Meet ALICE: How the United Way is Creating a Portrait of the Working Poor in NC
<p>The standard economic statistics are well-known to CED professionals: poverty rates, jobs created, unemployment rates. We hear them on the morning news broadcasts as they are released from the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Census Bureau. What is less common is the more complete picture of the working poor – what does the term ‘working poor’ mean? Who makes up the working poor in your county and how large is this population? The concept of the working poor has traditionally been relatively vague – an undefined group ‘out there,’ popular with politicians and poverty researchers. Then ALICEappeared.</p> <p>ALICE stands for the population that is Asset Limited, Income Constrained, and Employed, and the effort to measure the ALICE population is a project of the United Way. The ALICE population represents the core concept of the working poor — those who are employed but still cannot afford basic necessities. It is the population that makes too much to officially be in poverty (with income below the poverty line), qualify for government assistance but often make just too little to actually get by.</p> <p>It is easy to put a face to this idea – as the creators describe it, these are the folks who work hard at the grocery store, the day care, the insurance office, the police station and the school, with a steady but small income – but still with little or no savings, paying bills but maybe not all the time or on time, and in danger of everything falling apart with one failing car transmission or [...]</p>
