Introducing the new California Poverty Measure, a new index that improves upon conventional poverty measures. The CPM tracks the full range of necessary expenditures, adjusts for geographic differences in housing costs, and includes food stamps and other non-cash benefits as resources available to poor families. The CPM reveals which groups and counties have the highest poverty rates and whether California's safety net is successfully reducing poverty. The CPM is jointly produced by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality (CPI) and the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). (author abstract)