Good afternoon.

And welcome.

I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean here

at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

And I couldn't be more delighted to see all of you here

with us this afternoon.

Today's event would not have been possible

without generous support from the National Poverty Center

and its interim chair, Sandy Danziger.

I also want to thank the School Social Work

for cosponsoring today's event.

I know that many students from social work are here

with us, very welcome.

We're delighted that you're here with us, too.

We're pleased to be joined by some senior members

of the university administration, Tim Lynch,

who is the university's general counsel.

And Lisa Rudgers who's Vice President

for Global Communications.

We're delighted that both of you are here with us as well.

Well, thank you for coming here to join us,

to learn from the School of Social Work

and the Ford School's own Professor Luke Shaefer

and coauthor Kathy Edin.

They presented their work which you were about to hear

about in Washington DC,

to multiple audiences of policymakers.

And I know that they are going to explore some

of the really important policy issues and implications

of the research that they have been doing with us here today.

Luke and Kathy's book, "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing"

in America, has been featured in the Atlantic,

the New York Times, Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune,

and I could go and on.

It has received considerable very well deserved attention.

[ Applause ]

So all of the press

and policymaker attention is really noteworthy

but most importantly it really amplifies a crucial finding

in Luke and Kathy's book.

And that is that there are 1.5 million American households

living in poverty and extreme poverty,

and that that number is increasing.

That's really a striking number and something

that should really garner a lot of our attention.

During years of on-the-ground research throughout the country,

Luke and Kathy have documented families who are struggling

under these extreme conditions, connecting a very real face

to that shocking data.

Luke and Kathy will delve further

into the research methods and findings during their talk.

But first, I wanted to tell you a little bit more about them.

Luke's research focuses on the effectiveness

of the US social safety net in serving low-wage workers

and economically disadvantaged families.

Luke has pursued policy advocacy at both the state

and the national levels.

And prior to coming to Ann Arbor, he participated

in Chicago's anti-poverty policy initiative successfully helping

to raise the Illinois minimum wage and expand access

to health care, access to health care to low income families.

With Kathy, he recently presented their poverty research

to the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

He is an associate professor at the School of Social Work

and he very recently joined the Ford School faculty this year,

we're delighted to have him on board.

Kathy Edin is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor

at Johns Hopkins University, where she specializes in study

of people living on welfare.

Over the years, Kathy's books have tackled very tough

and important social challenges, including making ends meet,

how single mothers survived on welfare, and low-wage work

with current dean of the School of Social Work, Laura Lein.

And doing the best I can fathering

in the intercity with Timothy Nelson.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development,

the National Institutes of Health,

and the National Science Foundation,

among others have founded-- have funded her poverty research.

She's a trusty of the Russell Sage Foundation, and she serves

on the Department of Health

and Human Services advisory committee for poverty to search,

for poverty research centers at several universities,

including here at Michigan.

Last year when she became a member of the National Academy

of Sciences and the American Academy of Political

and Social Sciences as well.

So Kathy, thank you much for traveling

and joining us here today to share your work

with Luke with our community.

Just a quick note about today's format,

Luke and Kathy will make their presentation

and then welcome questions from the audience.

Beginning at about 4:40 p.m.,

members of the Ford School staff will walk up and down the aisles

to collect your questions.

You should have received a card when you came in.

Please white your questions on that card.

If you are watching us online, please twit your questions

into us using #policythoughts.

So, after the program, "$2.00 A Day", will be available

for purchase and signing in the Great Hall.

And I hope you will stay with us to continue the conversation

and also to have your books signed by Luke and Kathy.

And so, with no further ado, I'm delighted to welcome Luke

and Kathy to the floor.

[ Applause ]

>> Thanks Dean Collins for such a warm

and personal introduction.

I'm going to start with a story

because a story is how we got here.

Sometimes graduate students want to know how you come

up with ideas for research.

My failproof recipe is to spend a lot of time with folks

out in the field and this was very much a story

of how just immersing yourselves in your daily life with lots

of poor people, allows you to see something new.

So, as Dean Collins mentioned, at the beginning of my career,

I spent six years running

around the country interviewing low-income single mothers

about their budgets with the dean in School

of Social Work, Laura Lein.

And because of that experience,

I kind of have a mental calculator in my head.

If we go at a dinner tonight, I might look at you

and suddenly say, "So how do you make ends meet?"

That kind of became a habit over those early years.

I had gone on after welfare reform

that was published in 1997.

I just studied the family and study the working poor.

But in 2010, I came to Baltimore to study the lives of a group

of people, my colleagues

and I had been following since the mid-1990s.

These were young people who had been zero to seven

in the mid-'90s all born in public housing

and we've been following their lives over the years

to see how they would turn out.

And so, in 2010, as they were reaching adulthood,

I came to Baltimore.

And I-- you know, I started hanging out in the neighborhood

and of course several and many of these young people were

in fairly disadvantaged circumstances.

But one day I went and visited the home of Ashley.

Ashley lived in the Latrobe Homes with her mother,

her brother, elderly uncle and sometimes a cousin.

And she had just a baby.

The baby was two weeks old.

When we arrived at the house, Ashley was visibly [inaudible].

She looked depressed.

She was, you know, holding her baby over her shoulder

but she was having a hard time adequately supporting her

baby's head.

Of course, there's only-- there's hardly any furniture

in the house and so Ashley sat out on the only chair

in the kitchen and I sat on the floor

and she just gave me the perfect purview into the kitchen.

This is an old trick I learned from Dean Lein, you know,

she was always looking in the kitchen cabinets

to see what was in there.

And I quickly notice there was no food in the house,

nor was there any baby formula.

When I began asking Ashley, of course, how she made ends meet,

what I quickly learned is

that there was not cash coming to the household.

Nobody had a job.

Nobody was getting anything from [inaudible].

In fact, nobody in the family was even getting food stamps.

What they did have was housing subsidy.

So I started wondering, you know, is this is thing?

Are there a group of people who might claim something from the

in kind safety net but have no cash?

So I kind of tucked that thought in the back-- in my back pocket.

And in the next day, we kind of invented a [inaudible]

to revisit Ashley because we were concerned

about her and the child.

We said, you know, Ashley,

we need to ask you few more questions.

Can we come back tomorrow?

And she said yes.

So, we gave her the $50 upon leaving, that we gave respond

at the end of an interview.

And the next day when we returned,

we met her at the door.

She was on her way out.

She's forgotten we were coming.

She had gotten home perm.

She looked terrific.

She no longer looked depressed.

She had kind of spring in her step.

She had gone down to the local Goodwell, which is just

down Broadway Avenue from the Latrobe Homes

and bought a new pantsuit.

And in fact, she was on her way to search for work.

It was her-- her confidence had been restored, you know, $50,

isn't that much money.

But for Ashley, it seems to be the difference

between really being despondent and sort of unable to function

and to get that kind of confidence encouraged

about and search for work.

So, this prompted a second thought which--

and this by the way, ended up being the arc of the book.

What was it about cash that was so special?

She had a house in subsidy.

But something about cash, just a little bit

of cash seems to be transformative.

And if it was true, there were a whole group of people living

with virtually no cash in America, you know,

since the advent of welfare reform.

And we did-- you know, we did learn that this story was linked

to welfare reform that we're living on virtually cash

in America's most advanced industrial country

or in the world's most advanced industrial country.

What does that look like?

And what were the implications for the well-being

of families and children?

So, it just so happen-- and this was pure serendipity

that I visited the School of Social Work

and given a talk a year before.

And Luke and I had cooked up a plan for him to come to Harvard

as a visiting professor.

So that fall-- I think it was an 8 o'clock,

one morning in Cambridge, I was teaching at Harvard at the time.

Luke came to my office.

I told him the story of Ashley.

I said I want to know if this is thing.

I knew enough about Luke to know that he was one

of the nation's experts

on [inaudible] data set called the Survey of Income

and Program Participation, which was in fact the best data set

to really answer the question of whether, there been a rise

in a form of destitution in America that was so deep,

we didn't even think it existed

and had actually never even looked to see if it was there.

And Luke can take the story from here.

>> Well, I think of that first date, an 8 a.m. meeting,

it's unclear if Kathy actually remembered I was coming.

[ Laughter ]

But we had a terrific time.

And she said, gee, I just wish, you know, I was visiting all

of these homes and I wish there were some data set

where we could see, was there some sort of trend

over the past 15 or 20 years of more families surviving

on virtually no cash income.