Research by Author & Topic

Publications by Olivia Golden on Poverty and Safety Net

This report summarizes the roundtable "Infants and Toddlers in State and Federal Budgets: Yesterday's Choices, Today's Decisions, Tomorrow's Options" conducted by the Urban Institute, with support from the A.L. Mailman Family Foundation, on March 30, 2009. The roundtable's focus grew out of the widely perceived mismatch between sharply limited public investments on infants and toddlers and an accumulated body of research demonstrating the significance of the earliest years of life. We describe the group's diverse perspectives and wide-ranging discussion of strategies to address this mismatch.

In this commentary for The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif.), Olivia Golden and Sheila Zedlewski advise states to grab the federal dollars offered by the economic stimulus package to help pay for recession-driven increases in the demand for welfare.

In this commentary for SpotlightOnPoverty.org, Institute Fellow Olivia Golden lays out five strategic investments foundations can make to sustain the economic stimulus package's positive outcomes for low-income families.

As the director of the District of Columbia’s Child and Family Services Agency, Olivia Golden led reform of a system in federal receivership. Now, in Reforming Child Welfare, she uses her expertise as an administrator, an academic, and an advocate to pinpoint the factors that lead to success. “Writing from the inside,” she maintains, “makes it possible to analyze, in retrospect, what we thought we were doing, what it felt like, and what led us to good or bad choices.” By sharing her personal story, along with her analysis of the research literature and two other case studies in Alabama and Utah, Golden finds fresh insight on improving outcomes for imperiled children and families.

This chapter was part of an online effort by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and New Democracy Project to offer expert advice to the new administration as part of its Change for America book project (http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2008/changeforamerica/additionalcontributions.html). Washington’s new leadership, its authors say, should build on the Administration for Children and Families’ assets and focus on the interrelated goals of promoting family economic security and promoting healthy child and youth development. These twin goals can best be achieved through new strate­gic investments, capacity building and innovative partnerships, coordination across offices and departments, and collaboration with states and the private sector.

This paper for the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation conceptualizes a framework for a new safety net for low-income working families that is rooted in their most essential needs. It is organized around five key goals:(1) enabling parents to meet their family’s needs while working in lower-wage jobs, (2) helping families weather gaps in parental employment, (3) supporting parents’ job advancement, (4) helping parents combine work and child-rearing, and (5) improving children’s well-being and development. The paper describes these families’ circumstances, discusses gaps in current safety-net programs, and explores possible alternative approaches to meeting families’ most pressing needs.

This paper explores the key features of four essential federal-state-local programs that have offered supports to low-income families and individuals in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- housing, unemployment compensation, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It argues that the complexity of their structures and limited scale have inhibited their ability to respond effectively and quickly to the needs created by Hurricane Katrina. It recommends that national policymakers develop a set of disaster relief mechanisms better suited to address the large-scale cross-jurisdictional migration, diminished state fiscal capacity, increased demand for assistance, and other challenges that major disasters present.

About a quarter of American families with children work regularly but remain low-income. State and federal practitioners, policymakers, and national experts met in May 2005 to examine this group of working families that barely make ends meet despite "playing by the rules." This conference report lays out the salient point of the two-day roundtable and the thrust of a future agenda.

[Orlando Sentinel] As a high-ranking federal official in the late 1990s, Urban Institute senior fellow Olivia Golden was on the frontlines of welfare reform. Today, she oversees a major assessment of this legislative overhaul. In this look back at how low-income families have fared since 1996's reforms began putting more people in the workforce, the director of the Institute's Assessing the New Federalism project discusses welfare's successes and unfinished business.

Dramatic changes have occurred in the experience of low-income families, those who have been on welfare and those who haven't, since the mid-1990s. Assessing the New Federalism: Eight Years Later synthesizes much of what we've learned so far through intensive research, including a national survey of 40,000 American families, case studies, budgetary analysis, and a database of evolving state welfare rules. These findings offer a comprehensive picture of those leaving welfare and answer such questions as how many people recently off welfare are working and for how many hours.