How are Families Really Doing? Part 1: Economic Security

In the coming days, we will be releasing a series of interviews with policy experts who participated in a event we hosted on November 22nd, “Poverty, Inequality, Mobility, Oh My,” where we explored different ways of assessing how families are doing post-Great Recession and how applying these different approaches to the design of public policies might improve the conditions and opportunities of low-income families.

In this interview, Matt Unrath, the Director of the National Family Economic Security Program at Wider Opportunities for Women, discusses WOW’s efforts to capture family wellbeing by creating Basic Economic Security Tables (BEST), which indexes family budget items and projects the necessary income that families would have to earn in order to cover those expenses. The results show that a staggering 45% of families are falling short of the incomes they need to be economically secure. Matt also offers policy prescriptions to improve the wellbeing of these families, including those to promote building the savings they need to weather a financial emergency or invest in ways to move up the economic ladder.

You can also follow along with Matt’s presentation from the event here.

Stay tuned for future interviews with Melissa Boteach with the Half in Ten Campaing on poverty, Indi Dutta-Gupta with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on income inequality, and Erin Currier with the Pew Economic Mobility Project on economic mobility.