Social Poverty

In his previous book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly criticized the utter ineffectiveness of Western organizations to mitigate global poverty, and he was promptly fired by his then-employer, the World Bank. The White Man's Burden is his widely anticipated counterpunch - a brilliant and blistering indictment of the West's economic policies for the world's poor.

On any given night, more than half a million Americans and Canadians find themselves sleeping on the streets, in shelters, cars, and other places not meant for human habitation. Yet as this crisis continues to grow, it remains one of the least talked about—especially in churches. Kevin Nye introduces listeners to the Christ he’s met in tents, shelters, and drop-in centers. He demystifies homelessness by journeying into complex issues like affordable housing, mental illness, addiction, and more, while reimagining our theological approach to these matters.

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.

The Working Centre in the downtown core of Kitchener, Ontario, is a widely recognized and successful model for community development. Begun from scratch in 1982, it is now a vast network of practical supports for the unemployed, the underemployed, the temporarily employed and the homeless, populations that collectively constitute up to 30 percent of the labour market both locally and across North America. Transition to Common Work is the essential text about The Working Centre.

Teeth takes listeners on a disturbing journey into America's silent epidemic of oral disease, exposing the hidden connections between tooth decay and stunted job prospects, low educational achievement, social mobility, and the troubling state of our public health.

In this wide-reaching portrait of the constellation of people living in tents, shacks, and cars in the shadow of tech campuses and skyscrapers, award-winning journalist Brian Barth introduces us to the misfits, activists, and iconoclasts of Silicon Valley’s homeless encampments. Blending memoir, investigative reporting, history, and cultural criticism to paint a portrait of a community searching for dignity and connection in the midst of a national crisis, Front Street is a conversation-changing story about the struggle for housing.

In the United States today, one in every 31 adults is under some form of penal control, including one in 11 African American men. How did the "land of the free" become the home of the world's largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America's prison problem originated with the Reagan administration's War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.

In this uplifting and practical book, written in collaboration with his biographer, Austen Ivereigh, the preeminent spiritual leader explains why we must—and how we can—make the world safer, fairer, and healthier for all people now. In the COVID crisis, the beloved shepherd of over one...

A holiday classic by Charles Dickens. Originally published in 1843, Dickens worried about the disparity between the wealthy and the impoverished, and it was his attempt to bring this disparity into the light of day, to appeal to the die-hard capitalists to take care of the downtrodden masses. Since this inequity continues, this story is still popular, and will probably continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

There are, in the United States, a significant and growing number of families who live on less than $2.00 per person, per day. That figure, the World Bank measure of poverty, is hard to imagine in this country - most of us spend more than that before we get to work or school in the morning.

Piven and Cloward have updated their classic work on the history and function of welfare to cover the American welfare state's massive erosion during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. The authors present a boldly comprehensive, brilliant new theory to explain the comparative underdevelopment of the US welfare state among advanced industrial nations. Their conceptual framework promises to shape the debate within current and future administrations as they attempt to rethink the welfare system and its role in American society.

Good intentions aren't good enough. Everyone wants to see extreme poverty alleviated, but too often well-meaning do-gooders believe good intentions and their carefully crafted solutions are sufficient. But poverty is more than just a material issue, and the poor are more than a set of problems to be solved. The founder of 410 Bridge shares a proven blueprint for addressing extreme poverty by changing the paradigm of how the West engages the global poor.

In this "saucy and smart" memoir, a journalist uses pop culture as a lens to navigate her identity as a Black woman (Oprah Daily). Nichole Perkins takes readers on a rollicking trip through the last twenty years of music, media and the internet, exploring her experience with mental illness, her...

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...

Blighted is a powerful narrative about the decades-long decay and remarkable two-year reinvention of Summerdale, an aging apartment community located in one of Atlanta's grittiest corridors. Blighted unfolds in the voices of ruthless drug dealers, phantom tenants, fearless landlords, the working poor, educators, and visionary local leaders.

In the US, there is a wide-ranging network of at least 370 food banks, and more than 60,000 hunger-relief organizations such as food pantries and meal programs. And yet hunger still affects one in nine Americans. What are we doing wrong? In Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries, Katie Martin argues that if handing out more and more food was the answer, we would have solved the problem of hunger decades ago. Martin instead presents a new model for charitable food, one where success is measured not by pounds of food distributed but by lives changed.

New York Public Library Best of 2022 A gripping, twisting account of a small town set on fire by hatred, xenophobia, and ecological disaster—a story that weaves together corporate malfeasance, a battle over shrinking natural resources, a turning point in the modern white supremacist movement...

Twelve-year-old Lowen Grover is still reeling from the shooting death of his best friend, Abe, when he stumbles across an article about a small town giving away homes for just one dollar. It seems like the perfect escape from Flintlock and all of the awful memories associated with the city - and to his surprise, his mum, dad, and older brother are all onboard. Only his sister, Anneth, is reluctant to leave her friends and the familiarity (and amenities!) of Flintlock, but with the rest of the family anxious to do what’s best for grief-stricken Lowen, her protests fall on deaf ears. But is the Dollar Program too good to be true?

The acclaimed author of seven ALA Best Books for Young Adults, Will Hobbs pens a spellbinding true-to-life adventure. With nothing but dogged determination, 15year-old Victor leaves his Mexican village to illegally enter the U.S. and help his starving family. Soon he must outwit gangs, drug-runners, and border agents as he endures shivering nights, blistering days, and gnawing hunger. But can his longing for the beckoning opportunity of El Norte carry him through such impossible obstacles?

In Revolutionary Power, Shalanda Baker arms those made most vulnerable by our current energy system with the tools they need to remake the system in the service of their humanity. She argues that people of color, poor people, and indigenous people must engage in the creation of the new energy system in order to upend the unequal power dynamics of the current system.