OFF-KILTER with Rebecca Vallas The Century Foundation

For this week’s Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat down with a panel of UI experts and advocates who have been leading the charge: Rebecca Dixon, executive director of the National Employment Law Project; Andy Stettner, senior fellow at The Century Foundation; and Stephanie Freed, a freelancer turned UI organizer who founded and serves as the executive director of Extend PUA, which has organized tens of thousands of jobless workers in the fight to extend federal UI expansions during the pandemic.

In this week’s Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat down Representative Rosa DeLauro and two dear colleagues who have been leading the way on the fight to extend the child allowance beyond its first year: Indi Dutta Gupta, co-executive director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, and Dorian Warren, co-president of Community Change and one of the co-chairs of the Economic Security Project.

For this special relaunch episode of Off-Kilter, Rebecca Vallas talks with four of the disabled women leaders who've been making history on the front-lines of the ongoing fight for disability economic justice: Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA-7); Judy Heumann; Rebecca Cokley, Ford Foundation; and Mia Ives-Rublee, Center for American Progress.

This week, Off-Kilter’s bringing you a conversation Rebecca moderated at The Century Foundation earlier this week, on the historic opportunity to make long overdue improvements to Supplemental Security Income as part of #BuildBackBetter—featuring Sen Sherrod Brown, Rep. Raul Grijalva, and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, as well as a panel of disability and seniors’ advocates.
 
Guests: Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH); Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY); Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-CA); Nancy Altman, president, Social Security Works; Matthew Cortland, chronically ill, disabled lawyer and senior fellow, Data for Progress; Kristen Dama, managing attorney for SSI, Community Legal Services of Philadelphia; Tracey Gronniger, directing attorney, economic security, Justice in Aging; Mia Ives-Rublee, director, Center for American Progress Disability Justice Initiative; and Kathleen Romig, senior policy analyst, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
 
 
Show notes:
Event video: https://tcf.org/content/event/strengthening-ssi-must-part-building-back-better/
Polling: bit.ly/SSIpolling 
Follow #DemolishDisabledPoverty 
More on SSI: https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/550027-the-safety-net-program-congress-forgot?rl=1

Nearly 40 million people in the U.S. live below the official poverty line—which in 2021 is just $26,000 for a family of four. But while poverty is all too often portrayed as a personal failure, it’s actually the result of bad public policy choices. Public policy has purposefully erected barriers that deny access to basic needs, creating a society where people can easily become trapped in poverty—not because we as a nation lack the resources to lift them out, but because we are actively choosing not to. This is the premise of a new book called Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty, which looks at many of the policy choices conspiring to keep people poor and offers a roadmap of solutions that would eradicate poverty in the U.S. Rebecca sat down with the authors, Joanne Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox, for this week's pod.

Get the book: https://benbellabooks.com/shop/brokeinamerica/
National Diaper Bank Network: nationaldiaperbanknetwork.org
Alliance for Period Supplies: https://www.allianceforperiodsupplies.org/