Basic Needs Recommendations

The Recommendation: Ensure Families with Young Children Have Economic Security and Opportunities for Wealth-Building and Long-Term Economic Prosperity

The Strategies:

STRATEGY 8.1: Provide direct cash payments to low- and middle-income parents.

STRATEGY 8.2: Support a broad spectrum of parents, guardians, and caregivers of young children to get and sustain careers that provide a living wage, opportunities for wealth-building, benefits, worker protections, family-friendly policies, and opportunities for career progression.

STRATEGY 8.3: Make more equitable entrepreneurial and small business investments to diversify the power to shape culture.

Parents and caregivers with low and middle incomes are struggling to make ends meet both because they feel they do not earn enough and because paying for early care and education, healthcare, and basic needs to ensure a safe and healthy childhood is expensive and financial supports are not readily available to everyone who needs them.

More than a quarter of Durham’s young children (26 percent) live in a home where the head of household’s income is at or below poverty level.(1) As the ECAP report “Our Family Support System” section outlined, these challenges of poverty and economic disempowerment are rooted in historical and ongoing white supremacy, racism, and anti-Black racism specifically.

The County and large employers like Duke and Durham Public Schools have recently raised minimum wages to $15 per hour, in large part thanks to national and local organizing movements like the Fight for $15. However, parents continue to report financial insecurity in Durham. Many parents, especially young parents, expressed the need for more opportunities to increase their pay through training and professional development that is accessible for working parents.

(1) Duke Center for Child and Family Policy and Durham County. “State of Durham County’s Young Children.” (2021). Retrieved from: https://www.dconc.gov/home/showdocument?id=20751.

Community Voices:

• "It's hard to live decent even with a good job" - Durham parent

• "Work at Duke and still cannot afford a decent living" - Durham parent

• “Minimum wage isn’t enough” - Durham parent

• "Good employment for parents because if mom need 2 jobs to take care of kids how can she invest in her child’s education as well." - Durham parent

• “MONEY. But it’s true. You need money for the food. You need money for housing. You need money for everything and for the needs. If my parents would have had enough money they probably could have owned a larger house that had plenty of food and a proper and safe space to be in in a safer environment.” - 9th grader in Durham Public Schools

The Recommendation: Ensure Families with Young Children Have Access to Enough Affordable, Culturally-Relevant, Healthy Food Every Day

The Strategies:

STRATEGY 10.1: Make enrollment in supplemental food and nutrition benefits programs, especially during times of disaster and recovery, easier and more flexible for eligible families with small children.

STRATEGY 10.2: Expand access to healthy, culturally relevant food to all families with young children who need it, focused on addressing racial injustices in our food system.

STRATEGY 10.3: Increase access to healthy and culturally relevant foods in early learning and pre-K-3rd grade settings.

Having healthy, nutritious, culturally relevant food is vital for all human beings and a community obligation, yet not all families and children in Durham have sufficient, healthy and nutritious foods. As of 2019, 17.6% of children under age 17 in Durham faced food insecurity.(1) We know that food insecurity has only worsened as a result of the pandemic and resulting family economic insecurity.

Families shared the stigma associated with accessing food supports. Experiencing food insecurity is inherently stressful for families, and can be especially traumatic when families are not treated with dignity and respect when applying for SNAP benefits, visiting a food pantry, or accessing other types of food support.

There are racial inequities at all levels of our food system that are deeply rooted in the founding of this country—a founding which depended on land theft, indigenous genocide, and forced labor of enslaved African people. The resulting distribution of land, resources and capital has historically determined who has access to healthy, nutritious food and who decides what food is grown and which neighborhoods have access.(2,3)

While it is important to ensure that children have access to healthy, culturally relevant food (as defined by each community) in the short-term, it is also critical to address the underlying root causes that lead to injustices in our food system. Access to healthy, culturally relevant food is wrapped up in land ownership, economic and political autonomy and changes to our food system will be required to see sustainable change in this area.

(1) Feeding America. “Child Food Insecurity in Durham County: Before COVID-19.” (2021). Retrieved from: https://map.feedingamerica.org/county/2019/child/north-carolina/county/durham.

(2) Alkon, Alison Hope, and Agyeman, Julian. Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability. (2011).

MIT Press.

(3) Gilbert, et al. “The Loss and Persistence of Black-Owned Farms and Farmland: A Review of the Research Literature and Its Implications.” Journal of Rural Social Sciences, 18(2). (2002). Retrieved from: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jrss/vol18/iss2/1/.

Community Voices

• “[The administrative staff enrolling us for SNAP] don’t listen to us. When we ask questions they say things like, ‘these are not my guidelines’, ‘I just work here.” - Durham parent

• "The staff were rude when I went to the food bank and I won't go back." - Durham parent

• "I would also like some type of cooking class for mother’s on how to prepare healthy fun meals for toddlers. I’m sure all this is available somewhere in Durham, but not for poverty stricken at risk youth, or single Mother’s etc." - Durham parent

• “Let’s be honest most kids do not eat or do not want their lunch food because of what’s in it. They give you bad quality of food. We know that kids have developing brains and all that stuff. It’s better if we start in the beginning with elementary kids. So that once they grow by then when they become adults they already have strong, healthy minds and have more access to everything and probably help their own communities as well.” - 9th grader in Durham Public Schools

• "Provide more nutritious food options in school meals & snacks." - Durham parent

The Recommendation: Provide Reliable and Free or Low-Cost Transportation to Early Childhood Services

The Draft Strategies:

STRATEGY 12.1: Ensure the interests of parents and families with young children are represented in city, county, and regional transportation planning and decision-making.

STRATEGY 12.2: Gather rider data to advocate for bus stops and bus routes that are closer to child care providers, medical facilities, and other commonly visited early childhood services.

STRATEGY 12.3: Explore options for microtransit to fill in the gaps in public transportation for families with young children.

Parents and families repeatedly shared that transportation is a major barrier to accessing services like healthcare for themselves and their children and child care so they can go to work. Recent data reveal that 16.1% of Durham BIPOC households do not own a vehicle and only 28% of residents are “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the ease of travel by bus.(1)

Many families expressed challenges with transportation to child care homes and centers. Only 12.6% of Family Child Care Homes in Durham offer transportation and only 7.5% of centers offer transportation.(2)

Research suggests that cities prioritize “15-minute (or less) neighborhoods for babies” as an important strategy to shorten distances to key early childhood services and support healthy development for our youngest residents.(3)

(1) Transit Equity Campaign. “Durham County Resident Survey.” (2019). Retrieved from: https://bikedurham.org/transit.

(2) Child Care Services Agency. Durham ECAP Data Request. (February 2021).

(3) Vincelot, Julien and Watanatada, Patrin. Bernard Van Leer Foundation. “The Effects of Transportation on Early Childhood Development. (June 2019). Retrieved from: https://earlychildhoodmatters.online/2019/the-effects-of-transportation-on-early-childhood-development/.

Community Voices:

• "The afterschool programs and activities that are available are never at times compatible with my work schedule. I can't take them there." - Durham parent

• "In our Hispanic culture, in our home countries, it is our families who help us raise our children. When my kids were little I paid a friend to take care of them. I had to wait for a lottery pick to be assigned (for E/HS). When I did (finally hear about being placed in a center), I had to choose between continuing to work and my child’s education because of my job. There was no transportation available (to or from the center/provided by the center). I decided to accept the spot and take my child to school." - Durham parent

• “Now my only concern is that if you don’t have a vehicle none of the previous mentioned attractions are easily accessible. (Parks, museum of life in science, YMCA etc)" - Durham parent

• “Babies are not safe on the bus + have to have a car seat in an Uber of Lyft => could one be integrated into buses?” - Transit Plan Community Listening Session

• “The neighborhood I live in is dangerous and there is a section with no sidewalk or grass, so I have to run in the street pushing my daughter in a stroller to get to the bus stop.” - Durham parent through the Durham Transit Equity Campaign