Primary tabs
Location
(Excerpt below from Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine)
It has been four years since the economy tripped headfirst into the Great Recession, and the National Urban League (NUL), a 100-year-old civil rights organization with nearly 100 affiliate groups across the country, has seen firsthand the impact of the downturn that’s decimated African-American communities worse than most.
“In terms of the human impact, the recession is overwhelming at the grassroots level,” says Marc H. Morial, president and CEO of the NUL and a former two-term mayor of New Orleans. “We see an increased number of people seeking jobs, and greater num- bers of families seeking safety-net-oriented services, including housing counseling, and rent and utility assistance.”
With economic failure still on the doorsteps of NUL affiliates (the organization’s first responders who assisted more than 2.1 million people in 2010), earlier this year the NUL weighed in with a comprehensive plan for economic recovery, emphasizing jobs as the solution to the nation’s malaise.
The “Jobs Rebuild America” plan embodies not only the NUL’s legacy of fighting for the economic empowerment of under- served communities, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King’s economic-justice goals, it also builds on the organization’s track record of providing practical solutions to crucial issues facing black Americans. Today those issues are unemployment and the widening of the black-white earnings gap. According to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, joblessness among black Ameri- cans was at 16.2 percent in May 2011, compared to 8 percent for whites, while the NUL’s own research shows that the black- white earnings gap, which narrowed be- tween 1979 and 1999, is widening again.
“Jobs Rebuild America” offers a 12- point blueprint for quality job creation. It advocates policies such as the expansion of small-business lending, the establish- ment of “Green Empowerment Zones” to incentivize environmental industries in low-income areas, tax reforms, job- creation funding and the reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act. But the key element of the NUL plan is improving educational opportunities for the unem- ployed, young people, mature workers and entrepreneurs. And even as the NUL calls on government to take action, it is already leading by example, running programs that emphasize training for the opportunities it believes black Americans will be able to take advantage of in a future recovery.
