No more “us versus them.”

That’s the goal Seth Johnson, president and CEO of United Way of Northwest Michigan, has in mind when he discusses his organization’s brand-new “Working Families Policy Agenda.” Announced this week, the new initiative is a cross-regional partnership between the local United Way and the Metro Detroit-based United Way for Southeastern Michigan, aimed at putting aside differences and working together to address growing poverty or near-poverty levels in both regions and throughout the state.

According to a joint press release from the two United Ways, the partnership was prompted by the latest report on Michigan’s ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) numbers. A proprietary United Way metric, ALICE tracks households “that earn above the federal poverty level, but not enough to afford a bare-bones household budget.” Michigan’s latest numbers indicate that nearly 38 percent of households in the state fall into the ALICE category. That’s on top of the approximately 13 percent of Michiganders living below the federal poverty line. In other words, more than half of Michigan households are, at best, struggling to make ends meet.

For Johnson, the latest ALICE numbers underscore an oft-overlooked truth: Despite their many differences – geographical, cultural, political – rural northern Michigan and urban southeast Michigan face many of the same challenges when it comes to poverty.

“We're trying to show that the issues of downstate Michigan are not just isolated downstate, and that the issues of northern Michigan are not just isolated to northern Michigan,” Johnson says. “There are some things that cut across the state. Our hope is that the legislature can come together to start addressing some of those issues, rather than just prioritizing northern Michigan or prioritizing Detroit, and rather than getting bogged down in what’s a red district, or a blue district, or a purple district. We want our lawmakers focusing on things that are going to help families.”

The rural versus urban divide often does play out in the legislature, especially in areas like state budgeting. Speaking to The Ticker last summer about Michigan’s 2025 budget, State Representative John Roth (R-Interlochen) lamented that northern Michigan was getting just a small handful of “enhancement grants” – one-time budget allocations to help fund special projects – compared to tens of millions of dollars in earmarks for urban areas downstate.

“If northern Michigan got screwed last year, they took an automatic drill and drove that thing right through our hearts with this failure of a budget,” Roth told The Ticker at the time. “We don’t want special treatment, but we do want northern Michigan to receive the same dedicated funding that places like Detroit and Grand Rapids get.”

While Johnson appreciates any lawmaker’s desire to see more money coming to their part of the state, he sees struggling families as the people who will ultimately be hurt most by a lack of collaboration in Lansing. The partnership with United Way for Southeastern Michigan is intended to illuminate common ground that legislators can occupy together.

“The partnership is unique because we’re this little rural United Way, and we’re partnering with the largest United Way in the state, but we’re putting forth the same message and the same perspective,” Johnson says. “That message is that working families, it doesn’t matter where they live or whether they’re rural or urban, they’re struggling because of the same types of issues.”

The agenda highlights five policy categories that, if taken up as priorities by state lawmakers, could yield benefits for working families in both the Grand Traverse region and the Detroit area – and everywhere in between.

The categories are workforce stability, affordable and accessible childcare, housing stability and homeownership support, health and food security, and protecting the financial stability of ALICE households. Each of those categories has 2-3 actionable steps that state lawmakers could theoretically put at the center of bills or budgetary proposals in order to move the needle for struggling families in the state. Examples include funding free tax preparation services for low or moderate-income households to help them access tax benefits they might be overlooking; or enhancing school meal initiatives to make sure all children have access to nutritious meals at school.

Johnson warns that conditions are likely to worsen for struggling families in the weeks and months to come, thanks to a combination of COVID relief programs that are sunsetting and sweeping budget cuts at the federal level that will be hitting local communities. For example, the USDA is ending two pandemic-era programs that helped schools, childcare centers, and food banks purchase food from local farmers. While Johnson acknowledges that these types of programs – and the push to cut them to save money – are heavily politicized topics, he’s hopeful that the Working Families Policy Agenda and its collaborative roots will help show that the problems of poverty transcend politics.

“I think that, especially in this political time, it's good for us to point to the fact that those that are working and struggling to get by don't necessarily see partisanship,” Johnson says. “They just want to see someone come along and help them. And we're hopeful that this agenda can be a way to really cut through that noise and say, 'This is what we could be doing to help support working Michigan families.' Hopefully, we can agree that we all want working families to be able to make it. We want people who are trying hard to make a better life for their kids and their families to have that opportunity.”