Aetna Life and Casualty Foundation 1983 (Folder)

    AETNA LIFE & CASUALTY FOUNDATION

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legal I ^fenseFI^ M u n d
NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE AND EDUCATIONAL FUND, INC. 
99 Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. 10013«(212) 219-1900

November 18, 1983

Mr. Robert H. Roggeveen 
Program Officer

./Retna Life & Casualty Foundation 
151 Farmington Avenue 
Hartford, Connecticut 06156

Dear Mr. Roggeveen:

I am pleased to send you the enclosed copy of LDF's 
1982-1983 Annual Report and a more recent summary of current 
program activities. The Aetna Life & Casualty Foundation's 
1982 grant of $50,000 was an important contribution assisting 
LDF in maintaining progress over the past year in our con­
tinuing effort to secure the legal and constitutional rights 
of black Americans, other minorities and women. It is espe­
cially gratifying to count Aetna among those in the national 
corporate community who contributed nearly 9 percent of the 
total $4,853,214 in gifts received from private sources in 
1982. Again, our thanks for this very generous and steadfast 
support.

We seek renewal of the Foundation's support and request 
a 3-year grant of $150,000, payable at $50,000 per year, to 
enable us to complete budgetary planning and funding for two 
expanding programs: Project Alert and Black Women at Risk.
Conducted through LDP's Division of Legal Information and 
Community Service, both of these projects build upon and 
exploit LDF's 43 years of experience of combatting patterns 
of race and sex discrimination in education and employment. 
Importantly, they represent a conjunction of LDF program 
priorities with some of the revised priorities of the Founda­
tion as outlined in your letter of January 12, 1983:

... problems of urban public education ...

... improving minority youth employment opportunities ...
PROJECT ALERT - Challenging Inequities in Vocational Education

This project responds to three interlocking concerns: 
the staggering level of minority youth unemployment; the failure 
of public educational systems to assure effective linkages 
between school and the world of work; and the rapid increase 
in families headed by women, especially poor, young black women

Contributions are deductible for U.S. income tax purposes



who lack education and job skills as well as the resources to 
cope with discrimination in training and employment. LDF has 
been in the forefront of national efforts to combat racism and 
sexism in Federally funded vocational education programs, and 
is one of the few national agencies that works simultaneously 
at the Federal, state and local levels. Since 1977 LDF has 
sponsored educational programs to alert students about their 
rights to nondiscrimination on the basis of race, sex and 
national origin in Federally funded vocational education pro­
grams and have conducted research to document barriers to 
access to quality programs.

Although the authority for PROJECT ALERT arose from Con­
gressional legislation and from court orders in our suit, now 
entitled Adams v Bell, the objective of this program has been 
to make administrative processes work. We have exposed the 
Federal Government's failure to carry out its civil rights 
responsibilities and have played a key role in shaping the 
Office for Civil Rights' administrative compliance machinery 
in the area of vocational education. It now includes a nation­
al data base, compliance reviews, timely resolution of com­
plaints and findings of noncompliance and mandated corrective 
action plans. We exposed the failure of several states to 
comply with specific requirements of the Vocational Education 
Amendments of 1976 and filed administrative complaints in which 
we charged them with illegally depriving needy school districts 
of priority consideration in allocation of Federal funds.

California has been PROJECT ALERT'S major focus in the 
past four years. In the spring of 1981, we published Vocation- 
al Education: Cause or Cure for Youth Unemployment? (see
Appendix I), in which we reported to the citizens of Oakland 
our conclusion, after a two-year investigation, that the 
school system inadequately prepared students for the workplace.
A broadly representative group of citizens whom we identified 
was appointed by the School Board as its Commission on Education 
and Career Development to report in a year on the implications 
for Oakland of the LDF report. The Commission's report.
Working Together: The Future of Collaborative Efforts in the
Oakland Public Schools (see Appendix II), in June 1982 and a 
strategy conference rn March 1983, that LDF co-sponsored with 
the Oakland Unified School District, led to specific recommenda­
tions for implementation. LDF provided consultant services as 
a result of which the Oakland Alliance was formed that has 
brought the school district, business leadership and the 
University of California into a cooperative partnership to 
develop innovative and workable linkages between schools and 
the world of work. Oakland has also been accepted into two 
national network projects: the Brandeis-Aetna Urban Network
Project and the Ford Network Project.

In the spring of 1983, we also won an important victory 
in an administrative complaint that we had filed in 1981 against

Mr. Robert H. Roggeveen
November 18, 1983
Page 2



the California Community Colleges in which we charged that the 
system failed to assure nondiscrimination in apprenticeship 
programs that are located on about half of its 107 campuses. 
The far-reaching corrective action plan, in which the system 
has assumed responsibility for assuring statewide compliance, 
has established a model that we plan to replicate.

As our efforts to combat sexism and racism in training 
programs continue, we plan to focus on barriers to access, 
such as tests and the location of quality programs in suburbs 
that are geographically isolated; patterns of discrimination 
in employment and inequities in the distribution of state 
vocational and training funds that impact disproportionately 
on school districts with large black enrollments.

Mr. Robert H. Roggeveen
November 18, 1983
Page 3

BLACK WOMEN AT RISK Addressing Problems Encountered by 
Working Poor Black Women

Commenting editorially on the report of the D.S. Commission 
on Civil Rights, A Growing Crisis; Disadvantaged Women and 
Their Children, the New York Times concluded that the feminiza- 
tion of poverty is an American, and not just a women's issue.
For minority Americans, it describes a crisis of alarming 
proportions. Much attention has been focused on the increased 
proportion of minority families headed by women and the poten­
tial long-range and intergenerational impact of this phenomenon. 
Of primary concern to us is that the majority of these families 
are poor and remain poor even when the women who head them work.

In 1981, according to the Commission, the poverty rate of 
persons in female-headed families with children was 68 percent 
for blacks and 67 percent for Hispanics. If present trends 
continue, black and Hispanic female-headed familes will dominate 
the poverty population by year 2000. In her book. Black Women 
in the Labor Force, Dr. Phyllis A. Wallace, professor at Sloan 
School of Business, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
reported that one-half of black female heads were in the labor 
force in 1977. However, even when their earnings were supple­
mented by other income, 53 percent were poor. Citing the "strong 
probability that a disproportionate number of black teenagers 
will become improverished single parents," Dr. Wallace made 
an urgent call for the development of "appropriate strategies 
for assisting members of black single parent families to improve 
their life chances" and for a coherent research strategy on 
the economic status of blacks, especially one that delineates 
the constructive and central role of black women workers.

Working poor black women who are heads of households are 
at risk not only because they are clustered in low-paying jobs 
that are often seasonal, hazardous and without fringe benefits, 
but also because the future of these jobs is uncertain. The 
exportation of jobs out of urban areas and indeed out of the 
country, the restructuring of work, and technological develop-



merit are resulting in the elimination of thousands of jobs 
currently held by the working poor. The number of poor children 
at risk is increasing as their mothers are unable to provide 
a decent standard of living, as the working poor disproportion­
ately suffer from cutbacks in Federal programs and as a gap 
widens between resources in poverty and middle class schools.

BLACK WOMEN AT RISK, is LDF's effort to address this 
critical situation through coordinated projects focused on the 
problems of work, pay, fringe benefits and mobility opportuni­
ties. We will seek to resolve these problems by filing ad­
ministrative complaints, monitoring enforcement agencies, 
advocacy, community action, and, where necessary, litigation.
We will be particularly interested in preventive action - strate­
gies targeted to access to quality vocational education and non- 
traditional employment for young black women.

Our current planning phase, the objective of which is to 
shape a multi-year program, has two dimensions. One is the 
establishment of a reliable base of information about our 
target population for which LDF has contracted with the Wellesley 
College Center for Research on Women. Black women specialists 
in economics, urban planning and family structure are analyzing 
available data and will provide LDF with up-to-date information 
on working poor black women and their families, their workplaces, 
their conditions of work and their earnings. The researchers' 
assessment of the future prospects of categories of employment 
will be especially important to LDF because it would be counter­
productive to focus efforts on jobs that might vanish by the 
end of the decade. Projections of expanding job opportunities 
for which persons with modest skills might be qualified, but 
where black women are presently underrepresented, comprise 
another area of information that will be compiled during this 
research phase.

Networking the second dimension of our planning process, 
will be launched by LDF staff attorneys and Jean Fairfax, the 
director of LDF's Division of Legal Information and Community 
Service, as soon as we get the research. (The first draft is 
expected this month.) An initial consultation on this subject 
in April 1983 that involved some of LDF's most experienced 
litigators in the areas of employment and education, colleagues 
from agencies engaged in combatting sex discrimination and 
social scientists revealed the n ^ d  for new approaches if sex 
and race discrimination are to be simultaneously addressed 
through strategies targeted to the working poor. A focus on 
the problem of women in low-wage jobs will require LDP to reach 
out to new colleagues and constituents. Our goal is to complete 
the planning process and get the new program underway by mid­
winter.

We request that the Foundation consider renewing its support 
of LDF with a grant of $50,000 a year for 3-years earmarked for

Mr. Robert H. Roggeveen
November 18, 1983
Page 4



use in these important projects. Upon your advice we would be 
pleased to arrange a mutually convenient time to discuss this 
proposal in greater detail. It is our hope that should the 
Foundation favorably consider our request that an initial pay­
ment might be approved and made by year’s end. I look forward 
to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Mr. Robert H. Roggeveen
November 18, 1983
Page 5

JF/11
Enclosures

Jack Greenberg^ 
Director-Counsel^