Sustainable Employment

Collateral Damage: Homeless Children
.... mortgage crisis, soaring home foreclosures and..... economic meltdown on Wall Street tied to brokerage giants Merrill Lynch and Lehman Bros...... the collateral damage is a child ..... a wake-up call for all of us..... [ex:] The number of homeless children in Orange County is staggering. The latest figures from the Orange Co. Dept. of Education show that for the 2007-08 school year there were 16,422 homeless students - a 20 %increase from the previous school year's total of 13,130.

Byte Night!
Want to help with the homeless youth problem?       Check this out:
In the last decade, funds raised through Byte Night have been used to help thousands of young homeless people and adolescents facing life after care.
For further information about how to get involved contact Action for Children www.bytenightlocal.org.uk

Natural amenities may offset economic challenges facing remote communities    OSU
Economists at Oregon State University have discovered that remoteness is the main cause of disparities between communities that flourish and those that do not. The greater the distance between a community and its closest neighbor, the less likely it is to prosper. But the enhancement of natural amenities - the physical characteristics that make a location a nice place to live - can offset the degree to which remoteness matters in terms of attracting new households, and thereby entice businesses to locate in rural areas........ Community infrastructure has to do with physical services, such as transportation, water and sewer, power production and distribution, sanitation and communication management systems, and social services, such as education, science and technology and health care delivery. Add infrastructure to the knowledge and skill in a community's population and you get what Wu calls "accumulated capital". The degree of remoteness, natural amenities such as lakes to swim in and pull water from, and accumulated capital all contribute to the economic sustainability of a community. When these factors are favorable, wages are high, most people are employed, housing is affordable and communities thrive.

Fighting Poverty to Stabilize the Economy
The crisis on Wall Street might seem distant from poverty concerns, but the fate of the economy is clearly linked with poverty levels, particularly when unemployment rises. We need economic solutions that help every day Americans-not just Wall Street. Poverty has risen in recent years. Dr. Rebecca Blank of the Brookings Institute pointed, for example, to recently released 2007 poverty figures showing that poverty rose since 2006, and figures for 2008 are likely to be even worse. The current crisis should signal to lawmakers that we need to place greater focus on efforts to tackle poverty. Angela Glover Blackwell, CEO of Policylink, and chair of the Center for American Progress’s own task force on poverty, emphasized the importance of the goal to cut poverty in half in 10 years. Explaining the recommendations in the task force’s report, she emphasized the principles on which the report is based: promoting decent work, providing opportunity for all, ensuring economic security, and helping people to build wealth.

$100B Green-Collar Jobs Plan Recommended    OneWorld
Increased economic investment in clean energy sources could help revive the U.S. economy and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs across the nation, according to a new study released this week. "By investing $100 billion in the green economy, we can create 2 million good jobs in the next two years," said John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington, DC-based think tank that sponsored the study. The report (pdf), entitled, "Green Recovery - A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low Carbon Economy," shows that this year alone more than half a million Americans have lost their jobs due to the lingering energy crisis and economic downturn. "Our economy is in trouble," said Podesta. "Falling home prices, foreclosures, bank failures, a weaker dollar, rising prices for gas, food, and steel, and layoffs in the banking, construction, and manufacturing sectors are all indicators of serious economic strain."