Home / Vision 2020: Campaign to End Child Poverty

Vision 2020: Campaign to End Child Poverty

A Perfect Vision for Wisconsin

For many of us, Wisconsin provides a great environment in which to live and build healthy families.  Unfortunately, not all of our state’s families share in this economic prosperity.  Poverty is the leading obstacle to opportunity and in 2005 over 179,000 Wisconsin children lived below the poverty line.  That’s a group of kids larger than the populations of Green Bay and Appleton combined facing what are often insurmountable barriers to successful futures.   Clearly, we have ample room to improve our commitments to children living in poverty and to their unfulfilled futures.  The Vision 2020 campaign, a collaborative effort between the Wisconsin Head Start Association (WHSA), the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families (WCCF), and the Wisconsin Community Action Program Association (WISCAP), seeks to eliminate child poverty in Wisconsin by the year 2020.

We believe all families deserve living wages, safe and healthy communities in which to live and grow, and access to affordable and quality health care and education.  It is necessary to meet these needs if we expect to provide healthy futures for Wisconsin kids, families, and communities.  With the Vision 2020 campaign we aim to:

  • increase awareness of child poverty and its adverse impacts on our communities;
  • discuss, develop, and implement practical policy solutions that address root causes of child poverty in Wisconsin;
  • encourage individuals, organizations, communities, and policymakers to take action to eliminate child poverty;
  • and convince policymakers to make the eradication of child poverty their top legislative priority.

We hope you share our excitement about this visionary yet practical approach to ending child poverty in Wisconsin and that you will join with us as we embark on this new initiative!    To learn more about Vision 2020 or to get involved, please visit our website at www.2020wi.org.  We urge you to begin your commitment to end child poverty by filling out the Vision 2020 Pledge Card.  We are all part of this campaign.  Help us create solutions that will ensure that no one in Wisconsin is denied a healthy economic future.