ct.org, and it is the most comprehensive database in our state, the only truly comprehensive, consistently updated database of community resources to help people whatever it may be that they need help with.

Nancy Barrow:

And I know you also help domestic violence situations. Are you finding that people are needing more assistance in that?

Lisa Tepper Bates:

Yeah, you know, we're so proud to partner with our sister agency, the CCADV the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which is the coalition of all of the domestic violence shelters. So we work together certainly, and we make sure that when there is someone who calls and if they're in need of those specialized services, we will always make sure to connect them urgently to CCADV, and to our state's network of domestic violence shelters and specialized providers, but we're also happy to offer always the resources that we have at our disposal. When you talk about levels of domestic violence we saw some terrible increases in domestic violence, not just in Connecticut, but across the country during the pandemic, which was, again, one of the associated tragedies of the pandemic. And since then, some of those rates have stabilized, but we always have to be on the lookout for anything that can be an additional source of stress that leads to more domestic violence. And what we know is that when a household is under financial stress, that that has implications, and one of those implications can certainly be domestic violence.

Nancy Barrow:

Yeah, we we have a domestic violence policy as well. We give 12 days of income replacement so they can find housing if they need it or medical attention or mental health services, or if they have to go to court, like, like civil or criminal. But we've also added, starting in October, we've also added sexual assault to that, as well sexual assault victims. So I'm really proud that that has been added to our domestic violence policy and and I think, along with you, we're giving great coverage for people who really need it.

Lisa Tepper Bates:

And that's so important. So we're grateful to you and grateful to ConnecticutPaid Leave for that extra support.

Nancy Barrow:

Yeah, what would you like people to take away from this podcast with you Lisa?

Lisa Tepper Bates:

Well, my hope is, as hard as it can be to get your mind around, we hope that people will understand that when we think about who is struggling, it isn't that 12 or 13% that the federal poverty line would indicate. It really is 39% of people in Connecticut and 40% across the nation, or as you said, four out of 10 who are struggling every day just to make sure that they can put food on the table, keep a roof over their their head and their children's and keep the car running. We think that it's important that people have an understanding of that, and then I hope they take away the fact that there are concrete steps we can take that are within our reach to help folks who are struggling with the high cost of living, starting with a child tax credit. I think it's pretty simple to get your mind around the fact that people who are raising children in particular, really need that support. We know that the vast majority of voters in Connecticut understand this, and that's good news, whether they have children or not. More than 75% of Connecticut voters polled will tell you that they support a child tax credit. It just makes sense, so it's a really important place to start, and it can make all the difference, you know, to a single mother struggling to hold on to a job who now needs some type of expensive car repair, to have$600 per child available to her. That can be life changing.

Nancy Barrow:

Yeah, exactly. Any last thoughts as we head into the holidays and a brand new year?

Lisa Tepper Bates:

I would ask that, you know, if you do have the ability to think about a neighbor and do something to give now more than ever, every dollar counts, and wherever your heart might lead you, giving to a domestic violence shelter, giving to a local food pantry, volunteering a little bit of your time, giving to a United Way in your community. We would like to ask people just to remember that it's so important, and these are community nonprofits who are providing critical services every day to people in need. So So please think about that as we head into the holidays. There's a lot of good causes inour state. Give to any one of them that speaks to your heart.

Nancy Barrow:

Lisa Tepper, Bates, President and CEO of the United Way of Connecticut. Thank you so much for being on The Paid Leave Podcast, and thank you for all this wonderful information.

Lisa Tepper Bates:

Well, thank you, and again, our gratitude to our partners at Connecticut Paid Leave for helping us make sure that when someone's out due to a tragedy or an illness, they have that support.

Nancy Barrow:

To find out more about United Way of Connecticut, go to CTunitedway.org. If you need services, please dial 211 and for more information, or to apply for benefits, please go to ctpaidleave.org. This has been another edition of The Paid Leave Podcast. Please like and subscribe so you'll be notified about new podcasts that become available. Connecticut Paid Leave is a public act with a personal purpose. I'm Nancy Barrow, and thanks for listening.

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