Income Supports: For those who are unemployed, cannot work, or earn a low wage, income supports help fill the gap between their income and self-sufficiency, allowing them to support their families.

 Workforce Development: For those who work, employment is the foundation of self-sufficiency.

For many families living at or slightly above the Self-Sufficiency Standard, the sudden loss of some or all of their income means they are immediately floundering with bills they cannot pay and basic needs they can no longer meet. For other families, a Self-Sufficiency Wage is difficult or impossible to attain due either to having a disability that limits or prohibits work or having a job that simply pays low wages. Income supports, such as food stamps, child care assistance, or a housing subsidy, play a vital role in bridging the gap between a layoff and the next job opportunity or between low wages and what it takes to actually make ends meet.

A myriad of challenges plague the income supports system in the nation and in Illinois:

• Supports are designed to help struggling families, but often fail to make it into the hands of many who are eligible due to a lack of information about existing programs and barriers within the application system.
• Many of the systems in place to connect eligible people with income supports rely on outdated policies and procedures causing lots of red tape for people in need of assistance.
• Benefit amounts do not reflect actual need and are often too low to make a meaningful difference for families struggling to make ends meet.
• As families are successful in securing employment and increasing wages they fall into a policy gap where their incomes are too high to qualify for supports, but not high enough to get by.

Strategies for strengthening Illinois’ income supports system include:

• Create a service delivery system that offers multiple points of entry and access to reach all families in need, including effective use of technology and expanded relationships with local community-based organizations for education and enrollment assistance.
• Streamline and simplify existing policies by expanding local office business hours, providing language assistance, increasing or eliminating asset limits, and eliminating duplicative documentation and verification requirements.
• Increase benefit levels to reflect actual costs for goods and services, and address the gap between existing wages and the cost of basic needs.
• Adjust eligibility levels to allow families to increase wages without losing vital supports until income achieves level of wage adequacy .

Strategies for bolstering the path toward self-sufficiency in Illinois require attention in two areas: on the one hand, we must build a skilled workforce. On the other, we must ensure that there are good, quality job opportunities available and that there are natural linkages between workforce development, education, and training opportunities, and jobs:

• Ensure that programs for the hardest to employ—those with the greatest barriers to securing work—are implemented and funded to scale. These programs include the key workforce education and training programs of Transitional Jobs, Job Training and Economic Development grants, and the Employment Opportunity Grant program. 
• Blend adult basic skills education and English language services with postsecondary education and training, including more emphasis on advisory services, college success courses, peer support, and other student support and on providing career pathways to explicitly prepare people for the next level of education and employment.
• Ensure that flexible, need-based financial aid is available to adult learners in a variety of educational/training arrangements (e.g., part-time students who work).
• Seek ways to strengthen the alignment between workforce development and economic development. Create and support regional, sector-based partnerships among businesses, educational agencies, and workforce organizations to ensure that education and training reflect what is valued in the labor market and help lead to family-supporting careers.
• Develop income support strategies such as stipends, scholarships, or needs-related payments that support adult learners while they participate in training or education programs. 

 Asset Building: Create opportunities for Illinois families to build savings and accrue assets so they not only get by, but get ahead.

 Measuring Poverty

The Self-Sufficiency Standard illustrates a bare-bones budget that only allows for families to meet their basic needs. For a family living right at self-sufficiency, economic stability is precarious; just one seemingly minor incident – a car breaking down, a tooth needing to be pulled - can set a family on a downward spiral of tardy payments, late fees, ruined credit, and eventually even large consequences like eviction. In order to be truly economically stable, families must build a financial cushion to fall back on for emergency expenses and to help them move toward economic prosperity.

For lower-income families, there are many barriers to saving, such as high initial deposit requirements for savings accounts, that often have the effect of turning people toward alternative products. Few regulations exist on alternative products to protect those without less than perfect credit from the traps of predatory lending. Low-income families need the support of public policies that promote asset building so that all Illinoisans may participate in and benefit from our economy:

• Create asset-building opportunities for Illinois families and communities through the expansion of matched-savings programs, financial education incentives, and children’s savings accounts for all born in Illinois.
• Protect consumers from financial products that erode financial stability and ensure they are fully informed by further regulating predatory lending (payday loans and longer-term installment loans), limiting credit card marketing to college students, clarifying risky aspects of mortgages, and creating transparency in the mortgage lending process.
• Promote the development of financial products – like no-fee savings accounts - that will give low-income individuals the opportunity to participate in mainstream financial services and build the skills to build assets for the future.

The Self-Sufficiency Standard makes it abundantly clear that just because someone is not officially poor does not mean they have a standard of living that allows them to fully function and participate in American life.

The traditional way the United States has measured and tracked hardship - with the federal poverty measure - was devised over four decades ago as a one-size-fits-all approach to income adequacy based on a single factor—the cost of food—at a time when families, on average, spent one third of their income on food. It fails to account for the costs of the broader spectrum of basic needs, the variations in family sizes and types, and the variation of costs across different geographies. Annual adjustments to the measure do not factor in the ballooning cost of health care coverage or the increasing portion of monthly income that goes to taxes and child care—a much larger share than 40 years ago. Additionally, the measure is not sensitive to the value of income supports such rental assistance or food stamps or the impact of tax credits, making it difficult to assess the how these affect families’ bottom lines.

The poverty measure is now an incomplete and outdated way of measuring economic security and stability—one that now measures deprivation rather than income adequacy.Measuring Poverty in America