It’s gotten both worse and better for struggling working families

ALICE workers hold hundreds of different jobs: They are retail salespeople, child care providers, carpenters, security guards, janitors, housekeepers and servers. They are essential to a functioning society and the state’s economy.

Zysman says society will always have a need for people to work those jobs, so the solutions shouldn’t just be about retraining workers to move into higher- paying industries. It’s also about lowering the cost of living, raising the minimum wage and other ways to get more money into residents’ pockets.

“We have to figure out a way people can work in a service industry, a factory industry—those are good jobs,” she says.

“We need those jobs in our community.” And people working those jobs, she says, should be able to afford a place to live, with food on their tables and child care and education for their children.

Making the state EITC permanent and refundable is one way to do that, she says. A January 2022 brief by the Hawaiʻi Children’s Action Network, the Hawaiʻi Budget & Policy Center, and the Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice reports that the EITC is an effective anti-poverty tool.

The brief reports that EITC is linked to better outcomes for children of the credit’s recipients, such as being less likely to have a low birth weight, higher high school and college graduation rates, and is associated with increased earnings later in life. Households with several keiki tend to benefit the most from the credit as the amount received is based on income and family size.

Uplifting Community Voices

A program supported by the Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law and Economic Justice and other organizations has had similar outcomes. The Affordable Hawaiʻi for All Fellows comprises emerging community leaders who have experienced housing instability or homelessness. They share their perspectives with one another and with policymakers, and get training on the legislative process, and they receive a stipend for their time.

Kenna StormoGipson is the director of housing policy at the Hawaiʻi Budget & Policy Center, which is a Hawaiʻi Appleseed program. She has seen fellows grow from being intimidated or confused about the legislative process to being confident and engaged in submitting testimony, speaking at committee hearings and sharing their experiences.

They’ve also done things like sifting through hundreds of housing-related bills to set the legislative priorities for the Hawaiʻi Housing Affordability Coalition, and helping to design a temporary state Covid rent relief and mortgage assistance program. And they inspired the creation of a Hawaiʻi delegation that traveled to a June international housing conference in Finland to look at housing solutions.

Lived Experience

Lindsay Pacheco is an Affordable Hawaiʻi for All fellow and a co-founder of Ka Poʻe o Kakaʻako, a group of current and formerly houseless individuals trying to change the way homelessness is addressed. She writes in an email that being a community voice means she can speak on behalf of those who are afraid to speak for themselves: “It allows me to confidently speak up when decisions about our houseless folks are being discussed, allowing me to either disagree or agree, resulting in changing people’s hearts and minds.”

The work with the Affordable Hawaiʻi for All fellows has also caused Hawaiʻi Appleseed to change the way it thinks about solving Hawaiʻi’s largest problems and to focus on including the perspectives of community members who are most hurt by those problems, says Gavin Thornton, the nonprofit’s executive director.

“I think bringing people with lived experience into the conversation, it isn’t just to learn about the impact of policies from their point of view, but also to bring hope and inspiration into the conversation,” StormoGipson says.

“It seems counterintuitive sometimes that the people who are maybe struggling the most would have the most hope or the most courage to do something, but that is where you get the strength and I think the resilience to do something about these really difficult problems.”