Poverty and Social Welfare

Some families living in the U.S. struggle to access vital services that are intended to help them. Whether it’s health care, housing assistance, or unemployment benefits, many find themselves tangled in red tape, unable to receive the support they...

Luke Shaefer, Ford School professor and Director of Poverty Solutions talked with The Chronicle of Philanthropy about his work on Rx Kids as a guide for the NGO GiveDirectly. Working on Rx Kids he says was "a really humbling experience for me...

Following huge success in its first year, the child healthcare support program Rx Kids is set to expand from Flint into Kalamazoo. Luke Shaefer, professor at the Ford School and the program's co-director stated, "We see families reporting that they...

Rx Kids, co-directed by the Ford School's Luke Shaefer, celebrated it one-year anniversary at the end of January. The program has given access to $6M in cash support for over 1,300 Flint families with pregnant mothers and babies in their first years...

Pamela Herd, Ford School professor, says that disability benefits are "a category of benefits that’s most difficult to access and most misaligned with the population it’s trying to serve." Additionally, she says the system is "designed in ways that...

Vox network recently spoke with the Ford School's Pamela Herd on current barriers in the distribution system of social welfare programs. Herd testified, “We have a huge array of different programs with the primary goal of reducing poverty and...

Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan last year informed the largest-ever increase in state funding for youth homelessness programs, advised federal policymakers on place-based strategies for tackling poverty and laid the groundwork for...

America is rife with "internal colonies," where systemic violence, resource extraction, and corruption among decision makers have contributed to generations of poverty and disadvantage. These communities suffer from environmental degradation, lack...

Alexandra (Sasha) Killewald will be the next director of the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics at the University of Michigan, effective July 1. Killewald is a PhD alum of the Ford School and is being recommended as a professor of sociology in...

A new program that will grant Flint families with new babies $7,500 has been making the news, as it addresses "one of the most fundamental social determinants of health: poverty." The program, Rx Kids, received an initial grant of $15 million from...

Restrictive abortion policies in the U.S. are predicted to have negative effects on maternal health, women's economic opportunities and social welfare systems.  A multidisciplinary team of experts from the University of Michigan warns that...

The federal government has ended its pandemic aid for millions of low-income families on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.  The average person will receive about $90 less in benefits per month, possibly hundreds of dollars...

The progress that has been made in Michigan's child welfare system could be put at risk by a ban on abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court's Roe decision. The effects "could add thousands more children to the system in the coming years and...

“There are a lot of countries that [provide a monthly child tax benefit] already; some for decades: Canada, Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Australia. These countries have decided, 'hey, raising kids is expensive, and the government has a reason...

“To me, it’s the most transformational thing that’s under discussion, and nobody’s talking about it,” said Luke Shaefer. Read the full article in the New York Times...

Two faculty members at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy have been chosen from hundreds of nominees as part of the prestigious Carnegie Fellows program. Professors Susan Dynarski and H. Luke Shaefer are among only...

A new book by the Ford School's Kristin S. Seefeldt was featured in a recent edition of Dome magazine, an online publication that covers politics and policy in the State of Michigan.Seefeldt (MPP '96) is a Research Investigator at the Ford School...

Social Welfare Policy in the United States:  From the War on Poverty to the Covid-19...