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In the News…

Home Care Workers Get Minimum Wage: As Active Aging Week begins, the Department of Labor announced that the over 2 million home care workers in the US will earn minimum wage and overtime benefits starting January 1st, 2015. Home health aides — 90 percent of whom are women and 42 percent of whom are black or Latino –currently earn an average of $9.70 per hour. A Huffington Post article notes that the home health sector is one of the fastest growing occupations in the country, predicted to grow 70 percent from 2010-2020 as Baby Boomers age.

Kids Give! A report by the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University and the United Nations Foundation found that 90 percent of kids give to charity, sparking a discussion on how to get youth involved in giving . One of the report’s authors noted that “children whose parents talk to them about giving are 20 percent more likely to give than those whose parents don’t” and encouraged families and charities to find ways to engage kids in the giving and volunteering process. Read the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s article here or check out the study here.

Census Bureau Annual Report Released: The yearly report on poverty and income found that 21.8 percent of American children under the age of 18 lived in poverty in 2012 — and a Washington Post article notes that “the younger they are, the worse off they are.The percentage of children under the age of 5 living in poverty is 25.1 — and almost 1 in 10 live in extreme poverty.” Children of color are affected most with 37.9 percent of black children and 33.8 percent of Hispanic children living in poverty. Additionally, the statistics shows that 9.1 percent of Americans living in poverty are 65+.

The report also found that in today’s dollars, the median American household in 2012 makes less than in 1989. This is in stark contrast to the Forbes Top 400 list of the richest Americans, whose wealth has grown 15 percent since 2012 to a combined total of $2 trillion. Census data shows that households making over $191,000 are earning nearly what they had before the recession, yet the lower 80 percent are, on average, making significantly less than before the downturn, as noted in a NPQ article.

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