Why Human Services are Vital to the Community Pt I

Within the past few years, there has been discussion of the role that human services play in the lives of people and whether such services are actually healthy for individuals and families. As a result, many human services such as school and community health centers, after-school programs, and early childhood care and educations centers get targeted for budget cuts and even ridiculed for helping the less fortunate. And while there are people who will leech, other disadvantaged residents, such as children, the homeless, those living in or near poverty, and those with disabilities use the services as a vital lifeline.

An important fact about human services that is often overlooked is that they are extremely wise investments. According to the Social Impact Research Center at Heartland Alliance in Chicago, human services stave off future costs to the community if many of the issues in the community were left unchecked. Here are a few examples of those costs:

• Child poverty costs the US economy $500 billion per year when considering lost earnings, crime, and health care costs.
• The costs of low education attainment come in the form of lost productivity and earnings potential. The median annual income of someone with less than a high school diploma is 2.6 times less than someone with a bachelor's degree. This translates into lost taxable income and purchasing power.
• The cost of retaining students who are not promoted to the next grade costs $18 billion annually
• The potential economic value to be gained in better health outcomes if all Americans had health coverage is estimated to be between $65 and 130 billion each year
• The annual net burden of crime, including costs of incarceration and the legal system, lost wages, costs to victims, crime prevention organizations, lost opportunity costs, fear of being victimized, and cost of private deterrence, is estimated at over $1 trillion
• The monetary value of saving a single high-risk youth from turning to criminal activity is $1.7 to $2.3 million.

There is no question that human services help people mitigate many of the hardships in life, but they can also mitigate the economic impact of simply ignoring them. How so?  The next post will answer that.