Funding Rural | Episode #12 | Season 3: Luke Shaefer, PhD “Living in Complexities”
Luke Shaefer, PhD is one of the nation’s foremost scholars of poverty and social welfare policy. He is a professor at the University of Michigan and is the inaugural director of Poverty Solutions, an interdisciplinary initiative that partners with communities and policymakers to find novel ways to alleviate poverty. In 2015, he co-authored the book, “$2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America”, which was named one of the 100 Notable Books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. In Flint, Michigan, Luke helped launch RX Kids, the nation’s first citywide cash prescription program designed to help ease the financial journey into parenthood.
“What’s the acute economic crisis? It’s childbirth. It’s pregnancy.” —Luke Shaefer, PhD
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About Luke Shaefer, PhD
H. Luke Shaefer, PhD is the Kohn Professor of Social Policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. At U-M, he also directs Poverty Solutions, a presidential initiative that partners with communities and policymakers to find new ways to prevent and alleviate poverty. His co-authored book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2015 by the New York Times. His co-authored book, The Injustice of Place, has been featured on MSNBC, The Atlantic, and TIME, among other outlets. He is the co-founder of Rx Kids, the nation’s first citywide maternal and infant health cash prescription program that launched in Flint, Michigan in January 2024.
“My hope for all of [you] is that by starting with listening, by checking your assumptions at the door, being in conversation—not just with like community organizations, but with residents directly—you might find an issue that you could make a meaningful difference in, that will surprise you and will not be something you thought of when you started.” —Luke Shaefer, PhD
Discussion Questions
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Resources
- » H. Luke Shaefer
- Luke Shaefer | Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
- Voices of the Ford School | Luke Shaefer
- The Injustice of Place – HarperCollins
“This is a very visible and concrete way of saying we’re coming alongside you, [with] the joy of parenting, the importance of parenting.” —Luke Shaefer, PhD
Transcript: Episode #12 | Season 3: Luke Shaefer, PhD “Living in Complexities”
Erin Borla 0:10
It’s funding rural I’m Erin Borla with the Sisters Oregon based oundhouse foundation. I first heard Luke Shaefer speak at the rural partners summit in Anchorage, Alaska, and I was struck by how his brain works, especially when it comes to understanding the root causes of poverty in this country. Luke is a Professor of Public Policy at University of Michigan, where he runs a presidential initiative called poverty solutions. Folks may have heard of the book he co authored in 2015 on this issue. It’s called $2 a day living on almost nothing in America. It’s an incredible book. I highly recommend you check it out in 2024 Luke helped launch RX kids in Flint, Michigan and in other counties in northern Michigan. It’s the nation’s first citywide cash prescription program designed to help ease the financial journey into parenthood. I started by asking him about his new book, injustice of place, uncovering the legacy of poverty in America.
Luke Shaefer 1:06
Yeah, it started with a wonderful email from some program officers at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They reached out and they had read $2 a day, and they said, Hey, we really gain. Learned a lot from $2 a day. It was really valuable to us. We’d love to do something about extreme poverty at the community level. Could we do a project that really looks at very, very poor places and tries to understand some of the mechanisms by which those places remain poor? So we’ve been thinking about something kind of similar, and so we we were thrilled to put together a proposal and come to an agreement where we would use lots of different data to try to zero in on very disadvantaged places. We use income data from poverty estimates, but also health data, so looking at life expectancy and infant health and as well as markers of social mobility. So a social mobility metric doesn’t say whether you’re poor or not in a community, but it says, What are the chances of someone who grows up poor of rising to the middle class? And here’s an amazing thing, the rates of social mobility in some places in the United States, you know, folks who grow up low income are just as likely to rise to the middle class. So sort of the idea of economic mobility of the American Dream is alive and well. And other places, if you grow up poor, you’re just as likely to be poor as an adult. So we put all of these metrics into statistical procedure called principal component analysis, and it ranked all of them on a continuum of disadvantage. For us and as folks who had spent most of our time studying urban poverty, the first thing we noticed is that when we looked at the most disadvantaged places in the United States, they were overwhelmingly rural. So if you looked at the 100 most disadvantaged places, I think something like 8085, of them were rural. Only a handful of them were cities. And that really struck us. And you know, we noticed that they were clustered in Appalachia, in the in the tobacco belt, and the Cotton Belt down in South Texas and then out west tended to be tribal lands. And we noticed that the map that we produced from our index looked an awful lot like maps of poverty and Well Being from 100 years ago or 150 years ago. So you saw this persistence. So this became a book. Once again, you’re sensing a theme in my work. A surprise to me. It was a book on rural poverty, and so we spent time getting to know communities. Clay County in Kentucky, Marion County in South Carolina is just sort of off the coast. Lafleur County, Greenwood, Mississippi, and then Zavala County, down in South Texas, Crystal City. And I think the most interesting thing was to see the themes that emerged across all of these places, similar themes that emerged, in addition to their uniqueness of each site,
Erin Borla 4:19
what was there a community that you met with that really struck something with you, that that was as you were doing this research, that maybe changed the way you were looking at at poverty and disadvantage in the in this country?
Luke Shaefer 4:34
Yeah, I think each of the communities really did that for me, and sort of the repeated themes that we saw over and over again. The first thing that I learned very quickly, in part early on in the book covid hit, when we were supposed to be doing all of this field work so we couldn’t go anywhere. So that led us to do a deep dive in history. And that’s when we learned, I think, we think of communities as. Monolith, right as like this is a place Clay County, Manchester, Kentucky, and that’s not really true. You know, these these places, are often places of real contest between the haves and the have nots. They’re actually all places where the economy was dominated by a single industry for a very long time, and that single industry was controlled by a small number of people and required a low wage labor force. So cotton is probably the one that’s familiar to people with slavery. But then tenant farming after that, the tobacco belt in South Carolina, similarly so in Kentucky, we had timber, we had salt, and then coal mining, and it was much less violent. And in some ways we can’t make the comparison at all, but on the other hand, there were these similarities, right of a small number of people controlling everything you know, the political, the social, the economic. And then in South Texas, it was tabletop vegetables. It was farming after we figured out irrigation. And so this story really emerges of, you know, a contest between a very small group of haves over the generations and a large group of have nots. And leads us to sort of create this theory of thinking of these places as internal colonies, places where most residents are to have a sub citizenship, where they’re not granted all of the rights of citizens in the United States because of the structures that are there. But also all of these places have, you know, you have these long histories and exploitation, but there’s also so much wonderful about these places. So Crystal City in south in South Texas, it is very proud to be the spinach capital of the world. So I’ll give your listeners one guess as to whose statue adorns many parts of the of the city. It’s it’s Popeye. Of course, there’s larger than life statues of Popeye at city hall right downtown, and you know, someplace in Arkansas was making rumblings that they were going to be the spinach capital of the world, and Crystal City wasn’t having that at all, so they sort of reasserted their spinach dominance. Each place has a story like this, and they’re often festivals. So in Crystal City, it’s a spinach Festival, and there’s all sorts of contests, and then there’s a pageant too, so there’s spinach queens and spinach princesses. So you really just come to a place of realizing, when you study communities, you have to live in all of this complexity, a place that has so much history of exploitation and real injustices, and also wonderfully rich history and tradition, sort of all packed into one.
Erin Borla 7:49
I love that phrase living in complexity, because I think that is we’re in this phase now where we’re living sort of an eight second sound bites, and we’ve allowed people to be you’re either this or you’re that, or it’s black, or it’s white, or it’s, you know, rural or urban. But there’s so many more pieces to who people are, to who communities are. And I think just the description of the spinach festival is so brilliant. Of this is who community is, and this what they celebrate.
Luke Shaefer 8:22
Yeah, and things can, you know, history can be terrible and and also have so much beauty to it at the same time,
Erin Borla 8:31
yeah, it aligns closely to the way that philanthropy seems to have rolled out right in in funds being raised in community, oftentimes rural places, oftentimes through exploitive practices, and then the dollars being removed and created into a larger foundation somewhere else, which then the redistribution of wealth does not happen back to those places where those funds are raised.
Luke Shaefer 9:01
Very good point. So when I mentioned these sort of industries that came to dominate each of these places for decades, all of which sort of collapsed at some point because of more competition, I think in every case, they didn’t just fuel the regional economies. They were actually all things that fueled not just the national economies, but worldwide. When you think about cotton picked in Mississippi by tenant farmers, sold to, usually folks in the north and sometimes shipped over to textile mills in the United Kingdom, and that was used to sort of clothe so much of the world. Coal that really powered the industrial revolution in the United States, made so much of it possible, and then tabletop vegetables that feed people all over the country. And so these industries really are fundamental to our growth as a country. But you’re absolutely right, the dollars. In part, you know, I think very in line with this, thinking of them as internal colonies, the dollars mostly float out, you know, they went to a small number of halves in the communities, but otherwise flowed out into other parts of the country. So I think a lot of places in the north, right, are complicit in these industries. And they don’t, they don’t get a pass on them. And then the fortunes were really made. And philanthropy, I think, again, like living in the complexity, it’s very I think it’s very reasonable to want to better the places where you live. And a lot of philanthropy is place based. But that also means, for that reason, that rural communities don’t have a lot of it. If you look at the distribution of philanthropy, it’s just wildly unequal, hundreds and hundreds of dollars per low income person in urban centers, you know, sometimes 1000s, when we’re talking about some of our most philanthropic rich places, and pennies on the dollar in rural communities. It’s also harder to administer a lot of programs in rural communities, because you don’t have the scale, you can’t serve the same number of people within a given geographic region because they’re rural and there’s and they’re fewer people, and they’re more spread out. And then there’s the issue of human capital, that a lot of the people who are writing the grants tend to be clustered in urban areas. And so you really see, you know, these places are the most disadvantaged by all of these different metrics we looked at and and especially from philanthropy, they get the least amount of help. And then, you know, I think, I think some of what you were saying was pointing to the question of how we should help if we do and so I think a lot of times philanthropy says, I’m interested in this particular thing. I want to support this kind of program. And that’s not when a community wants. And so when, when philanthropy comes in, I think it’s a fairly typical story to say we’re going to create this program that a philanthropist wants. And then when people don’t actually sign up for it, we’re kind of shocked, right? And or disappointed, and they go, okay, maybe they don’t want our help, whereas, you know, you might have a much better outcome if you started with listening and found out what people want. So I’ll give you one example from the book. So as we talk to people, actually, because it was funded by Robert Wood Johnson, who’s, by the way, an incredible partner on this I just have so much appreciation for them supporting this project. We’d ask people, if philanthropy were to do something that really mattered, and we came back in a year or two and things were better, what would it look like? And the first thing is that people had a very low opinion on what was possible. They really didn’t think philanthropy or government could do that much to help them. They just didn’t have a lot of examples in their mind. Anyways. But then the second thing was to a person, and like every place, we would hear the same answer, well, there’s nothing to do for the kids but drugs. Nothing to do but drugs. And you know, the first couple times I heard it, I really, I didn’t. I thought of it as, like, not serious. But then we really started to delve into it. And it turns out there’s so much evidence that like places for people to congregate, to have cheap fun, maybe folks can think about the places they went to when they were growing up, roller rinks, the local movie theater, bowling alleys, whatever it might be, where lots of people across differences could gather, maybe make connections, just the act of sort of interacting with someone, stimulates a lot in your brain. And in so many ways, we’ve replaced a lot of that with isolation. So you know, far, far, far fewer small movie theaters in rural places, a lot more streaming, right? So people are in their houses watching what they want to watch, which has a benefit for them, but also doesn’t lead to this sort of connection point the social capital. So we call this a social infrastructure, and one of our policy proposals is maybe philanthropy should look to do more of this in partnership with communities, listening to what people want. But maybe it’s a splash park, maybe it’s a local movie theater, maybe it’s an arcade. It actually looks like in the evidence that like, arcades are really good places for people to build social connections. So it leads to a very different kind of proposal, and I think one that people in the communities that we’re serving might value more than a lot of the things that we often want to do.
Erin Borla 14:29
I’d love to have you share about RX kids, where it’s origin story, and where you are now, and what you hope to do with it.
Luke Shaefer 14:39
Yeah, I was lucky enough to get an email from Dr Mona Hanna, who was in Flint, is known for turning the tide on the Flint water crisis, and she and her partners in Flint had built this incredible infrastructure in the city that was providing so much to especially families with kids books. Services, incredible resources. There is this beautiful children’s health clinic right next to the farmers market and right downtown Flint, right by the bus station. And she was talking with families who were looking for the next thing, right? What else could we do in a city with the highest child poverty rate at the time in the nation? And they all noticed the success of the Child Tax Credit, the expanded child tax credit in 2021 which I had been involved in, sort of the early development of brought child poverty down to a historic low, lifted millions of children out of poverty, brought food hardship down to the lowest level we’d ever seen. Really improved the mental health of families with kiddos. So they were seeing the success, and wanted to do something like that in Flint. So Mona reached out to me, and we started conversation. Originally, we wanted to do, you know, provide something for every kiddo that would sort of really mimic what happened with the child tax credit of providing $500 a month, $250 per child. 300 per young child. And this is something that’s done like all over the world. Many other countries have a program that just simply says raising kids is expensive, and society has a reason to come alongside parents in that work, and one really efficient way to do it is to provide some money to pay for diapers, to pay for food or books or toys or the rent or whatever it might be. So eventually we got down to this infant and prenatal period. We followed the evidence. The first numbers looked really expensive, but getting down to this first year of life, one thing I learned through this process is how incredibly important that first year is. A baby’s brains double in size. So much of like the infrastructure that people take with them through their lives is built. You know, as babies are learning, you know, rapidly every single day, and even the prenatal period is incredibly important. So we have studies that show really supporting families during this critical window can have lifelong impact. So we designed a program that provides $1,500 prenatally, and then $500 a month for the six months after birth, or the first 12 months after birth, depending on philanthropic funding. It’s available to everybody in a poor place. So there’s no there’s no means test, there’s no income testing. You don’t have to bring your pay stubs. If you live in a community that’s covered and you’re pregnant, then you’re covered. And this relieves all of the doubt that families often feel, Oh, am I eligible? Am I not eligible? And it means that we’re able to reach pretty much everybody in Flint. We’re at virtually 100% take up, which is something I’ve never seen in anything else that I’ve worked on. And they receive $1,500 in pregnancy, as I said, and $500 that’s paid for with a combination of philanthropy. Our philanthropy, philanthropic partners are incredible. There’s so many of them. You can see them all on our website, arcskids.org, but then also, to sort of bring us back full circle, TANF dollars. So we were able to access money from this block grant was established as part of the 1996 welfare law, and has all this flexibility. We were able to take advantage of a very arcane provision, non recurrent short term benefits that allows you to provide help to families during an acute economic crisis. So what’s the acute economic crisis? It’s childbirth. It’s pregnancy. And it actually turns out another thing we learned was this is the poorest period of time over the life course. So families are poorest right around the birth of a child. So pairing those two types of support together also allows us to protect other public benefits from the cash transfers, so your food assistance isn’t impacted, your Medicaid isn’t impacted, WIC housing, all of these things are protected. So really creates this very stable, this very short term, but stable support for families during this critical window, which matters so much for the health of both mom and baby.
Erin Borla 19:07
Such an incredible program. And it’s been, it’s been around for a couple of years, and you’ve seen success. You mentioned the 100% take up in Flint. Talk about some of the other communities that you, you’ve worked with in the reception in those places.
Luke Shaefer 19:21
Yeah, it’s been incredible. It’s really wonderful to be in both urban and rural communities and have it be a program that families really value. It looks like we’re on track to hit the same kind of take up in the rural communities that we’re in. We have a diversity of partners up in the Eastern Upper Peninsula, including the Sioux Tribe of Chippewa Indians, who’ve been an incredible supporter of the program, the local health departments, as well as our elected policy makers we’ve been in now. Clare County is a rural county just launched in August, and you know, as someone who. With this book on on rural poverty, is just really exciting to see the excitement that is generating in these places. So, you know, we heard sort of over and over again as we talked to people, oh, nothing ever comes up here. We won’t. We’ll believe it when we see it, and then it happened, and there’s, you know, a huge amount of excitement. And the great thing is, this is a program that we can administer in rural communities as easily as we can in urban communities. So you apply online. You have to verify that you’re pregnant and verify you live in the community that’s covered. And then you apply through a website from our incredible partner give directly the nation leader in providing cash benefits like this, and then you can have the money direct deposited into the bank account of your choosing or put onto a reloadable debit card. And so it’s a program that we can provide in these rural communities. The money is the biggest part, obviously, but there’s also a lot of messaging around it. So messaging, we believe, really matters. The evidence seems clear that by sort of promoting the joys of parenthood, of saying that this is our visible way of supporting families, we get different results from something that just says, this is this is about, this is a little bit of money because you’re poor. So we’re still early. Yet we launched in Flint, and last year, January of 2024 but we’ve seen really big reductions in postpartum depression in Flint, we’ve seen an increase in prenatal care and the study, we can see that in vital records data, it looks like we’re seeing improved birth outcomes and reduced economic hardship. So people saying that they have more of the types of foods that they want and need, and a huge reduction in eviction. So all of this is comparing trends in Flint relative to the surrounding area that doesn’t get the benefit.
Erin Borla 21:48
Tell us more about the messaging, because I know when you and I have talked before, that’s you mentioned it’s a key component. What does that look like?
Luke Shaefer 21:58
Yeah, the messaging is all about love and supporting families, right? So we try to use the money as a visible sign that we’re supporting moms and incredibly hard. And, you know, as important as anything work of parenting that’s so expensive and so hard, and I think especially in this country, people can feel like they’re on their own, that people are don’t feel like they have any responsibility to one another. So this is a very visible and concrete way of saying we’re coming alongside you, the joy of parenting, the importance of parenting. These are all things that we want to be here with you. And actually that sort of leads to the one requirement that any community that wants to be a part of our kids has to do, which is to host a baby parade. So a baby parade is a is a something that came out of the children’s year of 1918, over 100 years ago, when the Children’s Bureau, the federal government said we’re going to celebrate parenting, motherhood and parenting with baby parades. So we’ve had a number of them. Now there’s often marching bands, always ice cream from the Michigan State ice cream store, and just, you know, incredibly joyous events. So you know, this isn’t just about helping people make ends meet. It’s about celebration. And then, you know, obviously that social capital element that we love it when people come together for a baby parade, and moms can meet moms.
Erin Borla 23:23
Yeah, I love that. I think, as a mom myself, recognizing and my kids are older now, but that first few months is such an isolating experience. Exactly, their sleep schedule is off, and there’s, you know, well, their kids are a little bit older, and newborn doesn’t interact the same way a toddler does. And how do you it’s just trying to find a sense of peace and a sense of place and to be able to celebrate that collectively, is such a powerful message.
Speaker 1 23:53
Yeah, absolutely. What do you wish
Erin Borla 23:56
that folks working in philanthropy or those that are providing funding better understood about poverty in rural America.
Luke Shaefer 24:06
I think to me, of course, I love Ari’s kids, and so I would love for folks who are interested in that program to learn more about it and see if they want to be a partner. Philanthropy can help spur the state investment of the TANF dollars, which every state has TANF funds that could be used in the way that we use them, but more so, I think this approach of starting with listening, of starting with humility, it really makes the work incredibly meaningful to me, and I think it will to your listeners too. So my hope for all of them is that by starting with listening, by sort of checking your assumptions at the door. Being in conversation, not just with like community organizations, but with residents directly, you might find an issue that you could make a meaningful difference in that will surprise you and will will not be something you thought of when you started. Yeah.
Erin Borla 25:00
Thank you for the research that you’re doing. Thank you for sharing the work in not only your published works, but also in your academic research and and love that you’ve put it into practice. Really looking forward to seeing what’s coming next out of your office.
Luke Shaefer 25:13
Thanks for having me on it was it was a pleasure. You.
Erin Borla 25:35
One thing that we talk about at roundhouse a lot is how sometimes research can get lost in doing research just for the sake of research. And I love what Luke’s doing at University of Michigan and through poverty solutions, because it’s applicable, and he’s putting that research to work, and we’re seeing that implemented on the ground with programs like RX kids. When he talks about not only connecting with organizations and community, but also connecting with people. That’s just such an interesting way to think about our work, how we begin really working beyond just our one partnership, finding the Nexus and those folks that come together to really develop these powerful and strong solutions. I’m really impressed with our ex kids and the work that he’s done, and I know there are funders behind that work. We’re definitely going to put information on our website, funding rural.com where you can get links to all of the data that he’s put together for this program. If you’re interested in learning more, recognizing that it’s such a critical time in someone’s life, when someone is pregnant, and then those first few months of that child’s life really making sure that those families are stable. And I love that the data that he’s collected really shows how that system is improving the base level of poverty in those communities. Luke talked about his partnership with different philanthropic partners, whether it was supporting his research for his newest book, or the work with RX kids. And I love that it really launched his exploration of how place impacted poverty. Philanthropy has this opportunity to really steer the exploration of those issues, not only in the research, but then also in the application as a funder, I really love to see someone do their homework and understand the problem they’re trying to solve. This is something that we can all learn from you.
Transcribed by AI. Please forgive any mistakes.
