Our Projects
True to our name, we are at heart an advocacy organization. The Community Advocates Public Policy Institute will, as needed, conduct research and prepare analyses that relate to poverty, its symptoms and its remediation. Unless the facts are known, advocacy cannot proceed. But developing concrete proposals to actually reduce poverty and its burdens—and then advocating for those policy changes—is our main work.
We are intensely engaged in the business of organizing, communicating and ultimately persuading policymakers to take action. The Institute has taken a leadership role in six major projects aimed at reducing poverty and improving the poor’s circumstances:
Transitional Jobs
In the midst of uncommonly high unemployment, the Public Policy Institute has worked closely with Milwaukee lawmakers to create wage-paying transitional jobs that allow low-income, unemployed men and women to do useful work and support themselves and their families. Our efforts have resulted in two significant pieces of legislation, the first to create and the second to expand the Transitional Jobs Demonstration Project, a $34 million program that will help get 4,000 Wisconsin residents back into the workforce. Additionally, as a local leader on transitional jobs, the Public Policy Institute helped to found the Milwaukee Transitional Jobs Collaborative, which seeks to obtain state and federal programs and funding to make transitional jobs available to Wisconsin’s unemployed. Read more about transitional jobs.
Milwaukee Addiction Treatment Initiative
Working closely with the Milwaukee County District Attorney and a diverse coalition of advocacy organizations, service providers and government agencies, the Public Policy Institute led Community Advocates’ effort to establish the innovative Milwaukee Addiction Treatment Initiative (MATI). The city’s poor population whose substance use disorder treatment needs frequently go unmet—and who often end up in jail, at enormous cost to the taxpayers, rather than in gainful employment paying taxes—would benefit enormously if MATI succeeds in dramatically improving the financing and delivery of addiction treatment in our community. Read more about the Milwaukee Addiction Treatment Initiative.
Mental Health Policy Initiative
The Mental Health Policy Initiative is a multiyear project that aims to improve state and local policies for individuals suffering from mental illness. Funded by a 2009 gift from Wildflower Communities, the Mental Health Policy Initiative seeks to increase funding for mental health services, ensure the availability of appropriate inpatient and outpatient mental health services in Milwaukee County, and improve the decision-making process among agencies that serve those with mental illness. Read more about the Mental Health Policy Initiative.
Community Justice Project
With the 2010 merger between Community Advocates and Justice 2000, the Public Policy Institute incorporated the Community Justice Project, which aims to strengthen the quality and efficiency of the criminal justice system, both in Milwaukee County and statewide. Funded in part by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, the Community Justice Project promotes a shift away from current policy that overutilizes incarceration to one that focuses on early intervention, treatment programs and community supervision, particularly for those individuals at greatest risk for committing crimes. Read more about the Community Justice Project.
Tobacco Prevention & Control Program
In April 2010 the Community Advocates Public Policy Institute was selected by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services to lead the Milwaukee operation of the state’s Tobacco Prevention & Control Program. Community Advocates’ primary responsibility is to help implement the Wisconsin Smoke-Free Act in Milwaukee, a new law which went into effect in July 2010 prohibiting smoking in bars, restaurants and all other workplaces in Wisconsin. Public Policy Institute staff will also build a grassroots coalition of Milwaukee-area tobacco prevention and control supporters trying to eliminate the death and disease caused by tobacco use. Read more about the Tobacco Prevention & Control Program.
Pathways to Ending Poverty
Pathways to Ending Poverty seeks to change the way we think about poverty by creating and testing a specific “policy package” that, if implemented, would reduce poverty in Wisconsin to a residual 2-5%. This new framework, based on the best evidence about which policy changes actually lower poverty, as well as rigorous modeling, aims to shift the debate about poverty to a serious, evidence-based discussion about which combination of policies for ending poverty would actually make the most sense for our state.
Since the program's inception in 2008, we have developed an updated, realistic poverty line. We have prepared, with the help of local and national experts, a "policy package"—a combination of specific policy changes for the poor with disabilities or over age 65, the unemployed poor and the working poor—that's calculated to lift them above the poverty line. We are now testing several versions of this "policy package" through the Urban Institute's TRIM model. Read more about Pathways to Ending Poverty.
