Statement from Nicki Ruiz de Luzuriaga, Vice President, Economic Mobility Pathways, in response to today’s Income and Poverty report from US Census:

“Today’s report makes crystal clear: the United States can move the dial on poverty, even in the face of unprecedented social, economic, and health crises. Despite one of the greatest disruptions to the labor market in history, investments in the social safety net lifted 11.7 million people out of severe financial hardship and prevented another 5.5 million from falling into it. Research shows that living with the stressors of struggling to make ends meet actually makes it harder to climb the economic ladder. So, the upshot is that investments like these have the potential to pay significant, lasting dividends.

Yet here in Massachusetts, the picture is more complex. With some of the highest costs for child care and housing in the country, record federal investments were still insufficient to keeping the poverty rate from climbing. And like the rest of the nation, we cannot ignore the fact that the greatest job losses in the past year were concentrated among the lowest earners.

We know that structural issues drive a lot of this—from the gender pay gap to racism. Systemic change is urgent, but in the meantime, people are living with low wage jobs now. So it’s critical that they get the mentoring and support they need to further their education and secure better-paying work.

For individuals and families bolstered by the social safety net, sustainable economic mobility is about more than money alone. To make solutions stick, EMPath’s experience has shown that we must also transform the relationship between the people providing services and those receiving them. And transformations like this are possible when we apply the science of what it takes to problem solve and plan for the future when you’re living with intense trauma and stress.

Ultimately, economic mobility is possible when people experiencing poverty gets the tools, skills, and support they need get to out of it. And to get there means we need to work differently at every level: with individuals and families, across systems, and through policies that take change to scale.”

EMPath is a national non-profit that dramatically improves the lives of people struggling to make ends meet. Using our research-backed method for one-on-one support, we work directly people living in poverty to help them climb the economic ladder; we partner with human service providers to re-envision the systems that serve people experiencing poverty; and we conduct research to inform our practice and advocate to take what works to scale. This is how we seed the systemic change needed for every person experiencing poverty gets the tools, skills, and support they need get out of it—for good.