As a child, I lived with poverty for more than a decade and as a ward of Washington state at times homeless, other times hungry. With help from many sources, I was able to earn college and law degrees before practicing law in 1978. As CEO of the Rural Alaska Community Action Program Inc., the only community action agency in Alaska, I support our mission to empower low-income Alaskans through advocacy, education, affordable housing and direct services that respect our unique values and cultures.<\/p>\n
Representatives Tarr, Foster and Hopkins have introduced House Resolution 8 calling for the creation of a House Task Force on Poverty and Opportunity that directly addresses the poverty crisis in Alaska and fosters necessary dialogue between the public and Legislature.<\/p>\n
Approximately 80,000 Alaskans live with poverty, and another 70,000 benefit from programs providing resources to lift them out. COVID-19 has revealed economic vulnerabilities that were not anticipated when the War on Poverty began in the 1960s. Our state needs a new dialogue for finding modern solutions.<\/p>\n
Please support the legislation and help start this conversation.<\/p>\n
Sincerely,<\/p>\n
Patrick M. Anderson,<\/p>\n
CEO for RurAL CAP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our state needs a new dialogue for finding modern solutions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":70073,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":14,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-70072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70072\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70072"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=70072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}