Dubuque reformers share anti-poverty roadmap with QC leaders

Quad Citians eager to learn more about Dubuque’s innovative plan to address, prevent and reduce poverty got a primer for finding their own Pathways to Prosperity from the leaders of Iowa’s oldest city on Thursday, April 27. Dubuque Mayor Brad Cavanagh and key staff members from the Mississippi riverfront city of 60,000, located north of the Quad Cities, headlined Project NOW’s daylong 2023 Rooting out Poverty Conference at the Rock Island Holiday Inn.  Project NOW Executive Director Dwight Ford invited the Dubuque team to the Quad Cities region to talk to local leaders as his agency explores how to create a regional anti-poverty plan here. The Rev. Ford said that when he first heard about the Dubuque project, he contacted leaders there who quickly welcomed him for a lengthy visit. “I had been wanting to take a look and have a conversation since my arrival back to the Quad Cities” about the “local reality of a poverty plan,” Rev. Ford told the crowd. The Dubuque leaders not only welcomed him to town and generously shared information about their process and progress, he said they agreed to lead the conference panel to a receptive and engaged crowd. Those community, government and nonprofit leaders also cheered some of the effective homegrown poverty-fighting Quad Cities programs the event also highlighted. They included the Quad Cities Eviction Coalition, which kept Quad Citians in their homes post-pandemic, the Augustana College Prison Education Program and Black Hawk College’s Highway Construction Careers Training Program (HCCTP). The conference’s Dubuque visitors clearly fed off the energy from the crowd of more than 250 Quad Citians who packed a pair of conference rooms for the morning sessions. “I hope you all feel it,” Mr. Cavanagh said. He added:  “We’re excited to be here and have these difficult discussions with each other. And I can tell that there's just a real hunger for you here to really move these initiatives forward and celebrate the things you’re doing well and really take some really strong swings at some of these other challenges that are in front of us.” Dubuque’s effort to create a poverty battle plan really began in the mid-2010s, the mayor said, when city leaders became alarmed about what was happening to the city’s poverty rate. The Dubuque City Council at the time began working with a consultant to dig into the numbers to identify where poverty is and how to attack it. The results “weren’t entirely surprising,” Mr. Cavanagh said, “but they were alarming.” Dubuque discovered that poverty was concentrated in the downtown area of the city, which is cut in half by a river bluff. Researchers also discovered that two Census tracts in the north end of that area were “where almost all of the people who are experiencing poverty live.”  When broken down, it also was clear that poverty in Dubuque is not only disproportionate by race, he said, it is “wildly out of whack.” When it was broken down demographically, city leaders found that 56% of its African American residents lived below the poverty line – more than twice the national average; more than 22% of LatinX residents live below the poverty line; while 13% of white Dubuque residents live below that level, also above the national average of 10.9%. Armed with those figures, in 2018 the city council launched its Equitable Poverty Prevention Plan to reduce, alleviate and prevent poverty, among its six top priorities.  Out of that effort, came the city’s pioneering new Office of Shared Prosperity & Neighborhood Support. Since its inception Mr. Cavanagh has been busy traveling around the country to talk about the process. The department’s job, he said, is to serve as the “backbone organization” for creation of a program to alleviate poverty in the community.  “We needed a hub that was going to be able to coordinate all our efforts and that’s really what the city was trying to take a role in doing,” he said. Through that office’s Community Engagement Coordinator Temwa Phiri the city connects with residents, neighborhoods and other organizations to attack poverty where it lives. Mr. Phiri also acts as a bridge between the low-income areas and other neighborhoods to help pull the city together. Another early building block for planners and reforms was to dial down and determine what poverty in the city looks like. Staff quickly discovered, Dubuque data analyst Bryan Moose said, that government measures of poverty – particularly in measuring what is considered a “livable wage” – were severely outdated. For example, the federal poverty level, which was created 60 years ago, sets poverty for an individual at $14,000 and for a family of four at $30,000. “So as soon as you’re above that measurement, you’re not being counted as a person who’s in poverty,” he said. Since those numbers are impossibly low, staff began searching for more realistic measures.  As a result, he said, “our threshold is $25,299 for a single adult. And there’s a huge gap there. “ It’s worse for that family of four with one adult working, which Dubuque determined should be set at $63,000. And if both parents’ work at $78,000 to make up for some of the high cost of childcare. Under the old system, Mr. Moose said “People are falling between the cracks,” yet they’re working hard at part-time jobs to support their families. Dubuque leaders said the city’s living wage study should be just the beginning. They urged the Quad Cities crowd to find ways to make more realistic measures – for example, Dubuque’s calculations – become the universal benchmark for program creation and eligibility.

Both Mr. Moore and Anderson Sainci, director of Dubuque’s Office of Shared Prosperity & Neighborhood Support, also urged Quad Citians to make data a driver of a poverty fighting plan they might create. “If you don't have the data how do you know if you’re moving the needle?” Mr. Sainci said. Outreach also is critical particularly among the populations planners seek to help. “Facilitate conversations with friends, partners,” he said. Talk to them about the data to find out what’s working and needs to be done differently. In addition, Mr. Sainci said “How do we make sure we’re connecting with new people?” The latter is especially important. “We were hired to change the system, so in order to do that sometimes you need new people at the table with shared powers and new ideas because you all know that those who are closest to the problem have the solution,” he said. For example, Mr. Phiri meets with neighborhood groups once a month and works to help empower people to change the system. Once empowered, Mr. Sainci said, “It’s OK to step aside and let others help lead our community.”  Consider, for example, a neighborhood’s desire to attack a trash problem. Neighbors organize the pickup and the city funds a barbecue to celebrate that day. As an added bonus, the money for the catering also goes to homegrown minority businesses. Mr. Phiri also works to engage community members with its local government to give them the power needed to make the changes that impact them. Dubuque’s City Life program, he said, is an opportunity to engage with residents and learn how the city functions and how to get involved in boards and commissions. Through that effort he said residents can “be the change they want to see.” Is it working? Under Mr. Phiri’s leadership, City Life membership has grown 591% since Mr. Phiri’s arrival.  The morning after Thursday's conference, Rev. Ford told the QCBJ that after 55 years, Project NOW remains determined to eliminate the causes of poverty and to alleviate the negative conditions which it creates in communities. He added: "We have great people and organizations doing noble work, but we lack coordination across municipalities and agreed upon and established benchmarks which can be measured through data collection. The effort must be big. It must be inclusive. It must be courageous! We need a critical mass because the state of poverty in Quad Cities is nothing short of critical. It’s going to take enough of us to become concerned about improving life for all of us! Poverty must go!"