2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Seems to me that most of you don't get it [View all]Spacedog1973
(221 posts)As a young lawyer working for the Childrens Defense Fund, Hillary went to South Carolina to work to stop the incarceration of teenagers in adult prisons, and she investigated school segregation in Alabama at so-called private academies.
In Arkansas, she started a legal aid clinic to ensure that poor people had access to real legal representation; she helped start a program to help low income parents prepare their kids for school success, which is now in more than 20 states; and she helped to found the Arkansas Single Parent Scholarship Fund, which helped nearly 40,000 single parents with their education.
As first lady, she continued her advocacy for children and families, helping to pass the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which now covers more than 8 million kids, helping reform the foster care and adoption system, and advocating for the expansion of Medicaid to cover foster kids until they are 21. She pushed for the expansion of Head Start and for breaking barriers for working parents like quality child care and equal pay for women.
As a U.S. senator, she worked to improve pre-K programs and provide parenting help for at-risk families, which is now part of the Affordable Care Act, and she pushed to expand CHIP to cover more kids. She co-sponsored legislation to end racial profiling and implement sentencing reforms to address crack-cocaine disparities. She also fought to restore voting rights for individuals involved in the criminal justice system, expand programs that help people re-enter society when they have served their time, and worked to expand assistance for at-risk kids including intervention and treatment. She also introduced comprehensive legislation to protect voting rights; supported increased funding for HIV/AIDS programs, spotlighting the disproportionate impact on African American women; and worked with then Senator Obama to fight against lead poisoning, holding the first hearing on environmental justice and disparate impacts on the African American community.
-In case its not clear; most of these people in extreme poverty situations were/are minority populations.