Diana Pearce, senior lecturer emerita at the School of Social Work and founder of the Center for Women’s Welfare (CWW), is giving $250,000 to the School to support the CWW’s work. Pearce hopes the additional funding will complete the Self-Sufficiency Standard’s expansion into all 50 states, and Washington D.C., with updated data by 2026.
The Standard is a measure of income adequacy that defines the income needed by working families to meet basic needs such as food, housing and health care, with costs varied by family composition and geographic location. CWW researchers partner with agencies throughout the country to incorporate national, state and local economic data and apply the Standard to local needs and conditions.
The Standard has been used for decades by academics, advocates, businesses, community organizations and governments across the nation to inform policy makers, guide clients, evaluate programs and analyze the dynamics of poverty.
Developing the Standard
While serving as director of the Women and Poverty Project in Washington D.C. in 1996, Pearce and her team created the Standard in response to the need in workforce programs for a realistic benchmark to measure participant and program outcomes. The Standard addresses the shortcomings in the federal government’s official poverty measure by incorporating geographically specific data, such as housing and childcare expenses.
With funding from the Ford Foundation, Pearce founded the CWW in 2002 as a means to support the continued development and refinement of the Standard along with related research.
Reframing Poverty
While the Standard helps provide a nuanced measure of poverty that produces better data for researchers and policy makers, it also helps people understand the complexity of poverty.
Pearce explains that flawed measures of poverty lead to gaps in government policy, so that people with incomes above the federal poverty line, but below the Standard, are still unable to meet their basic needs. Gaps like this leave people struggling to qualify for critical programs like food stamps, housing assistance or child-care subsidies.
Addressing poverty requires recognizing and supporting those within this policy gap. “For example, when you think of people who are poor, you don’t think of people who are working, but many are employed, even full-time, yet can’t meet their basic needs,” says Pearce. The widening disparity between wages and the actual cost of living exacerbates this issue.
“Ultimately, the goal is to reframe the issue of poverty,” says Pearce. “Too often, we talk about changing people who are poor, rather than changing the system that makes them poor.”
For decades, Pearce has used her academic research to further the needs of the people overlooked by these systems. “I believe part of our mandate as social workers is to not only help the individual, but to change the structures that impact people’s lives.”