A reporter recently asked me about income inequality in DuPage County and the suburbs in general. It is a topic that has received much attention because of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and there has been a particular focus on the divide between the top one percent of wealthy people and the rest of us. Of course, I wanted to help out the reporter, so I spent some time looking up data, learning about various ways to calculate income inequality, and thinking about what the data were actually telling me.

Administrators of public funds as well as private philanthropists want to get the most out of their dollars, so they often look for concentrations high-need populations and work to establish programs in those places.  However, I believe that focusing on geographic concentrations of need when designing and delivering human services may not be the best strategy.  In fact, it could be exactly the wrong strategy for today’s communities.

There is a lot of confusion about just how poverty is defined, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to clarify the terminology. When I started working in this field, I incorrectly believed that the poverty level was the amount below which a household did not have adequate resources to meet its basic needs. Silly me!

Welcome to the website of the DuPage Federation on Human Services Reform, and welcome to our blog page.  This feature of our newly designed website will discuss issues that we hope you find to be interesting, enlightening, and even sometimes entertaining.  In other words, we want to have a conversation with our readers about health and human services issues, and, like any blog page, we want to hear from you too.  Your opinions, thoughts, and observations about the topics we cover are an essential part of the conversation that will help us all understand and improve the health and human services system.

This could be a photograph of a home in DuPage County. It’s not, but it could be. This home is located in a suburban community on the east coast. In this home, a young woman was enslaved as a domestic servant for years. A major misconception of human trafficking is that many people think it doesn’t happen where they live or where they work. However, what we’ve learned through our anti-trafficking efforts over the past couple of years is that if you open your eyes and look beneath the surface, you will find it.