Salt Lake Community Action Program
Catherine Hoskins, Executive Director
Joe Duke-Rosati, Deputy Director
Virginia Walton, Neighborhood Councils
764 South 200 West
Salt Lake City, Utah 84101
(801) 359-2444
(801) 355-1798 fax

Unemployment in the Salt Lake City region in 1994 is about as low as unemployment gets, having dropped to the 4 percent range in a situation where "just about anybody who wants a job can have one," Joe Duke-Rosati says.

But low unemployment alone isn't sufficient to guarantee a rosy situation for working poor people, and Utah has plenty of them. Families are large in Utah, where Mormon and Catholic families boost average family size to the nation's highest (and, in a somewhat related statistic, average per capita income to near the nation's lowest). Further, a high proportion of the jobs available are relatively low-paying positions in tourism and government; and even mining jobs pay relatively poorly in this anti-labor "right-to-work" state. And finally, hordes of migrants to the region from California, not to mention Mexico and Asian countries, have put intense pressure on housing here, with an apartment vacancy rate hovering below 2 percent and rents for one-bedroom units ranging up to $600 a month.

"We tell working-poor families to use their resources to get the best housing they can afford and then let us take care of their food needs," said Virginia Walton, who oversees food pantries at Salt Lake CAP's seven neighborhood service sites, which passed out some 18,000 food boxes in the past year.

There's plenty of work here for a Community Action Program to do, and this one -- like most CAPs a legacy of the '60s-era Great Society -- provides a range of emergency services for the region's poor people: food pantries, weatherization services, information and referral and the community's Head Start program.

But this CAP -- a private non-profit not directly attached to local government and thus somewhat insulated from political pressures against raising hell and making waves -- goes beyond traditional emergency-service provision in two areas: It's a powerful participant in regional advocacy efforts to change things for poor people; and it mounts effective and creative programs aimed at going beyond charity to build self-sufficiency in the people it serves.

In its advocacy efforts, Salt Lake CAP worked with regional coalitions to get a ground-breaking Medicaid waiver through the legislature, with the result that EVERY youngster in Utah who's 18 or younger and belongs to a family earning no more than 100 percent of poverty is eligible for Medicaid, period.

This year, the same coalition hopes to extend that no-limits policy to bring Medicaid coverage to every Utahn below the poverty line, rather than the 47 percent of poor adults who currently fit into the limited categories eligible for aid -- primarily elderly, disabled, and single parents. CAP activists and other coalition members also helped negotiate SPED (Single Parent Employment Demonstration), an exciting welfare-reform pilot program, now under way, that removes the work disincentives from AFDC and replaces them with incentives to work and a system that doesn't penalize welfare recipients for trying to move back into the economic mainstream.

The CAP also established and continues to work with Salt Lake City's various Neighborhood Councils, which give residents a voice in city affairs and municipal decisions that affect their neighborhoods.

The organization's model self-suffiency efforts include: