The
National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) http://www.nccp.org is a public policy center that focuses on
helping poor families and children in the areas of health, welfare, and
financial security. The NCCP goal is to influence
policy on the state and national level by providing research data that
substantiates the need for positive change for impoverished families. The visions for the organization are:
· Family
economic security
· Strong,
nurturing families
· Healthy
child development
Under the State profile section on the
website readers can enter the name of a state and statistical information will
populate showing the poverty demographics for that state. There is also Early Childhood information in
this section that provides health, nutrition, and educational policies that
have been implemented in a particular state.
The Data Tools section allows users to track and tabulate the health
risk of children and also the state of mental health. Viewers can research publications by title,
date, project, or by the topic. There are
numerous Fact Sheets provided so information can be referenced easily. One interesting
project that I found under the Project tab was exploring the effectiveness of
housing subsidies on child development.
The research showed that when families have housing assistance, it
provides stability for the family because they are not experiencing frequent
evictions and the stress level is reduced for children and families. The NCCP website is an early childhood
professional’s dream because it provides a variety of useful information and
its motto is “Putting Research to Work for Children and Families” and that
should be our focus!
Nikki,
ReplyDeleteThe data tools are very helpful in finding out statistics in certain states. I was playing around with the income guidelines tool and even found that most classroom aides in public schools are getting paid at poverty levels. In my area, aides can only work 5 out of the 7 school hours. An aide's hourly rate is great, $12-$13 dollars an hour but with school vacations and working part time that income only amounts to 15,000 dollars at the most.When I plug the numbers into the tool the calculations came up to 97% poverty federal poverty level for a family of 2. Very interesting. Thanks for your post