Social Poverty

At age 14, I ran away, but not from home - because I never had one to begin with. At school I participated in every sport, club, and after-school activity, so that when the other kids finally left, I could settle in for the night by my locker. I spent my childhood dealing with gangs, drugs, violence, and my mother's mental illness, but the real enemy was always poverty.

Michelle Clark has loved animals all her life, filling her home with a menagerie of stray cats and abandoned dogs. But when her outreach work with London's homeless community leads to a chance meeting with a desperate man, and a quest to find a missing Staffie named Poppy, she has no idea that her life will be transformed forever.

What would charity look like if we, instead, measured it by its ability to alleviate poverty and needs? That is the question at the heart of Charity Detox. Drawing on his many decades of experience, Lupton outlines how to structure programs that actually improve the quality of life of the poor and disenfranchised. He introduces many strategies that are revolutionizing what we do with our charity dollars, and offers numerous examples of organizations that have successfully adopted these groundbreaking new models.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge has spent his career documenting the downward spiral of the American working class, and his new book explores the limits of the American dream in the 2020s. Poverty is both reality and destiny for increasing numbers of people in the 2020s and, as Maharidge discovers spray-painted inside an abandoned gas station in the California desert, it is a fate often handed down from birth.

Dem globalen Mittelstand droht der Kollaps - es sei denn, die Gesellschaft lässt sich auf eine neue Richtung ein. Wird das aktuelle Wirtschaftssystem, das den Superreichen einen stetigen Einkommenszuwachs garantiert, nicht verbessert, wird es eine unüberbrückbare Kluft zwischen Arm und Reich geben. Der Unternehmer Huschmand Sabet fordert in diesem Werk eine führende Rolle der Weltreligionen als Instanzen der Wertevermittlung, sowie einen globalen Marshall-Plan, der das Konzept einer ökosozialen Marktwirtschaft einläuten soll.

Warum unsere Gesellschaft Arbeitslose verachtet und sie dennoch braucht. Faul. Ungebildet. Desinteressiert. Selber schuld. Als Kind von zwei Langzeitarbeitslosen weiß Anna Mayr, wie falsch solche Vorurteile sind. Früher schämte sie sich, dass ihre Eltern keine Jobs haben. Heute weiß sie, dass unsere Gesellschaft Menschen wie sie braucht: als drohendes Bild des Elends. In ihrem kämpferischen, thesenstarken Buch zeigt Mayr, warum wir die Geschichte der Arbeit neu denken müssen und wie eine Welt aussehen könnte, in der wir die Elenden nicht mehr brauchen, um unseren Leben Sinn zu geben.

Als Jeremias Thiel elf Jahre alt ist, macht er sich auf den Weg zum Jugendamt. Er hält es zu Hause nicht mehr aus, hat Angst, der Armut und Verwahrlosung, die dort herrschen, niemals entkommen zu können. Seine Eltern sind psychisch krank und leben von Hartz IV, die häusliche Situation ist mehr als schwierig. Von da an lebt er im SOS-Jugendhaus, bis er als Stipendiat auf ein internationales College geht und im Herbst 2019 sein Studium in den USA beginnt. Er ist sich sicher, dass viele, die in ähnlichen Verhältnissen leben, nicht die Möglichkeit haben, sich daraus zu befreien.

In Those Who Wander, Vivian Ho delves deep into a rising subculture that’s changing the very fabric of her city and all of urban America. Moving beyond the disheartening statistics, she gives voices to these young people - victims of abuse, failed foster care, mental illness, and drug addiction. She also doesn’t ignore the threat they pose to themselves and to others as a dangerous dark side emerges. With alarming urgency, she asks what can be done to save the next generation of America’s vagabond youth.

As a street chaplain, activist, and cofounder of Open Table Nashville, Lindsey Krinks takes us on an unforgettable spiritual journey to tent cities, alleys, slums, and the front lines of movements for justice. Praying with Our Feet challenges preconceptions about people who live on the streets, calling us to move from charity to justice and to get our hands dirty in the struggle for a better world.

From the bestselling author of The Bottom Billion, the fate of the poorest regions of the world–some of which exist in the richest nations–is examined. Using examples of the “left behind” regions, renowned development economist Paul Collier shows that centralized western economies have...

For more than 30 years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the Green Revolution succeeded in South America and Asia, it never got to Africa. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every yearmost of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse.

In the works for more than twenty years, Interstate 69 has been both eagerly anticipated as an economic godsend and the center of a firestorm of protests by local environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, anarchists, and others who question both the wisdom of building more highways and the merits of globalization. Part history, part travelogue, Interstate 69 chronicles the last great highway project in America, introducing the people who have worked tirelessly to build it or stop it from being built, and the many places it would change forever.

When Rodney Mason, an ex-con drug dealer from Newark's rough South Ward, was shot and paralyzed, he vowed to turn his life around. A former high-school pitching ace with a 93-mph fastball, Mason decided to form a Little League team to help boys avoid the street life that had claimed his youth and mobility. Predictably, the players struggle but through the fists and tears, lopsided losses and rare victories, this bunch of misfits becomes a team, and in doing so gives the community something to root for.

Jonathan Kozol's books have become touchstones of the American conscience. Unlike his previous books, however, Ordinary Resurrections is almost entirely narrative and takes us into the fascinating details of daily life as he has lived it with young children who befriended him over the course of several years. Like Amazing Grace, this book describes the children of New York's South Bronx, but it is a markedly different book in mood and vantage point.

Coming of Age in the Other America shows that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth do achieve upward mobility. Drawing from 10 years of fieldwork with parents and children who resided in Baltimore public housing, sociologists Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin highlight the remarkable resiliency of some of the youth who hailed from the nation's poorest neighborhoods and show how the right public policies might help break the cycle of disadvantage.

Can money buy high-quality education? Studies find only a weak relationship between public school funding and educational outcomes. In The Money Myth, W. Norton Grubb proposes a powerful paradigm shift in the way we think about why some schools thrive and others fail. The greatest inequalities in America's schools lie in factors other than fiscal support. Fundamental differences in resources other than money explain the deepening divide in the success of our nation's schoolchildren.

Shortlisted for the first ever Booker Prize 'A masterpiece' - Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain 'An extraordinary novel' - Michael Magee, author of Close to Home 'It deserves its modern classic status' - The Times It’s the west of Scotland in the 1950s. New houses are going up. Factories...

The sometimes fragmentary tales of these people, their lives and deaths, are not included in official histories of a place. How, Ensign asks, has a large, socially progressive city like Seattle responded to the health needs of people marginalized by poverty, mental illness, addiction, racial/ethnic/sexual identities, and homelessness? Drawing on interviews and extensive research, Ensign shares a diversity of voices within contemporary health care and public policy debates.

Spending the night in juvie wasn't the worst thing to happen to seven-year-old Teresa that summer. When her much-anticipated cross-country vacation turns to abduction, Teresa is forced to care for her mother, sister, and twin brothers. Homeless, abused, and afraid in the slums of San Francisco's Tenderloin District, Teresa finds joy in her adventures while fantasizing of a better life. Keeping this dream alive throughout her childhood is what drives her to end the cycle of abuse and poverty.

For years, "Fisher King Mike" wandered the streets of LA, preaching to his people. On occasion, he'd share an open mic night with Michael Konik, who befriended the homeless man at a distance and offered a confused but sympathetic ear when the Fisher King lamented having to be so far away from his wife, Selena Gomez, and their several children. As the pair began to cautiously trust one another, confusion and distance gave way to friendship, and what came next astounded them both.