The Bigger Picture USC Bedrosian Center

Today, USC Senior Olivia Olson, speaks with USC Price Center for Social Innovation and Imagine LA to understand a partnership study that examined the complex social safety network for low-income working families to identify stagnation points.
The study looked at the total resources families have available and identified the threshold points where the safety net may actually become a barrier towards economic independence — a benefits cliff, where an increase in earnings leaves a family worse off, or a resource plateau, where such an increase leaves a family no better off in terms of the total resources available to them (income and benefits).
Most families receiving social benefits will experience lengthy resource plateaus, where an increase in earned income is met with the equivalent loss of some benefit. However, the ecosystem of social benefits is challenging to navigate and protects mainly families with extremely low incomes by providing childcare and housing benefits.
This partnership also created a tool for families to use to help with the complexities of the myriad benefits available to them, how these benefits overlap. Learn about the policy recommendations and demystify the complex social safety for low-income working families.
Olivia Olson, USC Dornsife Senior
Leilani Reed, Imagine LA Program Graduate and Ambassador
Jill Govan Bauman, President & CEO, Imagine LA
Brit Moore Gilmore, Director Of Business Development at Aneuvia | Social Enterprise & Small Business Consultant
Soledad De Gregorio, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Price Center for Social Innovation
Gary Painter, Professor, Chair of the Department of Public Policy, Director of the Sol Price Center for Social Innovation
Director, Homelessness Policy Research Institute

Even before the COVID pandemic brought the notion of precarity to the mainstream, many populations in the U.S. and abroad faced life through different types of insecurity.
In 2019, after hearing  story after story from students, the Leonetti/O'Connell Family Foundation created an emergency aid program. The project was co-designed with researchers at the USC Sol Price Center for Social Innovation and students experiencing precariousness.
Emergency Aid programs work! Using aid from this pilot program, students at USC and LACCD were able to continue schooling under tenuous circumstances.
So ... what now?
Our guests are:
Cara Esposito, ED of the Leonetti/O'Connell Family Foundation Gary Painter, Director of the Price Center for Social Innovation Hilary Olson, PhD Candidate, USC Price Victoria Ciudad-Real, Project Specialist Price CSI

Conversations about governmental and social services can get pretty wonky ... and yet ... they are often vital for making real change, particularly at the local level.
Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) allow governments to take risk without footing the bill unless & until there are results. Gary Painter from the Price Center for Social Innovation joins research partners Chris Fox and Susan Baines from Manchester Metropolitan University to share findings from recent evaluations of SIBs in the wild.
Some of the recommendations for making the tool better include increasing co-creation in the design and evaluation phases. Including affected communities is vital to making policy work, to making these programs do what they can & should do.
Our goal here is to take this wonky idea of how to have more innovation in the creation, funding, and production of social services ... and make it more clear. Are SIBs a way to move us from a "winner take all" society to a more egalitarian/democratic one?
 

The folks from the USC Safe Communities Institute stopped by to tell us all about the new LEWIS Registry. The LEWIS Registry is a crowdsourced public database for police officers who have been fired or resigned during an investigation of their behavior.
In addition to the front, public-facing, end there is a backend for use by Law Enforcement.

Olivia Olson speaks with Professor Jody Armour about the power of "word work to really make the frozen circumstances that somebody is stuck in dance, by playing them to their own melody."
In Prof Armour's latest book N*gga Theory, he focuses on the n-word to delve deeply into the social meaning behind the use of words. How can language challenge cultural boundaries? How can one word carry so much power?
Certain language is a form of mutual aid.
This is a powerful conversation on community. When the power of the state used language to sow inequality, how must we unlearn the language, how do we redefine the words we use to re-root community, to reclaim morality, to grow justice?
 
For links : bedrosian.usc.edu/bigpicture

Falling is the number one cause of injury and the seventh leading cause of death in adults ages 65 and older.
In “Breaking Down Silos to Improve the Health of Older Adults,” Richard Green, Patricia Harris, and Anthony Orlando make the case for Medicare coverage of home safety renovations to minimize injuries (and death) due to falls.
Olivia Olson speaks with Richard Green, Patricia F. Harris, and Anthony W. Orlando about their recent paper and the changes they hope to see in Medicare coverage.