A study by the United Way finds nearly 1 in 3 Florida households still cannot afford basic housing, food, transportation and health care.
Here to go In Depth on this topic is Rob Rains, who is the President of the United Way Brevard County. We're also joined by Ashley Blasewitz, Vice President of Marketing and Communications for United Way. Thank you very much both for joining us.
First of all, it was the ALICE report. So what does it stand for Rob and what is the ALICE report?
Jackie thanks for asking, and thanks for having us here. ALICE is an acronym that stands for asset limited income constrained employed. And it's a report that tries to put a face on the working poor throughout Florida. Actually it was a study conducted by Rutgers University. They did it in New Jersey. We found the results interesting, the data interesting and commissioned it in Florida and five other states as well. So what it does is it builds on the federal poverty level. That is an old statistic that was created in 1965. It hasn't been updated since 1974. And what the ALICE report does is it builds a survival budget looking at housing and wages and prices, town by town, county by county. And it paints a picture of what it takes to earn a living, to earn enough money to survive just with the basics in each county. And so you'll see the poverty statistics. So in Brevard, our poverty rate is only 13%, but when you add that ALICE population to get to that survival budget it's 27%. So between ALICE and poverty, 40% of the citizens in Brevard County are in that population.
Ashley, that's pretty startling that 1 in 3 Florida households can't afford basic food and things like that. Now that you have the report, what happens now?
Really what we want to do with this is three things. First, increase awareness about this population and its needs. As Rob mentioned, the federal poverty rate is not an accurate measure of need in our community anymore. This data goes to show that far more people living above the poverty level are in need of help. So awareness is one thing. The second is access. Improving access to our programs and services that are already available in the community to this population. And third is advocacy. Making sure that all of the sectors of our community, policymakers, the business community, non-profit sector we all come together to emphasize ALICE's needs and so we can grow as a community together.
I know you have a campaign going on. What do you hope to accomplish with the campaign to sort of combat these horrible statistics?
Well our campaigns in all of the different counties support a safety net of services. And we're also working to move upstream and close the front door on some of those poverty issues by focusing on education, income and health. But I think the ALICE report will help put a face on that population. These are folks that help in service every day. They are the folks that work in retail stores that do our hair, repair our cars. And they themselves are so often just one crisis or emergency away from being in that poverty situation. So we want to create programs, we want to build on what we have now to focus and as Ashley said awareness, access and advocacy.