Wonderful friends!

Even in “normal” times, one out of every four New Mexican children experienced food insecurity. During the pandemic, the number has increased to one out of every three, and in many rural communities, the numbers are as high as one out of every two. After a year of lockdowns, social distancing, and remote schooling, Appleseed’s fight to help families meet their basic needs is more profound than ever.

At New Mexico Appleseed we are leading the poverty prevention movement and our work impacts tens of thousands of low-income New Mexicans. We use best practices to address child hunger, child and family homelessness, family economic stability, and evidence-based policymaking. Below, you'll find our latest updates from these highlighted mission areas.

Like Einstein, we spend most of our time studying the problems of poverty, as that is the best way to understand what the solution should be. Join us on our intellectual journey and righteous mission to raise up all children and families to achieve their highest potential.

Thank you as always,

Jenny and the board and staff of New Mexico Appleseed



The word "hunger" is so outrageous that it's hard to even apply it to what might be happening just a few doors down from you. The word "food insecurity" is so sterile it doesn't capture how scary it is to wonder if you'll have your next meal—or not.

Appleseed is working directly with people and communities, and we have two bills in Congress right now that address this real and urgent problem.
Homelessness is so much more than people living under bridges.

It is the family in Cuba, NM we helped their school district find—with over 24 people living in one house along with their children sharing computers amidst distance learning.

It is the hundreds of families hiding in hotel rooms that dot the state because they can't pay old utility bills.

When the state announced that over 12,000 children were "missing" from school, we set out to find them. We are committed to finding every child who qualifies as homeless in the state. We know they're there.
What's the easiest and fastest way to help families get out of poverty? Give them cash and let them spend it as they choose (of course, poverty is more than a lack of access to cash...think power, support systems, information).

At Appleseed, we have two cash transfer pilots for inadequately housed students to see if $500 a month for 8 months—plus tutoring and coaching—results in improved grades, attendance and sense of wellbeing.
We'll be sure to keep you updated on our progress.
It boggles the mind that billions of dollars pass through state hands and we have no idea whether it's effective—or not.

For the past five years, New Mexico Appleseed has fought for an evidence-based policymaking tool. For the second year in a row, we've been able to eke out a small amount of money to create the Family Success Lab at the New Mexico Department of Health. The Family Success Lab's mission is to use integrated administrative data to discover and deploy evidence-based, data-informed and scalable solutions to common challenges facing vulnerable children and families.

If you want to stop seeing New Mexico's families caught in the vicious cycle of poverty, join us.
Every day at Appleseed is a rich environment filled with debate and reading and thinking. It is an intellectually rigorous organization with an incredible drive to get to the bottom of a problem and solve it.

If you want to join us in our journey, check out what's below—it's what we've been sharing in the office this month:
Esther Duflo's TED Talk
*From 2010 but remains relevant 11 years later.

"Esther Duflo takes economics out of the lab and into the field to discover the causes of poverty and means to eradicate it."

2009 MacArthur fellow Esther Duflo is pushing the field of development economics by studying specific causal relationships that lead to or perpetuate poverty. She looks at close-to-home issues: household behavior, education, access to finance and health.

At MIT, she's the founder and director of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research network that evaluates social programs. It's concerned less with wide-ranging policy than with specific questions. Sample: If school kids could get their uniforms for free, would attendance go up? What's an effective way to reward mothers for immunizing their babies? Randomized trials offer new insights toward creating global equity and prosperity. Her work may blur the lines between economics and activism, but it's a role Duflo not only considers comfortable but vital.
NPR's COMICS: Teaching in the Pandemic

It's been a year since teachers were handed an unprecedented request: educate students in entirely new ways amid the backdrop of a pandemic. In NPR's new comic series, they're illustrating one teacher's story each week from now until the end of the school year. In Episode 2, NPR illustrates Lori Chavez, a middle school social studies teacher in Kewa Pueblo, NM, as she discusses the importance of staying connected to your community during the lockdown.
Nice White Parents

We know American public schools do not guarantee each child an equal education. Two decades of school reform initiatives have not changed that. But when Chana Joffe-Walt, a reporter, looked at inequality in education, she saw that most reforms focused on who schools were failing: Black and brown kids. But what about who the schools are serving?

In this five-part series, she turns her attention to what is arguably the most powerful force in our schools: White parents.
Evicted

In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads.

Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.