Alan Cohen on child poverty

Alan Cohen—president and CEO of Child Poverty Action Lab—has a goal to cut child poverty in Dallas by 50% in twenty years. Hear the plan, the data and the steps you can take to help.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason, and I'm delighted to welcome to the program, Alan Cohen, who is the President and CEO of CPAL, which is Child Poverty Action Lab. It is an organization in Dallas that was started in the fall of 2018. Alan has been leading that effort ever since, and as we are going to be looking all during the fall of this year at the question of poverty, especially urban poverty and especially Dallas, we want to talk especially to Alan who has been doing this work for a couple of years. Alan, welcome to the program. We're glad to have you on today.

Alan Cohen:
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.

George Mason:
Well, Alan, to begin with, I want to say we all come to the work we do in usually interesting ways, ways that we didn't anticipate, what brought you to this work focusing on child poverty?

Alan Cohen:
Yeah, so I had gotten involved in public education about 10 years ago. I think that it became clear to me that you could ask the question, do we have so much poverty in Dallas because of failings in the public education system or does it appear that we have such failings in the public education system because we have such high rates of poverty? I think the answer is yes, and the more I spent time thinking about how best to support kids, the more I realized that it wasn't just education but issues related to health, issues related to safety, issues related to parents, jobs. All these things were symbiotically entwined, and so it was really important to think about what were some approaches that would allow us to attack this problem from multiple angles at the same time in order to really hopefully create what I hope will one day exist, which is the best place to raise a child in the country, regardless of zip code.

George Mason:
Okay. So many ways I want to go with this, but let's begin with the last statement you made, and that is that essentially we should not allow demography to be destiny, right? To say you shouldn't be able to predict people's futures based upon what zip code they've been born into. Yet that is really true in Dallas to an ungodly extent right now. Give us a sense of how, I know you like to say Dallas is more of a TV dinner than it a melting pot. Explain what that means and explain this diversity, this gap that exists of wealth.

Alan Cohen:
Yeah. I think certainly there's been more awareness in the social sector and I think more awareness in Dallas broadly that Dallas has among the most segregated cities in the country and that's by both race and socioeconomics. If you look at the lenses of race, if you look at the lens of gender, if you look at the lens of geography and location, you're going to see really, really deep correlations to opportunity for children and families and individuals. What I'm most focused on in the work at CPAL, along with my colleagues here is the research on economic mobility or the American Dream. What are the chances that a child that's born today in poverty can do better than their parents have done by the time that they're an adult? Then the next generation can do better than them and better than them, which is a lot of the promise that I grew up believing in this country.

Alan Cohen:
The reality is that your chances of economic mobility vary widely based off of the specific location, a specific neighborhood that you grow up in and the characteristics of your circumstances. One of the reasons I, earlier in my career was so focused on early childhood education is because it created so much hope for me, that when you look at a three-year-old or a four-year-old, if you've spent any time around young children, you realize that three-year-olds and four-year-olds are incapable of not learning. They're absolutely incapable of not learning. They are going to learn.

Alan Cohen:
So that's actually really empowering for society at large, because it really comes down to what is the stimulus that we surround children with. Are we going to teach them that there's hope in the world and that there's opportunity, or are we going to surround them with an absence of hope and opportunity? In which case, that is what they're going to learn.

George Mason:
Okay, but while all of that is true, it's clearly not working well yet in Dallas, as last time I checked, we were number three from the bottom, in terms of cities in America with a poverty rate that is as high as it is. Can you give us a little more clarity about where the data is on that and where Dallas sits right now in the national picture?

Alan Cohen:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if there's one thing that I hope that anyone listening to this conversation remembers it's that about one in every three kids in the city of Dallas grows up in poverty, one out of every three. I hope that we don't get numb to that number. We expect that that number really is only going to go up as a result of COVID right now. But whether it's one in three or one in four, it goes between one and three at the city level to one in five at the county level. But regardless, that's just, that's not good.

Alan Cohen:
What I believe is two things. One, which is if more people knew that, we would have much, much greater action. I see when there's a natural disaster on TV, that folks with affluence and influence will drive into the storm. They open up their pocket books. They can't allow what they see on TV, the human suffering to continue without taking action. Yet in our own backyard, poverty is the invisible natural disaster. So I feel like we have to make sure that everyone knows that this is happening in Dallas, Texas.

Alan Cohen:
The second thing is this, and this is where I think we ought to get some hope as well, which is you're right. Dallas is about third among major cities in the country in terms of the highest rate of child poverty. That's not a list you want to be high up on, but I'll also say this. A lot of other major cities in the country aren't as high on that list because their way of dealing with poverty is to price out all the poor people.

George Mason:
Ah.

Alan Cohen:
So one of the opportunities we have in Dallas is to make diversity, to make inclusion a competitive advantage. We're at a crossroads right now, and our decision is, are we going to deal with child poverty and poverty in general in this city by lifting families up or are we going to deal with it by pushing families out? Certainly in my organization, we're working on strategies to lift families up and believe that that is the best path forward through this city.

George Mason:
Let's go back to the origins of CPAL and say that it really grew out of Mayor Rawlings' Grow South Initiative, right? One of the ways initially that the mayor and the city of Dallas were looking at how to do this was precisely what you just said. The tendency is when we want to grow in areas like these to develop gentrification plans where we go in and actually do push people out. Yet we also know that we have a massive shortage of affordable housing, and we have a massive problem of existing housing, low-income housing, that needs to be improved in order for neighborhoods to be improved and all those sorts of things.

George Mason:
But what I find hopeful about your organization is that it is a coalition, not just a discrete organization on an island. Full disclosure, Faith Commons, the parent of this organization is a partner as well. But you brought together all sorts of government agencies, school, district, all of that. This is a coalition of how to find solutions together. So I imagine that that's both hopeful and frustrating at the same time though, getting everybody on the same page.

Alan Cohen:
I think you've got to stay hopeful. I think one of the things I really feel blessed about is that I get to wake up every day and think about solutions and work on solutions, and what are things that we can be problem solvers around? One of the reasons we decided to form CPAL is because it is really an easy trap to fall into when talking about poverty in the city and talking about such entrenched issues, to use data to admire the problem.

Alan Cohen:
There's definitely lots of opportunity to look at things that are working around the country that have potential and start to use data to drive towards solutions. But one thing that the data definitely tells us is when you start thinking about one in three kids in the city, growing up in poverty, the scale of the problem requires that we bring scale to bear on the solution side as well. We're not going to program our way out of systems issues. It's going to require really deep systems change, and that's why we have brought together, and really this is a credit to Mayor Rawlings. Mayor Rawlings, during his last year, brought together all of the CEOs of all of our major public agencies locally to start meeting together in the same room and thinking about how do we take on root causes of poverty together?

Alan Cohen:
That really had not happened in Dallas' fragmented form of government before. So in that room, when you bring together the city manager with the superintendent of schools, with the chancellor of the community college district, with the head of DART, with the head of our hospital system, our workforce solutions, et cetera, et cetera, we now have nine and a half billion dollars of systems leverage each year thinking together about how best to organize our tax dollars to really take on an issue that is deeply entrenched. That's what it's going to take.

Alan Cohen:
A data point that I like to point out to people is that in this country, we have $1.1 trillion in public funds that go to the social safety net every year. Also, across the entire country, in philanthropy, we spend $50 billion on the social safety net every year. What does that mean? It means if we could just make government 10% more effective, we would double the investment of philanthropy for the entire country. I have yet to meet anybody in Dallas or really anywhere else around the country that doesn't believe that government has at least 10% room to be more effective.

George Mason:
All right. So one of the things I've learned from reading and studying what you do is that the problems of poverty and the solutions, both are not linear. It's not from A to B to C if you just do this. Really that's, to some degree, that's a problem left and right, isn't it? Because those on the left would say almost exclusively poverty is simply a result of policy, right? It's all about government action and systems that have inhibited people's flourishing. Those who are on the right would say, it's almost entirely about personal responsibility, about intact families and parenting and choices that people make. We live in a free and opportunistic environment. If everybody just worked hard, they would be where I am, so to speak. We have these two almost intransigent philosophies that say that the solution is just there. But in your way of looking at this, it seems to be yes and yes, and even more. So talk about how you put all of that together.

Alan Cohen:
Yeah. One of the things that we talked about internally as a team a lot, and then we talked with our partners a lot about, is not to fall into the trap of a false choice. That nuance is really, really ... The world is complex and each of us individually are complex and our needs are complex. So we shouldn't try to oversimplify it and turn it into this, should we have better systems, or should we promote empowerment of personal responsibility? The answer can be yes.

Alan Cohen:
One thing that we believe fundamentally as a general theory of change for the organization, not to get into too much sort of consulting speak, but it is simply this basic concept that if everyone in Dallas, every individual were armed with good and complete information, if every individual in Dallas were armed with a sense of agency that they can make their own decisions for themselves, and if our systems in Dallas didn't create unnecessary barriers that got in the way of that sense of agency, we just think that very few people would choose poverty. What that allows us to focus in on are what are the many things that we can do inside of our systems that will reduce barriers to folks having the resources and the options for how to live their life in a way that will allow them to provide for their kids in a way that won't drive poverty. I'll give you an example.

George Mason:
Please do, yeah.

Alan Cohen:
We, at the very beginning of this effort, started looking at what's dollars that are available from the federal government or from the state government that are going under utilized in Dallas? Not something where we need a big policy change, not something where we need the state to say, we're going to give you billions more dollars. Just stuff that's already available that we're not using.

Alan Cohen:
One of the funds that we looked at was the Women, Infants and Children Nutrition Program, or the WIC program, which provides really high level of nutritional sustenance for pregnant women and families with children aged zero to five, to make sure that kids have the proper nutrition profile in their most developmentally important years. This is a program that has decades of longitudinal research behind it that is a bipartisan program at the federal level, that already has hundreds of millions of dollars federally appropriated for it, that tend to be under utilized every year.

Alan Cohen:
In Dallas, despite all the benefits, despite this really being free money to go to the grocery store and get things like baby formula, or other really important foods, only 40% of eligible participants in the county take advantage of this program, which means that actually in Washington DC, we're leaving $50 million a year that we've already paid taxes on, that could be coming into our community to the most marginalized neighborhoods and families to provide nutritional sustenance for kids, $50 million a year.

Alan Cohen:
If Melinda Gates we're hanging out in Seattle and said, "I'm ready to fly back to my hometown of Dallas and just one time, I'm going to make an announcement that once, only once I'll write a check for $50 million if we can get all of the nonprofits in town to help connect families with nutrition," it would be front page news in the newspaper. It would have all of philanthropy buzzing. It would have the religious community buzzing. It would have government buzzing. The check is written, and it's written every year. So we've got to figure out how to connect families with these services. What we're finding is that there are huge barriers that are getting in the way. It's like going to the DMV if you want to get your WIC benefits. You sit in a WIC center, you wait for three hours. When you go to the grocery store, it's hard to figure out what items are eligible for it.

George Mason:
Wait, wait, let me just stop you there. When you go to the grocery store.

Alan Cohen:
Yeah.

George Mason:
What grocery store?

Alan Cohen:
Exactly, exactly. You've got to figure out transportation in many cases to get a grocery store. There are little bodegas that are WIC-only stores, that are set up in different parts of Dallas because the shopping experience or the barriers to getting to the shopping experience are so extreme or create such extreme barriers that we have to set up new systems altogether. This to me is one of these really obvious things that we get excited about because there's an opportunity to improve a system. Texas' WIC card is a digital debit card, so it's one of those things that ought to be able to be refilled, whether or not you go to the WIC center or not. You ought to be able to do it from home. There's only two places in the country where you can not fill your WIC card from home. You actually have to go into a center to get it filled, Texas and Guam.

George Mason:
Guam.

Alan Cohen:
Guam. This is good though, because if we've got a problem and we don't know the first place to start on how to fix it or improve it, then we've got a big problem. But we've got some low hanging fruit here. So we're now working with the state of Texas, with the local agency to think about what steps do we need to take to put the technology in place and put the systems in place that would allow in Dallas County for those families that are eligible for WIC to be able to refill their card at home without ever having to get into a car, without having to figure out transportation.

Alan Cohen:
That doesn't mean that we've got everything solved. As you pointed out, we need more grocery stores. We need more transportation, we're going to need childcare sometimes to allow for parents to go shopping. All of these sorts of issues are things that we're going to have to figure out, but we can get an inch closer and an inch closer than that. I guess my hope is that if we focus on solutions, if we focus on the things we can agree on, we can have a different conversation five years from now than we're having today. It'll be a shame if we just let this be an admiring the problem conversation.

George Mason:
Right? Okay, so the goal of CPAL is to reduce child poverty in Dallas over the next 20 years by 50%.

Alan Cohen:
Yep.

George Mason:
What are some of the key things? You begun mentioning we can make WIC more easily available. We can begin to knock down some of the barriers to some of those basic resources that already exist. Let's talk about education, so education is another area you at one time were yourself, in the education field, specifically. Data suggests that early childhood education, pre-K, is hugely important to the success of kids from poor families. Is that on your radar as well? Is that something you're working toward?

Alan Cohen:
Absolutely. First of all, I would say, and I'm a little biased on this, but I feel like the work that DISD is doing, the work of our partners at Commit and many other organizations, Early Matters, have our pre-K and early elementary infrastructure in Dallas moving in the right direction.

Alan Cohen:
We're seeing more kids attending pre-K than they ever have. That is at huge risk with COVID by the way, though, so let's isolate the COVID conversation for right now. We have had a trend of more kids attending pre-K. We have had a trend of the quality of pre-K and kindergarten, and first grade, and second grade increasing. Our third grade reading scores have been increasing at a rate that exceeds the rest of the state of Texas and really exceeds the country. So lots of exciting news. That said, still, six out of every 10 kids in Dallas don't read at grade level at the end of third grade. Let's not take a victory lap, let's use this as a data point to say, we're on the right path and let's double down on those strategies.

Alan Cohen:
Now, what CPAL is focusing in on is birth to three care. How do we really start thinking about what types of interventions we can reach kids with and how we can support parents in providing care from infancy through the toddler years, knowing that the first time, really, and one of the reasons we focus on pre-K so much, this is the first time where we have a large concentration of kids all in the same place. That creates an opportunity for a system solution. In earlier years, before pre-K, you start thinking about it and the kids are spread out, family to family, or in small childcare centers that often don't have more than 20 kids for the whole center. It's a very fragmented world, and so the solutions have to look very different. That's a challenge that we're working on right now.

George Mason:
All right. We've talked a bit about government and about accessing that. We talked about education. Housing and transportation are two other major areas that we're looking at. So can you touch on those as part of the solution too?

Alan Cohen:
Yeah, so from an affordable housing situation, we look at that from a variety of angles. One is just, do we have enough housing? We don't, and we're going to have to increase the supply side of housing dramatically. We look at where is the affordable housing located? We know through really, really rigorous research that the neighborhood characteristics that a child grows up in have dramatic implications for adult success for that child. So a child at three years old moves to a high opportunity neighborhood, versus a child that moved at 12 years old, that can change lifetime earnings by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Making sure that we're building affordable housing in areas that already have a high opportunity characteristics, as well as bringing high opportunity characteristics to neighborhoods that have historically been disinvested in are big pieces of the puzzle, and stability.

Alan Cohen:
What I really want to focus in here is how two of these areas might intersect with one another, because I want to get into the complexity. A lot of times in these efforts and in philanthropy or government, we set up these problems like a salad bar. Like, okay, we'll talk about housing over here and then we'll talk about education over there. It's not like a child needs either housing or education, they need both, and those two things interplay.

Alan Cohen:
So one of the things that we can see very, very clearly in the data is that the power of early childhood education is undermined when kids are moving from one school to another, to another, to another each year because they have unstable housing situations. So there are 23 schools, 23 schools in DISD, where about a third of the kids have to change school mid-year. They're leaving their homeschool and going to another school because of housing instability. Our data team has done stuff that's a lot smarter than what I can do. They use big words like regressions and a lot of statistical terms, but they've been able to show that for about 60% of those kids switching schools mid-year, the catalyzing event is eviction.

Alan Cohen:
So if we can start to wrap our heads around strategies that might even just delay eviction from mid-year to summer, we could have a dramatic impact on a kid's academic achievement over time. If we could figure out ways not just to delay it until summer, but actually to eliminate eviction and make it a win-win for both the landlord and the tenant, and then also for Dallas at large, because we're now lifting up our kids, that's the type of thing that we want to pursue.

George Mason:
Well, I've often thought why is it that landlords incentivize people on the front end and not on the back end, with the opportunity to have a free month's rent site? Move here and you get a free month's rent. Well, it just incentivizes people to change their residence, so they're actually moving in order to save money, but they're disadvantaging their kids at the same time because they're changing schools. What if there were an incentivizing program where if you re-up for another year, you get a month's free rent or half of a month's free rent or some such thing. But it's like, nobody seems to be figuring out how to work with people to that end.

Alan Cohen:
Yeah, and that to me is exactly ... that's what we want to do. Let's think of a solution and then let's not just think about it, let's try it. What we're talking about at CPAL a lot is the word, prototype. How do we just prototype something, really simple? There's got to be a landlord that'll work with us on that. Let's just try it and see what happens.

Alan Cohen:
But at the same time, that means that we've got to start from a place that doesn't immediately villainize the landlord in this situation, even though our primary focus is how do we help that family? How do we help that child? We don't want to blame families. We also want to find what is a win-win opportunity? There's so much, I'll just tell you, right now, if there was an underlying root cause of a lot of our issues, it's an inability to collaborate.

Alan Cohen:
Collaboration has to be practiced. Empathy has to be practiced. It has to be practiced in all directions. The biggest collaboration killer is forcing two people to take the same action for exactly the same reasons. It's okay if we can get the landlord to figure out that it's in their best interest from a profit standpoint to take action of incentivizing. That's okay if they'll take the action, I'm not going to villainize them for that.

Alan Cohen:
To me, these examples of practicing empathy and practicing collaboration are so important. We get asked a lot, okay, "You're the action lab. So I'm an individual. I want to take an action. What can I do?" My answer is always, "Go find somebody that you really disagree with on an issue." If you hate charter schools and you find somebody that loves charter schools, sit down with them. Don't spend the whole conversation trying to convince them that you're right and they're wrong. Literally go through that process of just asking them, "Why do you like charter school so much?" Every time they give you an answer, ask again, "Tell me more about that. Explain." I bet if you break down that their life story far enough, you're going to find something that you agree with. There's some piece that you're going to agree with, and we've got to learn to lean into that. I've done a lot of work in the last year on violence reduction.

Alan Cohen:
We focused a lot on violence because exposure to violence for kids is documented as an adverse childhood experience or a trauma that has a really strong research base, in terms of its lasting impact into adulthood. Kids that are exposed to lots of violence, literally it can change the architecture of their brain in some really interesting and devastating ways.

Alan Cohen:
I ended up doing some work on thinking about what are non police or non law enforcement interventions for reducing gun violence? A big topic of conversation that a lot of folks around Dallas that I had a chance to work with, wanted to talk about was just generally guns as a topic, period, and gun control as a topic, period. It's something I'm pretty passionate about. I personally hate guns. One of the stakeholders that I worked closely with throughout this process loves guns. They couldn't understand why I had such a distaste for them. I don't understand why we need a device that's only purpose is to kill. They would tell me it's not only to kill. It's also for target practice. I would ask, "What are you practicing for?" Either way, we'll put that to the side.

Alan Cohen:
Well, we couldn't agree on much in terms of whether or not we think guns are a good thing or a bad thing in the world. One thing we could absolutely agree on is we both dislike murder. That's enough to start to work on solutions together. Let's think about what is it that we can agree on and then let's start working on solutions together, instead of spending so much time getting on social media and villainizing, and trying to organize the world into good people and bad people.

George Mason:
Okay, well, this would be so hopeful politically for us as well right now, because we seem to have grown farther and farther apart in our parties. But Alan, in the few minutes we have remaining, I want to go back to, you were talking about empathy and your concept oof compassion in this process. Now you're moving from the hard science to the soft science. You're moving from the data to the human element. I think it's getting into the God part of Good God. So I'd love to hear, when you think about what gets you up in the morning and you think about your own faith journey, is there anything that you would point to that that says, it's this vertical aspect that really animates this horizontal aspect of my work. What about your own story might connect with other people as to why their faith should lead them to act in these ways?

Alan Cohen:
You know, I guess I'd say that I was raised Jewish and my Jewish faith is important to me. At the same time, I have been the kind of Jew that would say, "I'm Jewish, but only on my parents' side." I only tend to go to temple on holy days, but culturally it was deeply, deeply important and has been deeply important to my family, and really understanding the history of my people and the mantras of we shall overcome has been really important. I don't know if it's really because of faith or because that faith to me was a conduit to just general morality decisions and frameworks for what is moral. But I tend to believe one of the reasons I and so many others are ever drawn to a religion or even drawn to politics, or drawn to any number of things in our life is that I think humans are hardwired to care about fairness. I do. I think we're hard wired to care about fairness.

Alan Cohen:
I know because of my work in early childhood education, that the brain is really a social brain and that our interactions with one another is deeply important to development and deeply important to how we feel in terms of our own happiness as human beings. So I tend to come at this work and I tend to try as hard as I can to more and more craft my entire life around the principle of general compassion. I believe that if we can lean into the idea that we should be compassionate towards one another, that we should think about how our actions are affecting each other and that if we actually take the time to look at the faces of our neighbors and think about how the look on our neighbor's face makes us feel, that we're going to realize that it is in each of our own self-interest to make sure that our neighbors are happy too, because it's going to make us happier.

George Mason:
Wonderful. Well, I think that you have distilled the essence of all religious traditions when you talk about compassion. So to live it and to operate out of it is a spiritual impetus. So thank you, Alan Cohen, for all you do through CPAL and in our community. We look forward to working with you and praying for you in your work in the days and years ahead.

Alan Cohen:
Thank you, George. I will say I've been a long time admirer of yours, and thank you for all the work that you do. I'm excited to be a friend and a collaborator going forward.

George Mason:
Terrific. All right, well, thanks for being on Good God, and we'll talk to you again.

Alan Cohen:
All right. Take care. Bye.

George Mason:
Bye, bye.

George Mason:
Thanks so much for continuing to tune into Good God. We've enjoyed having these episodes produced, over a hundred of them now, usually in a studio, but now we're doing so through computer technology in this time of social isolation. We're all trying to be careful with one another, but we also want to be careful to cultivate our spirit during this time. Not to be discouraged, not to be despairing, but to be encouraged and to encourage one another. So thank you for tuning in. We hope you appreciate these as much as we enjoy being able to offer them to you as a gift.

Speaker 3:
Good God is created by Dr. George Mason. Produced and directed by Jim White. Social media coordination by Cameron Vickery. Good God, conversations with George Mason, is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God and faith and the common good. All material copyright 2020 by Faith Commons.