By Mike Rutledge
NKyTribune contributor
If Northern Kentucky were a village of just 100 people, with the same demographics it has today, 66 of its residents would live in families, meaning neither a couple nor a single person.
That was the message delivered by Janice Urbanik of Partners for a Competitive Workforce to the audience at Northern Kentucky University Tuesday.
“Of those 66, 21 of them would struggle to afford the basics,” Urbanik said. “They would struggle to pay the rent, buy a house, buy a car, put food on the table, provide health care for their families – to pay for the school supplies at back-to-school time.”
They would also be unable to save to put their kids through college, cover car repairs that come up, or fix a hot water heater that stops working, she said.
“And of those 21, 11 of them would be in one-wage-earner families,” many of them headed by females,” she added.
That’s significant, she said, because 66 percent of children living in poverty are in families led by single females.
The event was organized by Northern Kentucky Forum, a partnership of Legacy, the organization formerly identified as Vision 2015, and the Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement at Northern Kentucky University
The topic of the evening was the non-profit organization Skyward, an evolution of the former Vision 2015, an effort to make Northern Kentucky a better community.
Skyward is in charge of helping implement the four new goals for improving the region through the next five years that were set forth in the “My NKY” plan unveiled in early June. The meeting was among the first that will lay out the goals to the general public in coming months.
Perhaps the most ambitious goal of the four is to improve the economic tide of the region, to help lift the families’ boats above the jagged rocks of economic peril.
“The whole objective of Skyward is ‘How do we make Northern Kentucky thrive?’” Urbanik said. “‘How do we help it get to the next level?’ We can’t leave any family behind. We have to make sure that all of our families in Northern Kentucky can thrive.”
To improve the overall economy – including lifting the family economies of the poor – the My NKY plan set a goal of improving the newly created Northern Kentucky Labor Market Index by 5 percent over five years, Bill Scheyer, president of Skyward, said.
That index, created by Janet Harrah, senior director of NKU’s Center for Economic Analysis & Development, measures four components: total jobs; unemployment; annual average wage; and civilian labor force (which measures such factors as under-employment).
The index for the United States is 100 percent. Northern Kentucky’s index is about 103 percent, or 3 percent better than the national average, because three of the categories, annual wage is the exception, are doing well.
“Average annual wage, we really lag,” Scheyer said. “And a lot of times people say, ‘Well, that’s because we have a great cost of living.’”
But Scheyer said that’s not true.
“Janet analyzed that, and she said if that were really the answer, our cost of living would have to be 25 percent lower than what it is, so that is not the answer.”
The solution, Scheyer says, is to find a way of getting more jobs that are paying more from either existing companies or new ones.
“So many jobs across this entire region don’t pay enough to sustain a family,” Scheyer said. “As a single person, you might be making enough, but once you have any kind of a family at all, people are working two- and three jobs, to make ends meet. That’s not just us – it’s across the country, but that is certainly an issue that we really need to focus attention on.”
The other My NKY goals include:
*Improving public health so 20,000 more adults will rate their own health “excellent” or “very good”;
*Prepare 1,000 more children for kindergarten by the time they reach kindergarten age; and
*Leverage $5 million for a “Northern Kentucky Vibrancy fund” that can help make the region more vibrant, as well as “intentionally inclusive, creative and connected.”
To sign up to become a volunteer in Skyward’s efforts to improve the region, click here