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Programs For Low Income Families In California: Resources for Housing, Childcare, Healthcare, and Mo



These low-income assistance programs give bill assistance to Californians with rent, food, utilities, home repair, and more? If you qualify financially, you can get help! California assistance programs help many residents having economic struggles.




Programs For Low Income Families In California




School readiness is the key to children from low-income children doing well in school. Early Head Start helps children under five by supporting cognitive, social, and emotional age-related maturity. Other aspects of Head Start serve pregnant women and families with financial challenges.


The California assistance programs like Lifeline provide free and discounted landline and cell phone services to families who qualify financially. The California LifeLine helps consumers lower the cost of their phone bills.


Medi-Cal is a program that provides financial help with health care to low-income families, pregnant women, children, the disabled, and seniors. The state and local governments fund this program. This program pays for medical care for children and adults in the home. Benefits under MediCal include:


California assistance programs help low-income residents with home repairs to make homes energy efficient. The California Weatherization Assistance Program helps low-income residents make their homes energy-efficient.


The Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) provides U.S. federal resources to distribute to Community Action Agencies (CAAs) and other programs that help low-income California residents. They offer various support services to help families maintain stability by helping with shelter and health services.


If your income increases during the year, this may affect what levels of subsidies you qualify for according to Covered California income limits. It also may affect whether or not you, your spouse or your children qualify for certain government assistance programs. If you have a significant income change mid-year, you may be required to report that to Covered California or to Medi-Cal.


To receive the CARE discount, you must already participate in certain public assistance programs or meet the income guidelines. If you do not qualify for the CARE program, we will automatically check to see if you qualify for FERA, which provides an 18% monthly discount on electric use for families of three or more.


If you do not participate in the public assistance programs listed above, then qualification is based on your household size and total current household income* (total income of all persons living in your house, condo, apartment or mobile home).


Under the Sonoma County pilot, 305 families will receive unconditional payments of $500 a month for 24 months. To qualify, the family must live in Sonoma County, have a household income up to 185 percent above the federal poverty level dependent on family size (for example, $51,338 or below for a family of four), be pregnant and/or parenting a child under the age of 6 and have experienced adverse economic impacts due to the COVID-19 pandemic (loss of employment, income, child care or housing).


First 5 California partners with the 58 First 5 county commissions to serve California's diverse populations. We work with our statewide partners to ensure our programs are designed to support healthy children who can reach their full potential in school and in life. The county commissions work to achieve the common goals of First 5 California, while also creating their own programs to support the specific needs of local children and families. Working with our county partners is how First 5 California is able to reach a broad spectrum of California families with services specific to their needs.


CalEITC is a California tax credit program established in 2015 by Governor Brown and the California Legislature that puts money directly back in the hands of qualifying low-income families, with or without children, to use for their most immediate needs. CalEITC can increase an overall tax refund, or if taxes are owed, can reduce the taxes owed and possibly provide a refund.


In California, the question of whether and under what conditions labor standards requirements should be included in housing bills typically hinges on the issue of how much it would add to the cost of the project.[1] However, one important aspect of cost has so far not been considered: the cost to the public safety net resulting from low-road employment practices common in residential construction. Our analysis calculates the cost of utilization of the five major means-tested safety net programs by California construction workers and their families. We find almost half of families of construction workers in California are enrolled in a safety net program at an annual cost of over $3 billion. By comparison, just over a third of all California workers have a family member enrolled in one or more safety net program.


When workers do not earn enough money to meet their basic needs, they often turn to safety net programs to make up the difference. In this brief we will estimate the public cost to California and the federal government from the use of safety net programs by construction workers and their families in California.


To calculate the numbers of working families who participated in safety net programs, we restrict the sample to those who work 27 or more weeks per year and 10 or more hours per week in all industries in California. We exclude observations who live in institutional group quarters. To identify construction workers, we further use the 1990 Census Bureau industrial code All Construction (60), and the 2010 Census Bureau occupation codes from First-Line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers (6200) to Construction Workers, n.e.c. (6765), and we include W2 workers and the not-incorporated self-employed but exclude the incorporated self-employed.


However, survey databases like the ACS and CPS frequently have safety net program utilization counts that differ from program administrative data. We adjusted the CPS so that its program utilization estimates match the program administrative data. The CPS does not provide a large enough sample size to accurately estimate program utilization for construction workers at the state or county levels. The ACS does have sufficient sample size for this analysis but lacks specific questions about program utilization, and its occupational employment counts differ from more accurate data like the OES. On the other hand, while the OES has accurate employment counts for wage workers, it does not include independent contractors. To overcome these issues, we built a model using CPS data to predict program utilization based on income, demographics, and family structure. We then used that model to impute program utilization onto the ACS data. We calculated the ratio of wage workers to non-incorporated self-employed workers based on the ACS and used it to adjust the OES data for non-incorporated self-employed workers, and then adjusted the employment counts in the ACS to match the adjusted OES data. Finally, we used that imputed and adjusted ACS data to analyze safety net program utilization in families of construction workers.


Table 1 shows the annual enrollment of California construction workers and their families in safety net programs between 2015 and 2019. Almost half (48%) of construction working families are enrolled in one or more of the five means-tested programs we examine. Of particular note, almost one-third receive Adult Medicaid benefits (31%) and/or EITC (32%).


Compared to ALL working families in California, construction working families are significantly more likely to participate in safety net programs: 48% of construction working families compared to 36% of all working families. Construction working families participate at higher rates in each of the five programs individually as well.


In Table 2 we see the annual combined California and federal spending on safety net programs for all working families and for construction working families between the years 2015-2019. In total, $38.3 billion is spent on the participation of all working families in the five programs, and $3.4 billion is spent on construction working families.


Title I, Part A (Title I) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESEA) provides financial assistance to local educational agencies (LEAs) and schools with high numbers or high percentages of children from low-income families to help ensure that all children meet challenging state academic standards. Federal funds are currently allocated through four statutory formulas that are based primarily on census poverty estimates and the cost of education in each state


Once a State's EFIG allocation is determined, funds are provided (using a weighted count formula that is similar to Targeted Grants) to LEAs in which the number of children from low-income families is at least 10 and at least 5 percent of the LEA's school-age population.


Free or Discounted Health CareOffering a wide variety of medical services to residents, there are about 800 clinics throughout the state of California that can offer either free or discounted health care.Low income single moms in some parts of California can also receive free diapers from a few non-profit agencies.There are also non-profit dental centers that can help someone if they specifically need oral healthcare or their dental needs met.Uninsured residents with limited health plans can also receive medical and dental care from state coordinated programs. Prescription medications, specialty care, and help paying premiums and medical bills are some of the services offered to California families and single moms.


Through our Mutual Self-Help Housing Program and our Down Payment Assistance Programs, Mercy Housing California offers people the opportunities to own their own home. Mercy Housing California's Self-Help Housing Program enables low-income families to own an affordable home built with their own ... Read More 2ff7e9595c


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