REGIONAL SPOTLIGHT

Circles Central Florida/Poverty Solutions Group

Circles Central Florida (CCF) and its parent organization, Poverty Solutions Group, continued their pioneering work in the Regional Coach arena—building confidence to develop this regional hub into an “expansion chapter:” CCF is collaborating with Family Promise, a nonprofit transforming the lives of families experiencing homelessness, which has yielded another chapter in New Jersey; and stepping up as a partner chapter for the October 2023 Circles USA Leadership Conference.

Circles Coach

Southern Region

Circles USA’s poverty-reduction platform frames policy recommendations within the local, state, and national scope. This platform, informed by our original National Big View Team and authored in 2020 by Board Chair Joan Kuriansky, addresses six issues our chapters flagged as high priority: quality jobs, the “cliff effect” (a phenomenon that occurs when a pay raise at work triggers a disproportionate loss of government assistance), broadband access, healthcare, housing, and transportation. It also emphasizes CUSA’s commitment to addressing the structural biases that unjustly affect people of color and other historically marginalized communities.

Circles teams deepened and expanded their Big View work this year, tackling systemic change with collective knowledge drawn from government, schools, nonprofits, businesses, and philanthropies. Following a two-year pause for the pandemic, we also reinstated the National Big View Team that gathers BIg View champions from a wide variety of chapters across the country. This team will guide local and national campaigns in 2023 and beyond to address the cliff effect: one issue that poses an existential threat to working class families and unifies chapters across differences to build thriving economies, thriving communities, and thriving families.

Here, we spotlight ways that participants with lived experience of poverty shared their perspectives to shape immediate, practical solutions as well as policy change in 2022.

Big View

BIG VIEW SPOTLIGHT Cliff Effect

Circles NWA (Fayetteville, Arkansas) hosted an in-person learning event titled “The Cliff Effect: When Earning More Means Having Less.” Panelists at the livestreamed discussion included Circle Leaders who were part of the first cohort of the Circles NWA program and have personally experienced the cliff effect. Educator, performer, fashion designer, organizer, and entrepreneur Jeremiah Pickett (known professionally as Baang) emceed the event. The City of Fayetteville proclaimed October 18 “Cliff Effect Awareness Day.”

Circles Salt Lake (Salt Lake City, Utah), led by Executive Director Michelle Crawford, organized a hybrid panel discussion in early October to address the cliff effect. The talk was moderated by Salt Lake County Councilwoman Aimee Winder Newton, who also chairs the county’s Poverty Intergenerational Task Force.

Participants—mainly single or separated parents who had seen their incomes rise from 0 to 90% or more of federal poverty guidelines in Circles—talked about the difficulties of navigating Medicaid’s website to calculate benefits thresholds; the frustration of turning down job promotions to maintain an unstable financial status quo; and how small income gains can result in even bigger losses.

Bruce Forbes and Ame Sanders of Circles Upstate South Carolina found an innovative solution to their region’s lack of reliable transportation: vanpooling. These deeply rooted Greenville, South Carolina, residents are modeling how Circles chapters and Big View teams across the U.S. can leverage commercial, government, and faith-based resources to build transportation pathways in their own communities.

BIG VIEW SPOTLIGHT Transportation

“It’s the beauty of this Big View process: The direction that we’ve taken, this is totally replicable in any community that Circles serves right now.“

Bruce Forbes Special Projects Coordinator SHARE and Circles Upstate SC