Social Services
Upon reading that advocates were–surprise surprise–lamenting that our safety net wasn’t big enough, a paragraph from the 19th century Irish writer/storyteller William Carleton came to mind. The story is the humorous tale, “Phil Purcell, the Pig-driver” and, as Carleton tells it, the events occurred in a time “unaccompanied by the improvements of poverty, sickness, and…
Writes Michael Morse at Rescuing Providence: “I know-lets hook up, you get pregnant, I’ll show up when it’s convenient for me, maybe once a week, maybe twice, maybe not at all, you can be my baby momma, I’ll be the baby daddy, we’ll get RITE care for the baby, and you until the baby is…
This week’s Political Scene column in the Projo contains this interesting note at the bottom…The Poverty Institute at Rhode Island College, a vocal player in the state budget debate, is ending its formal relationship with the public college. The organization announced that this fall, 10 years after its inception within the college’s School of Social…
There is now a set of state-by-state listings that Rhode Island has placed near the top of. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the Federal Government’s Department of Health and Human Services (as reported in the New York Times), Rhode Island is…#1 in the percentage of the population using illicit…
There’s a familiar face on the front page of the Providence Journal today: From the beginning, the relationship between William Felkner and the Rhode Island College School of Social Work has sounded like the screech of chalk on a blackboard. … Felkner has filed a lawsuit against Rhode Island College that revives arguments from conservatives…
I’ve received several e-mails about possible distortions that can arise from plotting a true continuous variable (the relative poverty rate) versus an ordinal rank, and if it’s possible to re-plot the data against the data used to create the ranks. Of concern is that ranks can have different meanings at different points on a scale;…
With all indicators showing the Rhode Island economy tanking at the state level, as well as national and international-level factors like the banking crisis and energy prices squeezing Rhode Island families, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that the Federal Government says that the overall poverty situation in Rhode Island improved during…
The website of Crossroads, Providence, describes it as “a national leader in providing a continuum of care to the homeless”. This post is in no way a criticism of its staff, who are undoubtedly dedicated and work very hard, or of those residents who find themselves in genuine straits. On his blog Rescuing Providence, in…
The ProJo reports: Thousands of poor Rhode Islanders have received cash welfare benefits for longer than five years, the time limit adopted by state leaders during the sweeping welfare changes of a decade ago intended to push poor families into the work force. Nearly half of the state’s 10,755 families receiving cash assistance last year…
Governor Carcieri said, “When I look at our rolls of people receiving ‘family-independence’ [benefits] whether it be RIte Care, whatever, the vast majority of these are women with children and they are not married and this is not a good situation.” To this, Kate Brewster of the RI Poverty Institute responded, “I don’t think anyone…
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