Yesterday, WCCF and its Vision 2020 partners, WISCAP and the WI Head Start Association, released the second edition of our Vision 2020 Report Card. The report card grades the state’s progress in four key areas related to poverty: early care and education, access to family-supporting wages, healthy children, and safe and affordable housing. Both the report card and the full, detailed report are available online. Here’s our press release about it.

We timed our release to coincide with the statewide poverty summit taking place in Milwaukee yesterday and today, be didn’t manage to generate much media attention, party because the Institute for Research on Poverty released a big poverty report the same day, and they presented on theirs at the conference. However, there is an important difference between their report and ours. While the IRP report provides a good snapshot of poverty in Wisconsin and examines the strengths and weaknesses of how poverty is usually measured, it is silent on the matter of solutions to poverty. Our report card is all about finding systemic ways to combat poverty at its roots. We believe talking about the severity of poverty is only useful if it leads to productive conversations focusing on what to do about it.