If the Census Bureau proceeds with its plan to cut short efforts to count every person in the 2020 Census, the census won’t be a true portrait of America. And as a result, every community will have to live for the next decade under the harm of an incomplete count, with millions of people, especially those hit hardest by the pandemic,...
We Should All Answer the Door for Census Takers
In a time when we don’t answer our phones if we don’t recognize the number and we don’t answer our doors if we aren’t expecting visitors, Census Takers are taking on a challenging but important job. Starting July 30, census takers will begin interviewing households in Eastern Wisconsin. Click here to see if your community is included. ...
Following Federal Deregulation, 100,000 Wisconsinites Have Junk Insurance
A report from the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce found that enrollment in short-term health insurance plans increased about 27 percent from 2018 to 2019, and Wisconsin is among the ten states with the highest enrollment. Short-term plans do not have to cover the basic health care services required under the...
Trump Administration’s Latest ACA Sabotage Threatens Transgender Rights
Since its passage, opponents have tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act and failed. President Trump’s administration has taken many steps toward undermining the health law that brought access to health insurance for 22 million people. The ACA worked to reduce racial disparities in access to insurance, and enacted consumer protections...
Working Towards an Anti-Racist Future
Kids Forward staff is angry, devastated, and distraught by the killing of George Floyd, another victim of brutality, in a long line of callous and violent disregard for Black lives in this country, in our state, and in our home city of Madison, Wisconsin. The perpetrator of this brutality is white supremacy and the extraordinarily rigid...
Progress Amidst the Crisis
Last month, we shared some of the ways that youth in custody and the staff who serve them are more vulnerable to COVID-19. We also urged Wisconsin officials and administrators to follow guidelines from Youth Correctional Leaders for Justice to reduce the risk of infection in juvenile detention facilities. The guidelines included best...
The Work of Undocumented Immigrants Supports the Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund. So Why Are They Barred from Receiving Benefits?
Undocumented immigrants have played a part in depositing over a hundred million dollars in Wisconsin’s Unemployment Insurance trust fund over the past decade, yet the federal government excludes them from collecting unemployment benefits paid for from the fund. This exclusion is part of a larger pattern in which workers who are...
People in Wisconsin Won’t Count if we Don’t Count All People in Wisconsin
Wisconsinites have experienced years of redistricting, maps analyzed in private meetings, and fingers pointed over gerrymandering. All of this leaves a bad taste over how some Wisconsinites are represented in our government. While the federal courts have delayed the trial date in Wisconsin’s partisan redistricting, one thing we can...
Achieving Equity in Early Learning
In order to know where we need to go to achieve equity in early learning, we need to know where we’ve been. Using data from 2016, Kids Forward has created a baseline report as a point of departure. The findings in this report will be updated to see where we have gone since 2016. That more current data, along with increased community...
Achieving Equity in Early Learning: A Baseline Report on Race and Ethnicity in Wisconsin Shares, YoungStar and Four-Year-Old Kindergarten
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