August Newsletter
Economic Mobility Alliance Ohio
August 2025 | News and Updates
Navigating Continued Challenges
This summer marks a shift from the whirlwind state budget process to the remaining 1.5 years of the 136th General Assembly. The state operating budget, the largest policy and funding bill of every 2-year legislative session, was signed by Governor DeWine on Monday, June 30th.
EMAO hosted our first-ever Economic Mobility Advocacy Day in March, and advocated throughout the budget process for increased investments in child care, refundable tax credits to support low-income families, and the continuation of Ohio’s Benefit Bridge Pilot Program.
The final state budget included modest investments in programs for children and families, child care, and older adults, while cutting or flat-funding most services, and opting to move Ohio to a flat state income tax by decreasing the higher income tax rate, rather than investing in a refundable state Child Tax Credit or Earned Income Tax Credit.
Here’s how our policy priorities fared:
Refundable Tax Credits: The final budget did not include a refundable state Earned Income Tax Credit or Child Tax Credit, which would have promoted economic stability among low- and middle-income households.
Child Care: The final budget will maintain current eligibility levels for Publicly Funded Child Care (PFCC), but will continue the Child Care Choice Voucher program, which supports families above PFCC eligibility but under 200% of the Federal Poverty Level. Funding for the voucher program will allow the state to serve 20,000 more children.
Benefit Bridge Pilot: The pilot program was unchanged in the state budget and received level funding from previous years.
Advocacy throughout this budget cycle was often focused on defending programs under threat and working to protect advancements secured in previous budgets, with little space left for discussion of broad investments in programs to support economic mobility.
At the federal level, the reconciliation bill included $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid by adding work requirements and shifting more program costs to sates, and cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by $300 billion, which for Ohio alone is expected to shift $416 million to the state. On an individual level, 132,000 Ohio households are projected to lose an average of $1,152 per year in SNAP due to caps on the Thrifty Food Plan in the reconciliation bill.
More changes are coming every day. At the end of July, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services re-classified Head Start as a welfare program, instead of an education program, which could threaten continued access for over 800,000 children nationwide.
Changes to public programs without considering the ripple effects and impact on other programs can create new benefits cliffs and reverse past progress towards bridging the cliff. Our mission is as important as ever in these challenging times.
Celebrating 1 Year of Economic Mobility Alliance Ohio!
We are proud to celebrate the 1-year anniversary of Economic Mobility Alliance Ohio’s launch! Thanks to passionate, engaged advocates like you who have joined us along the way, EMAO has hosted webinars on our policy priorities and the Ohio Benefit Bridge Pilot Program, submitted testimony on the state budget, signed on to advocacy letters, met with more than 40 state legislators, 1 U.S. Senator, and the state administration, featured expert guest speakers at our monthly meetings, and so much more.
Our work to raise awareness of solutions to benefits cliffs and to center economic mobility in policy and programs at every level will continue.
Thank you for being part of our first year!
Webinar: The Occupational Mobility Explorer: A Tool To Inform Skills-Based Career Paths
Thursday, August 21st at 1:00pm
Across Ohio, practitioners, advocates, and public sector leaders are working to figure out how to best support occupational mobility, especially when career advancements and promotions can place workers at the edge of a cliff, a benefit cliff. Workers can be forced to choose between growth opportunities and publicly funded supports like childcare. The Ohio Workforce Coalition, Economic Mobility Alliance Ohio and others are partnering to share about benefit cliffs.
Recently updated, the Occupational Mobility Explorer (OME) is an interactive data tool created by the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia and Cleveland. The OME allows users to explore potential career paths by visualizing how skills needed for lower-paying jobs can transfer to similar jobs with higher pay in the same local labor market. The tool includes nearly 600 job titles across 500 geographies, new functionalities, and skills-based resources for job seekers and employers.
This month's Ohio Workforce Coalition webinar, presented in partnership with EMAO, features Kyle Fee, Community Development Policy Advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Dr. Fee will offer a demonstration of the tool, highlights updates with use cases for job seekers, employers, workforce professionals, and students, and offers insights on adopting a skills-based approach to occupational mobility.
New Report from Leap Fund: Five Years of Employer Insights on Benefits Cliffs
Leap Fund has released a new report, Five Years of Field Learnings about Benefit Cliffs with Employers, sharing powerful lessons from their work with HR teams, employers, and workers across the country.
The report explores how benefits cliffs - situations where a small increase in income can lead to a significant loss in public benefits - impact decisions around raises, promotions, and job advancement. Drawing on five years of research and pilot interventions, the report offers valuable insight into how benefits cliffs show up in real workplaces and what strategies can help mitigate them.
Key highlights include:
• Why some workers may avoid raises or promotions
• How benefits cliffs impact workforce retention and advancement
• Lessons from field-tested employer interventions
• A framework for understanding income, benefits, and worker decision-making
This resource is especially valuable for employers, workforce development professionals, policymakers, and funders looking to better understand and respond to the structural barriers holding workers back.
Access the full report here: https://myleapfund.com/employer-report-2025
Gap Between Cost of Housing and Income Grows
Last month, the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio and the National Low Income Housing Coalition released the 2025 Out of Reach report, showing that the disparity between renters’ income and the cost of rent in Ohio has more than doubled since 2020.
Full-time workers in Ohio now need to earn at least $22.51/hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment. The average Ohio renter currently earns $18.62/hour. The report also found that only 4 of the 15 most common jobs in Ohio pay more than $22.51/hour, meaning 1.2 million jobs in the state don’t pay enough to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment.
The new data comes at a time when federal housing assistance is under threat in the current federal appropriations process, with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s funding facing a potential 44% cut, and rental assistance programs facing elimination.
New Public Benefits Administration Analyses
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a national research institute, released new resources on how public benefits are administered across the nation and how that impacts public benefits enrollees. The State Landscape lists and explores eligibility and enrollment practices across Medicaid, SNAP, TANF, and WIC. This Toolkit explores how to utilize the Landscape in advocacy. And this analysis identifies the most impactful areas where public benefits administration can be improved.
Economic Mobility Alliance Ohio, 175 S. Third Street, Suite 350, Columbus, OH 43215, USA