Uniting to fight poverty summit hosted at Penn

Philadelphia is the most impoverished of the 10 biggest cities in the United States, according to a recently released report — but improvements are being made.

This fact was shared in a progress report released by the Mayor’s Office of Community Empowerment and Opportunity on Nov. 20, when the group hosted a Uniting to Fight Poverty Summit at Huntsman Hall on Penn’s campus. The event focused on poverty, inequality and race, as well as the city’s future.

The Mayor’s Office of Community Empowerment and Opportunity was founded in 2013 and its plan, Shared Prosperity Philadelphia, has been one of the initiatives aimed to help fight poverty. The plan has five main goals: economic security and asset building, housing security and affordability, access to public benefits, job creation and workforce development and early learning.

The summit on Friday opened with a keynote speaker, author Dale Russakoff, followed by breakout sessions, and ended with the release of the Shared Prosperity Philadelphia 2015 Progress Report by Mayor Michael Nutter and Eva Gladstein, the executive director of MOCEO.

According to the report, new benefit centers, called BenePhilly Centers, have helped provide the impoverished in Philadelphia with around $13 million in benefits over the past year. These centers help provide benefits and programs to Philadelphians that are eligible. The Office has also made many new partnerships in the past year to other organizations and businesses to increase the effort to reach their goals.

The report showed that A Running Start, an early learning plan for Philadelphian children aged zero to five, has been developed and is currently being implemented.

However, there is still a lot of work to be done to fight poverty in Philadelphia, which has the highest deep poverty rate of large cities in the U.S., according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

According to the report, 26 percent of Philadelphians still live in poverty, down only a little from the 26.3 percent reported in 2013. As Mayor Nutter hands the office over to his incoming successor, Jim Kenney, in January, time will tell whether this statistic will continue to fall over the next year.

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