CIPA Domestic Capstone: Multi-Generational Poverty

Zachary German is a second-year CIPA fellow and a CIPA admissions ambassador. He is concentrating his studies on Social Policy, with a specific focus on health care.  You can read his full bio here.

This past fall semester, I was enrolled in the CIPA Domestic Capstone course to fulfill my professional writing requirement.  I was on a small team consisting of only one other CIPA fellow and myself.  For our project, we chose to work on developing a framework to address multi-generational poverty concerns.  This 2Gen framework will manifest terminally through a website and several interactive tools designed to provide a snapshot view of key indicators that are representative of the economic well-being of a specific community.  We intend for our final product to be used by communities and policy makers to inform new policies regarding family poverty.

The scale of our project was concentrated on New York and we focused on stratifying poverty at the county-level.  Our project was innovative in the respect that most current poverty stratification efforts focus on the state-level.  This state-level approach, however, fails to address unique concerns affecting specific communities.  Therefore, in geographic terms, we chose to scale down our project to provide a more tailored and personal approach.

Our project was challenging, exciting, and rewarding since no one had done what we did before.  One great success for our project is that we have set up a foundation for future capstone teams to pick up where we will have left off.  There is so much room for opportunity, and great need for the continuation of this project.  Who knows? Maybe you will be the next one to take on the challenge and continue the work that is being done.

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