My husband and I sat in the ADA section towards the back of the main floor—I’m a little person, so the only thing I can see in general seating is other concert-goers butts. The show was extraordinary—it was visually stunning, and emotionally empowering. Towards the end of her set, The Electric Lady took a moment to talk about the dark times we are in and the interdependence of social justice movements. As she rattled them off—telling her fans that we “need to fight for black and brown communities, immigrants, the disability community…” —my jaw fell open. Never, in my (almost) 40 years on this planet, have I heard an artist specifically call out my community, let alone use our preferred language (too often we are called “special needs,” “differently abled,” or “handicapable”). There was a flurry of activity as everyone I was sitting with checked with their seatmate to make sure it had actually happened: That a mainstream artist, at a public event, had just included us in their activism.

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Monae was leaning into a shift that we’ve seen take place over the past year. Last month, Ava DuVernay pushed back when fans of Queen Sugar asked her to reverse a character’s Lupus. Many folks felt like having a disability made the character weak. But instead of caving to pressure and “healing” the character, DuVernay focused on how disability adds important complexities. She replied, “[r]espectfully, we can have physical illness and still be whole. That’s what this storyline explores among other things. Many of us live with chronic illness and still we thrive and live and love wholeheartedly.”

I want to be specific about the role black women are playing here. When a community member thanked Brittany Packnett, from Operation Zero and Teach for America, for highlighting the perspectives of the disability community in response to the straw ban and other acts of ableism, Packnett said that it’s “because we’re used to not being listened to.” That open acknowledgement of interdependence makes this feel like it’s part of a bigger movement—the intersectional kind that Monae called for.

Most years, this last week in July is the only time that the media turns its attention to people with disabilities. It’s the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), so there are usually a smattering of stories about the importance of including people with disabilities in American society. But this year has been different. The ongoing assault on health care has forced the media to grapple with its tendency to cast disabled people as either vulnerable victims or powerful protestors. We’ve seen a phenomenal series of stories by Joe Shapiro talking about sexual assault of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We’re seeing on-going discussion of the trauma being experienced by the children at the border, which will follow them for a lifetime. We saw open discussions of mental health rise when Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade died. We got to watch W. Kamau Bell do a #UnitedShades segment with powerhouse Alice Wong, and Drunk History covered the 504 Sit-ins (the longest occupation of a federal building in U.S. History.)

So it feels appropriate that this is the week that the Center for American Progress (CAP) is launching the Disability Justice Initiative. CAP is the first D.C.-based national progressive organization to have a disability shop, and I am thrilled to build off of the work of folks like Eli Clare, Mia Mingus, and Sins Invalid, to work on cross-movement organizing and to center multiply-marginalized disabled people. The project is working to bring the disability lens across issues progressives are working on, and will also work to get progressives to the table as allies and accomplices fighting for the rights of people with disabilities.

We are setting a big table—a massive table. We’re including people with mobility, sensory, mental health, and learning disabilities, and calling in our siblings with chronic health conditions (like diabetes, migraines, fibromyalgia and IBS/IBD), eating disorders, folks in recovery from substance use, and people living with and learning how to navigate trauma.

There is not a single issue, whether it be health care, paid leave, immigration, climate change, education, or voting, that does not impact the 1 in 5 Americans that lives with a disability. Now that Americans are starting to recognize that—that we are a part of every community, that we are here to fight, and that we are worth fighting for—it is time to formalize our seat at the table. And we’re leaving another seat open for you.

Despite the clear calculation by corporate media outlets to move away from substantive, progressive coverage of Americans struggling in a broken economy, we know that there’s a hunger for this kind of content. That’s why we are proud to launch our redesigned website today, with an inaugural post by Senator Elizabeth Warren.

TalkPoverty’s growth in the past two years has exceeded the capacity of our original website. In retrospect, I’m not surprised. During my eight years working at The Nation—the final two as its poverty correspondent—there was a marked increase in anti-poverty activism. I saw it first with Occupy, and then had the opportunity to report on organizing by domestic workers, farmworkers, janitors and other low-wage workers. I saw it with the Fight for $15, too. The voices of people most directly affected by poverty and inequality began to gain greater traction in the media.

My experiences on the poverty beat—and learning from excellent reporters like Bill Greider and Chris Hayes, and editor Katrina vanden Heuvel—led to an idea: what if there was a website where people living in poverty and people working to dramatically reduce it could work together to cover the issue with a kind of range and thoroughness that one, two, or even ten poverty reporters wouldn’t have on their own?

Moreover, what if our contributing writers reflected the kind of diversity that is needed if we are to build a vibrant anti-poverty movement—including people with low incomes, policy professionals and scholars, activists and advocates, students and other young people, and elected leaders at all levels of government?

In pursuit of this mission, TalkPoverty has now published dozens of writers—many of them with low-incomes—exploring issues ranging from the effects of incarceration, to the relationship between poverty and disability, to representations of poverty in our culture, to solutions to inequality, and many other areas where poverty and public policy intersect. Our writers have also used the site to push back against high-profile individuals who propagate myths about poverty in America. And our weekly podcast, TalkPoverty Radio, offers us another opportunity to demonstrate what good poverty coverage looks like, as we did when we interviewed the journalist who originally broke the story of the Flint water crisis.

With this increasingly diverse content, we needed a redesign that would make it easier for people to see how all of the different things we do at TalkPoverty fit together: original reporting, in-depth data analysis, a weekly podcast, and story collection. It will now be much easier for you to find related content, so you can take a deeper dive into topics of interest. We’ve updated our data feature, so that it’s simple to access—and understand—poverty data for every state and congressional district. We’ve also made it easier for readers to share their stories, so that we can continue to feature the voices and experiences of people living in poverty, and the policy solutions that deeply affect their lives.

There is no way to replace the progressive voices we are losing from the national media landscape. But we can promise you this: TalkPoverty will continue its commitment to finding new ways to lift up the voices of people living in poverty, and showing you the progressive policy solutions that will make a dramatic difference in creating opportunities for all Americans.

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In the comments below, please let us know what you think of the redesign and any thoughts you want to share about covering poverty in America.

CNN is hosting the first Democratic Presidential Primary Debate, happening at 9pm ET on Tuesday, October 13—and they’re accepting question suggestions via social media. Tell CNN to make poverty a priority during the debates by suggesting questions through their Facebook post:

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Here are some question ideas to get you started:

• Millions of people struggle to balance work and caring for their families. What will you do to ensure that households aren’t forced to choose between their paycheck and family responsibilities?
• Each year, investments like Social Security, nutrition, healthcare, housing, and tax credits lift millions of people out of poverty, and prevent millions of families from going deeper into poverty. However, conservatives in Congress continue to put these programs on the chopping block. What are your plans to protect and strengthen vital social insurance programs?
• Since research shows that areas with higher union membership demonstrate more mobility for low-income children, what are your plans to increase workers’ ability to collectively bargain with their employers?
• Income inequality is increasingly a problem in this country with productivity increasing, while wages are flat or falling. How do you plan to ensure that more Americans benefit from the recovery?
• Families with young children are facing some of the deepest economic pressures just as their children reach a critical stage of development.  This economic stress can affect their life outcomes. What will you do to improve the economic security of families with young children?
• The United States makes up 5 percent of the world’s population, but over 25 percent of the world’s prison population. What measures would you take to address mass incarceration in this country?

Millions of American families are working multiple jobs to make ends meet but are still living paycheck to paycheck.

Millions more who are undocumented can’t plan for their futures because they fear la migra (the immigration police) will haul them and their loved ones away at any time.

And still others, who have served often excessive sentences for past transgressions struggle to find work when they are released from prison.

In total, about 106 million people live on the brink, fighting to overcome the barriers to success that keep them living in marginalized communities or in such chaos that financial stability is out of reach.

Yet what are the chances that their struggles will be addressed in any meaningful way during the first Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News on Thursday?

What are the chances the Fox News moderators will ask candidates about their agenda to address the needs of neighborhoods facing high unemployment and low wages?

What is the likelihood that the candidates will be asked to outline plans to improve the lives of the working families who live in forgotten communities where there is little investment in infrastructure and jobs?

If the most recent presidential elections are any indication, the chances that these issues will be raised are slim to none. While there was plenty of rhetoric about the dwindling middle class, the last presidential election was noticeably devoid of any references to Americans living in poverty. In fact, The Nation reported that from 2008 to 2012, at least five consecutive presidential or vice presidential debates went without a single question about poverty.

This first debate of the 2016 election is an opportunity for the leading Republican candidates to go on the record about the issues that matter most to working families.

So in an effort to help the candidates and the Fox team find their way, here’s a roadmap. We asked four Americans struggling to make ends meet about what they want to hear on Thursday:

Rachael Collyer, 22, Cleveland Heights, Ohio:

Rachael graduated from The Ohio State University with a major in Spanish and English. She works as a bartender with a fluctuating income that on a good day nets up to $14 an hour and on soft days earns her the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

She also has almost $26,000 in student loan debt.

Rachael can’t afford her own apartment, so after she graduated, she moved back home with her parents in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She’s a volunteer organizer now for the Ohio Student Association because mounting debt is holding too many students and their families back. The state has decreased its college grants to students, she says, even though more than half of all jobs in Ohio will require a college education by 2020. It is no wonder then that about 68% of Ohio’s college graduates have an average of $29,000 in debt.

“We are like frogs in boiling water,” she says. “College debt has been going up and going up and suddenly we’ve reached this point where we yell, ‘How did this happen?’ “

Rachael wants the Fox News moderators to ask the candidates: Given the cost of attending college, most students work while they are in school. And, in Ohio, if a student works 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job, they won’t earn enough to cover the average cost of attending Ohio State. How do you propose addressing the wage needs of recent college graduates and current students so that paying for their college education is not a barrier to success?

Duane Edwards, 34, Fredericksburg, VA:

Duane’s life changed drastically when he was 14 years old. His father, an Army veteran, was killed in a car crash, leaving behind a wife and three children. At that moment, Duane told himself he had to find a way to earn money so he wouldn’t be a burden on his mother. So he secretly began selling marijuana.

He was eventually caught on a drug charge and sentenced to community-based probation. His mother tried hard to keep him straight, but she had to work to maintain the family and he took advantage of her absence. He says there were few mentors or teachers who looked at him and saw any potential. Without a job and no prospects, Duane eventually landed in prison and served a three-year sentence.

“Being incarcerated made me grow up,” he says. While behind bars, he earned an associate’s degree in childhood education, and he tutored other inmates who were trying to get their GEDs. He wanted to make good on his life when he got out.

So when he was released in December 2006, he had high hopes that he would turn around the troubled life he once lived. But it was dependent on him finding work. In the first six months alone, he applied to more than 40 jobs. None would hire him because of his record. Since he’s been out, Duane has applied to more than 120 jobs and has received call backs for just 15 of them, with most offering low-wage work washing or loading trucks.

Today, the married father of two girls, who are three and four years old, has a bachelor’s degree in theology and is a pastor at a local church. It’s taken him almost nine years since he got out, but he finally has a full-time job driving a truck, making $14.50 an hour. He says he’s grateful for the job, but says it’s still hard to make ends meet.

“I would like an opportunity at a good job so I can take care of my family,” he says.

He wants to ask the candidates: Given that the school to prison pipeline starts early, particularly for young black men, and there is a decided lack of opportunity for young African Americans, what is your plan to invest in schools in marginalized communities made up primarily of people of color so that the outcomes of the students in those schools are the same as in wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods?

Patrice Mack, 45, Euclid, Ohio:

Patrice is the single mother of a 24-year-old daughter and three boys, a 14-year-old and 11-year-old twins. She owns her own home and has a college degree in business administration. Earlier this year, she left a job that paid her so little that her sons were eligible for government health insurance because she couldn’t afford the company’s insurance.

“You can have a degree and still struggle to survive,” she says. “I’m a paycheck away from poverty.”

Patrice is tapping into her retirement savings in order to get by until she finds a job. She is looking for work, but opportunities for good jobs have dwindled. And due to unpredictable, constantly shifting schedules, and a lack of paid leave and paid sick days, many jobs make it impossible to balance work and caregiving responsibilities.

She wants to ask the candidates: The minimum wage is at a level where working families can’t survive unless they work multiple jobs. So how do you propose we do a better job of parenting our children and being there for them, while at the same time earning enough income to provide for our families? And how do you think employers can incorporate paid leave or paid sick days?

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Astrid Silva, 27, Las Vegas, NV:

Astrid grew up most of her life under the tinsel and lights of Las Vegas. As a young person, she was a standout student and graduated at the top of her class in her magnet high school. She’s earned associate degrees in arts and political science and is working on a bachelor’s degree. Astrid could be a poster child for today’s diverse and civic-minded millennial generation.

She’s also an undocumented immigrant.

At the age of four, Astrid rode a tire raft with her mother and crossed the Rio Grande. She wore black patent leather shoes and the “biggest poofiest white dress with purple flowers and a purple sash.” Her mother had wanted her to look pretty when they met her father in the States.

“As a young person, you understand,” she says. “I understood there was something different about us.”

She says their status affected her family in big and small ways. Neither she nor her mother were able to drive because they couldn’t get driver’s licenses. They wouldn’t go to certain areas, or leave Nevada, because they were worried they would get picked up by immigration authorities. And unlike other people in their neighborhood, they couldn’t leave the country and visit Mexico. She remembers the pain and sadness that overwhelmed her family when her grandmother died in 2009. Her father couldn’t leave and see his mother one last time because they feared he wouldn’t be able to return.

Their biggest fear came true in 2011. Her father was arrested and given deportation orders. He’s since been granted a stay, which he has to apply for every year, and Astrid says she doesn’t know how long it will last.

Since then, she has become a vocal advocate for immigration reform. President Obama even mentioned her in a speech where he deplored our “broken” immigration system.

Thanks to an executive order signed by President Obama that allows undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to remain in the country, Astrid has a stay until 2017.

But she says that too may end after Obama’s term ends.

“I’m trying to figure out how to keep my family together here,” she says. “This is not a political strategy. For us, it’s real.”

Her question for the candidates is: Given that there are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, what kind of concrete plan do you have for immigration reform? Not one that dismantles what the President has done or that focuses only on border security, but that offers real solutions for issues such as family reunification; the ban on re-entry to the U.S. by undocumented immigrants that spans three to ten years; or the rights of asylum for undocumented immigrants?

To discuss how far we’ve come—and how far we still have to go—we’re joined by Talley Wells, Director of the Disability Integration Project at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, for an overview of the ADA as well as the Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision, a critical civil rights case for people with disabilities. Courtesy of the Vera Institute, we feature remarks from Talila “TL” Lewis, founder of HEARD, on the impact of the criminal justice system on people with disabilities. We also hear from Alice Wong about the Disability Visibility Project, a partnership with StoryCorps to collect oral histories of people with disabilities. And we are joined by Michael Morris, Executive Director of the National Disability Institute, to discuss the work that lies ahead to ensure that disability and poverty no longer go hand in hand.

Here are 7 moments from this week’s episode reflecting on the ADA:

1.  “[Olmstead] is the most important civil rights decision for people with disabilities. It’s often called the Brown v. Board of Education decision for people with disabilities.”

2. “When the laws changed and society changed, [Kate Gainer] had the right to get in the front of the bus, but it wasn’t until much later – and the push from the disability rights movement – that she was actually able to get on the bus because she uses a wheelchair.”

3. “Tanisha Anderson, Freddie Gray, Anthony Hill, Ezell Ford. These are African American people with disabilities whose lives were cut short by law enforcement.”

4. “People with disabilities are the largest minority populations in jails and prisons.”

5. “Deaf-blind, deaf-disabled, and hard of hearing prisoners customarily experience discrimination and terrible abuse in our prisons. Punished for failure to obey commands they cannot hear.”

6. “I couldn’t believe it. It was thrilling to be in the White House and to actually say hello to the President.”

President Obama talks w Alice Wong via robot before ADA reception today. pic.twitter.com/W7BMEwWX9B

— petesouza (@petesouza) July 21, 2015

7. “There’s a disability pay gap: For every dollar earned by workers without disabilities, those with disabilities earn just 68 cents.”

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– President George H.W. Bush, at the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act

 The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) turns 25 on Sunday, and it has done a tremendous amount to break down barriers and open doors for people with disabilities. Many of my closest friends and colleagues count themselves members of the “ADA generation” and proclaim with confidence that they would not be where they are today if not for the passage of this watershed legislation. But as we celebrate this important landmark, it would be a grave mistake to declare that the struggle for inclusion is over as a great deal of work remains.

As I’ve written here before, disability is both a cause and consequence of poverty, and twenty-five years after the signing of the ADA, the two still go hand in hand. The poverty rate for working-age people with disabilities remains more than double that for people without disabilities.

People with disabilities are also significantly more likely to experience material hardships—things like food insecurity; not being able to pay rent, mortgage, or utilities; or inability to access needed medical care—than people without disabilities, even at the same income levels. The same is true for families caring for a child with a disability.

People with disabilities are also nearly twice as likely to lack even modest savings to help them weather job loss, an unexpected bill, or other financial shock, according to the National Disability Institute.

As we look ahead to the next 25 years of breaking down barriers, it’s time to examine our own work as advocates for change. The next wall that needs to come down is the one that keeps disability advocacy in its own bucket, separate and apart from the broader fight for a fair economy and equal opportunity. Until disability inclusion—both social and economic—is a core part of the economic justice movement, we’ll continue to miss a huge piece of the puzzle.

Much of the economic agenda to break the link between disability and poverty is already mainstream. Raising the minimum wage. Boosting the Earned Income Tax Credit for workers without dependent children. Expanding Medicaid. Paid leave and paid sick days. Strengthening Social Security (including updating the woefully outdated Supplemental Security Income asset limits). Add in affordable, accessible housing; accessible transportation; and ensuring access to long-term services and supports and we’ve got a to-do list that would go a long way toward reducing poverty and expanding opportunity for people with disabilities.

As President George H.W. Bush’s signed the ADA into law, he closed his remarks with this: “Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”  Let’s take that to heart not only as we fight for inclusionary social and economic policies, but as we shape our work and tactics as change-makers.

It is in that spirit that throughout next week, TalkPoverty.org will feature posts from disability leaders, all exploring the link between disability and poverty and solutions that would increase economic opportunity for people with disabilities. This week is not intended to be a comprehensive examination of the topic. But we hope it will help advance this important conversation, and we look forward to working with our readers, contributors, and partners to break down the silos that have kept disability separate from the broader fight for economic justice for far too long.

This week the TalkPoverty Radio team headed out to Phoenix, Arizona to attend Netroots Nation, a gathering to exchange ideas on how to use media and technology to influence the public debate.

We open this week’s episode with the Weekly Worst, a round up of the week’s worst poverty news, with Alan Pyke, Deputy Economic Policy Editor for Think Progress.  We then join Rebecca on the ground in Phoenix as she talks with Katie Klabusich, writer and reproductive justice activist, who discusses the need to include economic justice in all social justice movements. Rebecca then talks to Congressman Mark Takano (D-CA) about the push to raise the income threshold for overtime pay. We then hear from Analilia Mejia, Executive Director of New Jersey Working Families, about her work advocating for paid sick days for working families amid opposition from Governor Chris Christie (R) and the state legislature. And we close with the voices of the Black Lives Matter protestors who shifted the conversation of the Netroots Presidential Town Hall.

 Here are 7 of our favorite moments from this week’s episode:

1. “So it wasn’t the maggots. It wasn’t the unrefrigerated meatballs…it was something else!”

2. “I can’t imagine how often my folks would have gotten arrested when I was a kid…”

3.“Is there a term for the opposite of mansplaining?”

     4.“If you’re not including economic justice in your movement, you’re doing it wrong.”

5. “This is one of the tools that we have to raise American workers’ wages, and it can be done with the stroke of a pen.”

6. “The devil has enough advocates.”

7. “Welcome to Arizona, where the Martin Luther King holiday was repealed.”

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This week we talk to Joan Walsh, Editor at large for Salon.com, MSNBC political analyst, and author of “What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America.” We discuss 2016, the stigma around poverty, and race in the U.S.

But first, we’re joined by Craig Harrington, Economic Policy Program Director at Media Matters for America, to discuss why comparing the U.S. economy to the Greek debt crisis makes no sense, and why conservatives are doing this anyway. We also talk to Liz Ben-Ishai, Senior Policy Analyst at Center for Law and Social Policy, on how we can protect workers and help business at the same time by simply making work schedules predictable, and how new legislation can help.

Here are 6 moments you can look forward to hearing on this week’s episode:

1) “Charlie, it was meant to mock you. You’re an idiot!”

If you’re worried that #GreeceCrisis is a looking glass into the future of the USA, you might work for Fox News http://t.co/7AD3uvFHgM

— Craig Harrington (@Craigipedia) July 8, 2015

 

2) “Hashtag Trump your cat, for our listeners.”

Omg #trumpyourcat is beyond making my life right now…… @maddow #winning pic.twitter.com/XrkS08yUrM

— Rebecca Vallas (@rebeccavallas) July 11, 2015

3) “In defense of Donald Trump, he’s had some crowds – they were just paid actors.”

4) “One thing that makes a good ally is doing more listening than talking.”

5) “People say dumb things on Twitter – I’m not talking about Paula Deen here…Oh boy.”

6) “It seems odd to employ tactics or strategies that undermine your business.”

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After a year of building TalkPoverty.org and increasing its reach, we are thrilled to combine forces to offer one place online where you can learn about poverty in America and find the resources you need to do something about it. All of the data tools and action resources at Halfinten.org are now available on this website.  Additionally, the Center for American Progress will continue to publish the Half in Ten annual report on poverty and inequality in collaboration with the Coalition on Human Needs and The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. We also will continue to manage our story network, in partnership with the Coalition on Human Needs, to provide low-income people with opportunities to take action by sharing their personal stories with media and policymakers.

We’re excited to have the Half in Ten community join forces with us to learn about poverty in America and take action to build a vibrant anti-poverty movement.

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With a new conservative-led Congress, most people devoted to helping individuals and families living on the brink aren’t feeling terribly optimistic about the prospects for positive action at the federal level.  (With the exception, perhaps, of action on criminal justice reform.) In fact, we will almost certainly need to redouble our efforts simply to defend programs that are currently working.  Remember, poverty would be approximately twice as high—nearly 30 percent—without the safety net.

But as my friend and colleague at the Center for American Progress, Melissa Boteach, constantly says when she talks about poverty with activists—we can’t simply play defense, we’ve got to stay on offense.

Melissa is right, and frankly, with more than 1 in 3 Americans living below twice the poverty line—on less than about $37,000 annually for a family of three—it’s going to take a visible, disruptive, and non-violent movement if we are to create an economy that is truly defined by opportunity as well as a robust safety net that is there for us when we need it.  To some extent whether it’s conservatives or progressives who are in the Majority, our task remains the same: we must build a dynamic movement.

In the two weeks ahead, BillMoyers.com will feature a post every day by an anti-poverty leader.  Every day, one of these contributors will offer an action you can take to advocate for people who are struggling and to help build the movement we so urgently need.

Beyond these two weeks, we hope you will keep reading BillMoyers.com, which has long demonstrated its commitment to poverty-related issues.  Sign-up, too, for TalkPoverty.org weekly emails, and we will continue to bring you the voices and ideas of people who are struggling in poverty as well as posts by other anti-poverty leaders.

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There is nothing inevitable about poverty.  The only questions that remain are the same ones we have faced for so long: are we committed to dramatically reducing poverty?  And, if so, what are we willing to do to advance our goal?

Over the next 12 days, we hope the ideas offered by our contributors will provide valuable openings for your activism. BillMoyers.com will keep adding to the list each day here—bookmark the page to see all the big ideas. Please share this link and your thoughts below in the comments and via Twitter using #12Days.

The Media Must Tell the True Story of Struggle in America

by Deepak Bhargava

Last year, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly did a segment on poverty where he asserted that “poverty will not change until personal behavior does,” explaining that anti-poverty work will never overcome “addictive behavior, laziness, [and] apathy.”

In many ways, the segment sums up a widely-held myth constructed by the right that people who struggle to make ends meet don’t want to work. But in reality, people are working harder and harder for less and less, and all we have to do is listen to the stories of everyday Americans to see the truth.

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Protect and Expand Workers’ Ability to Bargain

by Sarita Gupta

Greedy corporations have been on a decades-long bender to take advantage of working people – depressing wages, benefits and job standards, which has led to record inequality and poverty.

Fighting poverty requires expanding and protecting the ability of workers to bargain with their employers to demand higher wages, better working conditions and better living standards. As the nature of work changes, we look at collective bargaining through the union workplace campaign lens, but also through nontraditional forms, including legislative, policy, rulemaking and industry-wide interventions that put more money in workers’ pockets and improve standards and conditions for workers. Only through bargaining do workers have the power to directly confront the corporate actors behind poverty and inequality.

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Make Public Higher Education in the United States Completely Free

by Maxwell John Love

Fifty years ago, the US National Student Association (The United States Student Association’s predecessor) declared its support for “the establishment of free public higher education throughout the United States financed by the local, state and federal governments, with the purpose of furthering the freedom of the individual and the critical spirit which ensures a dynamic and democratic society.”

Last week in Tennessee and last night in his State of the Union address, the president said the words ‘free’ and ‘college’ in the same sentence. The administration’s proposal is a big deal. It would offer funding to states to completely eliminate tuition at community colleges (on average $3,800). The funding would also not be last-dollar, meaning students could receive additional aid to offset living expenses.

We welcome the president to the fight for free college, and we believe that all public higher education in the US should be free!

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We Need to Expand the Most Effective Anti-Poverty Program in America

by Alex Lawson

In order to fight poverty, one of the easiest and most effective things we can do is to expand our Social Security system. Social Security lifted 22 million Americans out of poverty in 2012, including one million children. Without Social Security, 44.1 percent of all Americans over the age of 65 would be living in poverty; with Social Security that rate is 8.9 percent.

Social Security isn’t just for seniors – it is also the primary disability and life insurance protection for most of America’s workers. Social Security provides around $580,000 in disability insurance protections and $550,000 in life insurance protections.

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Low Wages Are a Moral Crisis in Our Time

by Sister Simone Campbell

Having worked as a family law attorney for 18 years in Oakland, California, I know that the single greatest cause of the breakup of families is economic stressors. This is especially true for the working poor families of our country.

Working for poverty wages creates family conflict when you have to choose between paying for rent and food, phone or medicine. This stress causes friction, blame and break-ups.

But it isn’t just families who suffer because of low wages. All workers working for minimum wage today need more than one job to get by.

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Protect and Strengthen Medicare and Medicaid Programs for Another 50 Years

by Kevin Prindiville

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that play a key role in ensuring that elderly and disabled Americans have access to health care and are not bankrupted by its costs.

Before Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, 35 percent of Americans over 65 did not have health insurance, leaving a huge uninsured aging population with either insurmountable doctor and hospital bills, or more frequently, no health care at all.

While we celebrate the fact that millions of people are better off now than they were in 1965, we must be aware that access to health care is continually threatened by program cuts, and millions of beneficiaries have trouble accessing the care they are entitled to because the programs don’t always work as well as they could.

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Support Human Rights for Food Supply Chain Workers

by Coalition of Immokalee Workers

The CIW’s Fair Food Program and Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model have transformed Florida’s $650 million tomato industry. The program is the gold standard for human rights in the fields today, including: worker-to-worker education on rights, a 24-hour complaint line and an effective complaint investigation and resolution process — all backed by market consequences for employers who refuse to respect their workers’ rights.

Now in its fourth season, the Fair Food Program is poised to expand, and bring respect and dignity for workers to new crops and new states. As underscored by the phone call from the former strawberry worker — that expansion can’t come soon enough.

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Slash Child Hunger

by Joel Berg

Even though the United States is the wealthiest and most agriculturally abundant country in world history, food insecurity now ravages 49 million Americans — including nearly 16 million American children. This often-overlooked mass epidemic harms health, hampers education, traps families in poverty, fuels obesity and eviscerates hope, while sapping the US economy of $167.5 billion annually, according to the Center for American Progress.

That’s why in order to achieve other vital national priorities — such as fixing public education, restoring the middle class, expanding opportunity, reducing crime and incarceration, making health care more affordable, protecting the nation from enemies, and slashing poverty — we must also end hunger in America, starting with child hunger.

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Stand with Native Youth and Support “Generation Indigenous”

by Erik Stegman

American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) youth face more barriers to success than almost any other group in the country. Thirty-seven percent of AIAN children under 18 live in poverty, significantly higher than the national child poverty rate of 22 percent (according to the American Community Survey).  The AIAN graduation rate is the lowest of any racial and ethnic group at 68 percent. Perhaps most stunning, suicide is the second leading cause of death for AIAN youth between ages 15 and 24 — they commit suicide at 2.5 times the national rate.

But these youth have a new partner in their movement for stronger economic and cultural opportunity: the president.

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We Can Reduce Child Poverty by 60 Percent Right Now

by

Marian Wright Edelman

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “America is going to hell if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.”

Today, 150 years after the end of slavery, every other black baby in America is poor. Every third Hispanic baby is poor. Nearly every fourth rural child is poor. All told, there are 14.7 million poor children and 6.5 million extremely poor children in the United States of America. It is a national disgrace that such an unconscionably large number of children are homeless, hungry and living in poverty in a country with the world’s largest economy.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

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We Should Ensure Access to Safe and Affordable Rental Housing

by  Sarah Edelman and Julia Gordon

Since the foreclosure crisis in 2008, the nation has gained more than four million renting households, and demographers expect an additional four million households to become renters over the next decade. At the same time, the homeownership rate has declined from nearly 70 percent to 64 percent.

This influx of renters has put significant upward pressure on rents. According to the Consumer Price Index, as most other expenses have held steady in recent months, rent expenses continue a steep upward climb. Half of all renters spend more than 30 percent of their gross income on housing, while 27 percent spend more than 50 percent — both sharp increases over the last decade. When the rental market tightens, the lowest-income renters feel the pressure first.

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Stop Punishing People After They Have Been Released from Prison

by  Jeremy Haile

In America, we punish people for being poor. But we’re also one of the few democracies that punishes people for being punished.

Consider the felony drug ban, which imposes a lifetime restriction on welfare and food stamp benefits for anyone convicted of a state or federal drug felony. Passed in the “tough on crime” era of the mid-1990s, the ban denies basic assistance to people who may have sold a small amount of marijuana years or even decades ago and have been law-abiding citizens ever since.

The Sentencing Project found that the legislation subjects an estimated 180,000 women in the 12 most impacted states to a lifetime ban on welfare benefits.

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In a single hour, nearly 500 participants posted 1600 tweets. Those tweets reached 5 million unique Twitter streams. For all of you who participated, thank you!

Beyond the impressive numbers and reflections, the Twitter storm demonstrated two things.

First, the facts and figures tweeted by organizations and online activists reveal the intersection of race, age, and gender in poverty statistics: That one in seven women are poor and that a majority of minimum wage earners are women is society’s failing. That 50 percent of African-American babies and one-third of Latino babies are poor is society’s failing. That men of color, and their families and communities, suffer overwhelmingly from an excessively punitive criminal justice system is also society’s failing.

Second, there is a formidable and passionate community that cares deeply about poverty in America and is working hard for change. There is strength in our numbers, and part of how we will succeed in making our agenda a political priority is by continuing to #TalkPoverty, continuing to collectively make our case, and coming together to take action however and whenever we can.

We hope that the President will prioritize the dramatic reduction of poverty not just in his State of the Union address, but in the remainder of his presidency.  In doing so, we hope he will help inspire high-quality media coverage of poverty that has been lacking, and strong legislation at the local, state and even federal level.

Please join TalkPoverty and other online activists again on Tuesday, when we will be live tweeting during the State of the Union address. Offer your thoughts using #TalkPoverty and #SOTU, and ask your friends to join us.  Also, don’t miss our first episode of TalkPoverty Radio on SiriusXM Insight this Saturday at noon.  Witness to Hunger member Tianna Gaines-Turner will talk about the state of her community in Philadelphia, and will be joined by Senator Sherrod Brown, Melissa Harris-Perry, and other special guests.

Thanks for all you do. Here were some of our favorite tweets:

Many have only a minor record—a misdemeanor, or even an arrest without a conviction. But even a minor criminal record carries with it lifelong barriers that can block successful reentry and access to many of the essentials for economic security and upward mobility, like employment, housing, education, and job training.

The reason? Policy choices at the federal, state, and local levels, as well as the rise of technology and the ease of accessing data via the internet. A generation ago, access to criminal record information for housing applicants and jobseekers was unusual. Today, however, background checks are ubiquitous, with 4 out of 5 landlords and nearly 9 in 10 employers using criminal background checks to screen out people with criminal records before they even get a shot.

The result is that tens of millions of individuals are prevented from becoming productive members of society, and their families, communities, and the national economy are held back as well.

It is important to note that the lifelong consequences and stigma of having a criminal record stand in stark contrast to research on “redemption.”  Studies show that once a person with a nonviolent conviction is crime-free for three to four years, his or her risk of recidivism is no different from the risk of arrest for the general population. Put differently, people are treated as criminals long after they pose any significant risk of committing further crimes—making it difficult for many to achieve basic economic security, much less upward mobility.

As detailed in a new Center for American Progress report to be released tomorrow—which I co-authored with Sharon Dietrich—mass incarceration and hyper-criminalization are now major drivers of poverty and inequality. Having a criminal record can stand in the way of employment, housing, public assistance, education and training, and more; convictions can result in significant monetary debts too. In fact, a recent study finds that our nation’s poverty rate would have dropped by 20 percent between 1980 and 2004 if not for mass incarceration and the subsequent criminal records that burden people for years after they have paid their debts to society.

Communities of color—and particularly men of color—are disproportionately affected, and high-poverty communities generate a disproportionate share of Americans behind bars. Approximately 60% of people in America’s prisons are racial and ethnic minorities.  Of those individuals serving time for drug offenses, about two-thirds are black or Latino.  Research shows that mass incarceration and its effects have been significant drivers of racial inequality in the U.S., particularly during the past three to four decades.

The barriers associated with a criminal record also hurt the nation’s bottom line. The Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates that the cost of people with criminal records being shut out of the labor market is a $65 billion annual hit to GDP. And that’s in addition to our nation’s skyrocketing expenditures for mass incarceration, which now total more than $80 billion annually.

It’s long past time that we create policies to ensure that Americans with criminal records have a fair shot at earning a decent living, providing for their families, and joining the middle class. Failure to address the lifelong barriers associated with a criminal record as part of a larger anti-poverty, pro-mobility agenda risks missing a major piece of the puzzle.

President Obama’s administration has been a leader on this important issue, for example by establishing the Federal Interagency Reentry Council, which has brought 20 federal agencies together to coordinate and advance effective re-entry policies. States and cities across the country are also beginning to take action: To date, 13 states and 70 municipalities have enacted fair-chance hiring policies to help level the playing field for jobseekers with criminal records. And cities such as New Orleans and New York City have taken steps to remove obstacles to public housing for people with records.

But further action is needed at all levels of government. Our new report offers a roadmap for the Obama administration and federal agencies, Congress, states and cities, employers, and colleges and universities to ensure that a criminal record no longer presents an intractable barrier to economic security and mobility.

Bipartisan momentum for criminal justice reform is growing, due in part to the enormous costs of mass incarceration, as well as an increased focus on evidence-based approaches to public safety. Policymakers and opinion leaders from across the political spectrum are calling for sentencing and prison reform, as well as policies that give people a second chance. Now is the time to find common ground and enact meaningful reforms that ensure a criminal record does not consign an individual to poverty.

We are thrilled that in conjunction with our report, TalkPoverty.org is featuring posts throughout the week from leaders in the criminal justice reform movement—including the Brennan Center, the Vera Institute of Justice, The Sentencing Project, the Center for Court Innovation, Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, and more—all exploring the link between mass incarceration and poverty, and solutions that would break that link. This week is not intended to be a comprehensive examination of criminal justice reform—we know it will only scratch the surface. But we hope it will help advance this important conversation, and we look forward to TalkPoverty.org continuing its commitment to criminal justice reform throughout the year.

Working Anything but 9 to 5 by Jodi Kantor and Sam Hodgson (New York Times)

Last month, she was scheduled to work until 11 p.m. on Friday, July 4; report again just hours later, at 4 a.m. on Saturday; and start again at 5 a.m. on Sunday. She braced herself to ask her aunt, Karina Rivera, to watch Gavin, hoping she would not explode in annoyance, or worse, refuse. She vowed to somehow practice for the driving test that she had promised her boyfriend she would pass by the previous month.

Thanks to campaigns in San Francisco and across the country, more people are aware that irregular, part-time work hours and poverty go hand in hand. Kantor and Hodgson provide a window into the dizzying schedule of Janette Navarro, a Starbucks barista and single mother. It’s easy to see how Navarro’s schedule creates “logistical puzzles” that strain family relationships, jeopardize her son’s spot in daycare, and even cause her to become homeless. Kantor and Hodgson explain why erratic scheduling has become so widespread. One huge culprit is new technology adopted by corporations like Starbucks to keep staffing levels at utmost efficiency, at the expense of worker wellbeing.

Michael Brown and Black Men by Charles M. Blow (New York Times)

Brown had just finished high school and was to start college this week. […] But it is clear even now that his killing occurred in a context, one that we would do well to recognize. Brown’s mother told a local television station after he was killed just weeks after his high school graduation: “Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate? Not many. Because you bring them down to this type of level, where they feel like they don’t got nothing to live for anyway […]”

As Blow states, a key reason why 18-year-old Michael Brown’s shooting is so devastating is that it has a “sense of tragedy too often repeated.” The killings of unarmed black and brown youth like Michael Brown are not just random accidents. These tragedies are rooted in our racially biased institutions and power structures. According to Blow, we need to take a step back and examine the data on how America criminalizes people of color, beginning in school and leading to prison. As early as preschool, black and Latino students are suspended at much higher rates than white students. These disparities continue throughout the life course, shaping “truly horrific” high school graduation rates, arrest rates, and imprisonment rates.

American Mayors Pledge to Fight Income Inequality, Low Wages by Erin Carlyle (Forbes)

The numbers underscore what seems to be constant news these days: despite record levels of corporate profitability, American wages remain stagnant. That is one of several factors creating a growing income gap between the poor and the affluent: tax policy is another big one. “When we go back 30 years, we lost our way,” said Paul Soglin, mayor of Madison, Wisc. “Mistakenly we thought that tax breaks to export jobs overseas was the way to build this country’s economy.”

As Neil Irwin reported last week, business forecasters recognize that America’s rising inequality is hindering economic growth. Big city mayors, from Michael Nutter of Philadelphia to Anise Parker of Houston, have arrived at the same conclusion. On Monday, the U.S. Conferences of Mayors released grim findings on income inequality. Jobs created during the Recovery pay an average of $47,171, a far cry from $61,637—the average wage of jobs lost during the Recession. 36 mayors signed a pledge to address income inequality. Of course, the million-dollar question is how?

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How Obama Suddenly Became Pro-Worker by Dave Jamieson (Huffington Post)

“This outside agitation has really helped push the president to do the right thing,” Paco Fabian, a spokesman for Change to Win, which includes the Service Employees International Union, said recently. “And he certainly deserves credit. For the first time in a long time we have a president taking executive action to help workers.”

American workers saw some significant wins in the past year. In 2014, President Obama signed executive orders to raise the federal contractor minimum wage to $10.10, protect federal contractor employees from LGBT discrimination, and require that federal contractors report labor law violations to crack down on wage theft. While these measures are important first steps, they only reach one segment of the workforce—about 1-in-5 workers. Jamieson analyzes the strengths and weaknesses inherent in Obama’s use of executive orders. One pro: policy reforms can still be enacted in a time of Congressional gridlock. One con: these reforms can be rolled back with a new president.

A Tale of Two Maternity Leaves by Darlena Cunha (Washington Post)

Rebecca Carparros works for the Federal Government. “I have to work, and I was only able to stay home with my first daughter five weeks,” she said. “For my second, I managed to get six weeks. I could have used FMLA and gotten eight weeks, but I can’t afford weeks off unpaid.” Contrast this with dual-citizen Tiffiny Rossi’s experience in Finland. She had a baby in April 2013, and is still on maternity leave. In fact, her paid leave will last until January 2015.

The United States “prides itself on its family values,” yet stands as an extreme outlier in its lack of guaranteed paid family leave. Only 11% of American workers receive paid family leave. Cunha details the ways that working mothers in the majority are forced to cope, such as returning to work when their babies are not ready, attempting to go on short-term disability, and even Internet crowdfunding.  At the same time, Cunha reminds us that better models are available. New mothers and fathers in Finland are guaranteed paid leave until their baby is 9 months old, and one parent can stay on home leave until the child is 3, without fear of losing their job. And yes, Finland’s businesses and taxpayers are doing just fine.

To keep up with our reading list throughout the week, like TalkPoverty on Facebook and follow us on Twitter (@TalkPoverty). You can also sign up for weekly emails on the TalkPoverty.org homepage.

Black, Asian Residents Unite to Save Low-Income Building Near Chinatown, by Robert Samuels (Washington Post)

Saving their D.C. apartment building seemed impossible, but the tenants association president resolved that he would try. So Kevin Rogers and fellow board member Vera Watson set out on a Saturday to knock on every door in the egg-yolk-colored halls of Museum Square. The problem: More than 70 percent of their neighbors were Chinese. Most were elderly and spoke little English. Rogers and Watson needed to convey the urgency of the matter, a complicated confluence of community development, tenant rights and city law.

It’s a disturbingly common tale: neighborhoods revitalize, only to push out the lower income residents who stuck with them through the rough times. Washington, D.C. is no exception to growing displacement, but it does have a unique tool to fight it. The Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act gives tenants the first right to make an offer when their building goes up for sale. So far the policy has preserved at least 1,500 affordable units across D.C. But what happens when a building owner sets the price impossibly out of reach? That’s exactly what is unfolding in Chinatown, where over 200 low-income residents have banded together in attempt to save their home. The added complication? The majority are elderly Chinese immigrants who will face extreme challenges living anywhere else. So far, the tenants have secured one more year in their building, but the story is far from over.

A New Report Argues Inequality is Causing Slower Growth. Here’s Why It Matters. By Neil Irwin (New York Times)

The fact that S.&P., an apolitical organization that aims to produce reliable research for bond investors and others, is raising alarms about the risks that emerge from income inequality is a small but important sign of how a debate that has been largely confined to the academic world and left-of-center political circles is becoming more mainstream.

If you do not believe low income people or progressive advocates when they say that rising income inequality is bad for the economy, maybe you’ll believe your forecasting firm. S&P recently released a report stating that “the current level of income inequality in the U.S. is dampening GDP growth.” To explain why this is so groundbreaking, Irwin situates S&P in the world of economics research. The firm does not aim to advance political ideology or social policy; they simply aim to give practical business advice. Thus, their report could signal a paradigm shift in the way that the business community views income inequality and increase the imperative to address it.

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Minnesota Café Charges 35 Cent ‘Fee’ To Protest Minimum Wage Hike, by Alexander C. Kaufman (Huffington Post)

Minnesota raised its minimum wage by 75 cents to $8 last week — the first increase in the state since 2009. An owner of the café claimed the 35-cent fee was a way of “thumbing my nose at the law change,” according to CBS-affiliate WCCO. “Shame on your protest over a small increase in pay required by law,” wrote Facebook user Terry Edgar in a one-star review. “Hopefully customers will not continue to patronize your cheapskate establishment.”

If you find yourself at the Oasis Café in Stillwater, MN, your huevos rancheros are going to cost a bit extra. The management believes an extra “minimum wage” fee is a clever way to protest the state’s new $8 minimum wage. The customers think differently and have stormed social media in protest. Even more appalling, another local chain, Blue Plate Co., actually pledged to start taking back money from servers’ tips.

Rich Kid, Poor Kid: For 30 Years, Baltimore Study Tracked Who Gets Ahead, by Juana Summers (NPR)

Monica Jaundoo didn’t have an easy life growing up in Baltimore in the early ’80s. “I remember being so immune to death, so immune to shootings, killings. I just remember wanting them to rush, like, get the body out the way so we can get back to playing hopscotch or dodgeball,” she says […] And so her story raises a question: How can a child with the deck stacked against her get out and get ahead?

Johns Hopkins researchers recently published the results of a study that tracked about 800 low-income Baltimore children all the way through adulthood. Their goal was to discover which factors truly impact a child’s life chances. The ultimate conclusion is disheartening: they found that, “a child’s fate is in many ways fixed at birth — determined by family strength and the parents’ financial status.” Only 33 subjects moved into the high income bracket after 30 years.  Summers illustrates the findings by profiling two subjects, Monica and John. She also unpacks employment and incarceration rates, underscoring how racial discrimination also plays a huge role in shaping life outcomes.

This is How Rural Poverty is Changing, by Lydia DePillis (Washington Post)

“I think it’s more of a place-based poverty than it is demographic,” says Tracey Farrigan, an economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture who is studying how rural poverty has spread. “People are moving to areas where they can afford to live, which are areas with less support for them. It’s kind of a cycle. So the places are poor, and the people are poor.”

Las Animas, Colorado has lost almost a third of its population since the late 1990s, along with many of its factories, farms, restaurants, and hospital jobs. Dairy Queen is the most successful restaurant in town, and the county commissioner believes there wouldn’t be enough demand for another chain like it. What happens to the people who stayed when the economy went south—those who can’t leave, or who don’t want to leave their community? What happens to their children? DePillis provides an in-depth profile of residents, revealing tough realities about the state of rural poverty today.

I Tried to Live on the Minimum Wage for a Week, by Ted Strickland (Politico)

Washington is in a bubble that keeps our representatives away from the experiences of those they actually represent. We need to understand the challenges faced by Americans who are being left behind in our economy. That’s why I joined members of Congress and dozens of organizations in taking the Live the Wage challenge […] and asking those in Congress to actually try living on the minimum wage for a week before opposing an increase that would help millions of Americans who currently live in poverty.

Former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland describes his past week participating in the Live the Wage Challenge, calling attention to the fact that it’s been 5 years since the federal minimum wage was last raised to $7.25/hour. Spoiler alert: $77 per week is not enough to live on. Strickland reminds us that a lot can change in five years, like gas prices. On average, it costs $13.20 more per week to fill the tank than it did in 2009, which makes a sizable dent in a minimum wage budget. As Strickland recounts his struggles—from skipping meals, to getting sick, to eventually running out of money—we can’t help but think that we’d see faster progress if more policymakers stepped up to the plate and “lived the wage.” Want to hear more about Strickland’s experience? Catch him on Hardball with Chris Matthews.

Why “Can’t Make Ends Meet” Trumps “Poverty,” by Karin Kamp (Moyers & Company)

First, Americans who are struggling do not see themselves in abstract language like “the poor” or “poverty.” This is partly because such language is seen as quite pejorative in America. To be poor is to have failed in pursuit of the American Dream. In too many ways, people who are poor are reviled. The first thing we need to do is stop blaming people and start talking about their real lives. Second, we need to stop talking about the economy in ways that make it seem like the weather. The economy is a result of the rules we create and the choices we make.

What if anti-poverty advocates are using the wrong words? Kamp interviews Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director of the Center for Community Change, which recently performed “the most robust scan available of attitudes toward poverty” by surveying 700 Americans living below 200% of the poverty line. The results? Many people living in poverty ignore political debates that impact their lives because they do not identify with the language used. Interestingly, many social movements gain power by uniting people around shared identities—from race, to gender identity, to sexual orientation. However, Bhargava explains, most people are not eager to claim the identity of being poor—for good reason. The key conclusion is that we need to move from nouns to verbs, meaning that describing families’ lived experience—from living paycheck to paycheck to working irregular hours—is much more empowering and mobilizing than calling them “low-income” or “poor”.

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History Suggests Ryan Block Grant Would Be Susceptible to Cuts, by Richard Kogan (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

Ryan says that the block grant would maintain the same overall funding as the current programs.  But even if one thought that current-law funding levels were adequate, they likely wouldn’t be sustained over time under the Ryan proposal: history shows that block grants that consolidate a number of programs or may be used for a wide array of purposes typically shrink — often very substantially — over time.

Have you heard the expression, “don’t feed the trolls”? That’s what we fear we’re doing when we keep Rep. Paul Ryan’s recent poverty plan in the spotlight. As many experts in the poverty field have argued, it’s not a serious, evidence-driven attempt to address poverty. Instead, it’s largely a repackaging of old ideas—including block grants (which he now calls “Opportunity Grants”)—that have failed in the past. Still, it’s important to recognize how harmful consolidating 11 programs into a single block grant would be for low-income families. Therefore, this short-and-sweet Center on Budget and Policy Priorities post is a must-read. One look at Kogan’s table, titled “Most Major Low-Income Block Grants Have Shrunk Significantly over Time,” is enough to make anyone doubt the “opportunity” in Opportunity Grants.

U.S. Paid Family Leave Versus the Rest of the World, In Two Disturbing Charts, by Bryce Covert and Adam Peck (ThinkProgress)

In the United States, new parents aren’t guaranteed any paid time off. Instead, if they have worked for a certain amount of time at a company with 50 or more employees, they are guaranteed the ability to take 12 unpaid weeks off for the arrival of a new child. That leaves us in lonely company. Out of 185 countries, the United States is one of just three that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave, the others being Oman and Papua New Guinea. Over half of the countries that provide leave give at least 14 weeks off.

There is nothing a policy wonk enjoys more than a good infographic. Covert and Peck’s piece features two, illustrating how the United States is an extreme outlier on the world stage with regard to paid maternity and paternity leave policies.  Covert and Peck pair the graphics with shocking facts about the state of family leave across the country, and show how California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island are leading the way towards progress.

To keep up with our reading list throughout the week, make sure to like TalkPoverty on Facebook and follow us on Twitter (@TalkPoverty)! You can also sign up for our weekly emails on the TalkPoverty.org homepage.

Here are our top 5 picks this week:

Paul Ryan and His Poverty Prophet, by Charles M. Blow (New York Times)

But, make no mistake: “opportunity” is the new “block.” And, block grants to states don’t have a great track record where poor people are concerned. First, let’s set the stage: Some of the poorest states in the country consistently vote for Republican presidential candidates, have Republican governors and Republican control of the statehouses. Many of these are the same states that refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which would have extended health care to more low-income Americans. What could possibly go wrong?

After months of anticipation, Paul Ryan unveiled his new anti-poverty plan on Thursday. Blow reminds us to “look beyond the catchphrase dance” and analyze Ryan’s big reveal—a proposal to consolidate various safety net programs into “Opportunity Grants.” As Blow explains, Opportunity Grants are repackaged block grants, and this strategy mirrors 1996 welfare reform, which made low-income families worse off. Ultimately, Blow reminds us that behind the smoke and mirrors of carefully-crafted speeches is “a particular strand of tough-love, up-by-the-bootstraps, stop-helping-poor-folks-so-much-because-you’re-hurting-them thinking.”

We’re Arresting Poor Mothers for Our Own Failures, by Bryce Covert (The Nation)

Whose fault is it that these children were put in these situations to begin with? […] They were both mothers trying to hold down jobs to provide for their children while stuck swirling in a Catch-22. Can’t work or interview without childcare, but can’t afford childcare without a job that pays enough to cover the ever-increasing cost. Taylor and Harrell are both holding up their end of the deal: don’t rely on public assistance, go out and get work to provide for your children. Our country has reneged on its end of that deal: we’ll help you pay for someone to watch your children if you go to work.

Shanesha Taylor is a homeless mother arrested for leaving her kids in the car while she went on a job interview after her babysitter had cancelled. Debra Harrell was arrested for leaving her daughter to play alone in a park with a cellphone while she worked shifts at McDonald’s. According to Covert, Taylor and Harrell’s heartbreaking stories are a symptom of massive social policy failure. In the 1996 welfare reform process, President Clinton promised to protect necessary family supports like subsidized childcare. Covert presents some truly jarring data, such as how childcare spending has plummeted, to prove how “we broke that promise.”

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The New Face of Hunger, by Tracie McMillan (National Geographic Magazine)

To witness hunger in America today is to enter a twilight zone where refrigerators are so frequently bare of all but mustard and ketchup that it provokes no remark, inspires no embarrassment. Here dinners are cooked using macaroni-and-cheese mixes and other processed ingredients from food pantries, and fresh fruits and vegetables are eaten only in the first days after the SNAP payment arrives.

McMillan provides an eloquent overview of modern American hunger.  Not only has the hunger evolved, but it’s grown fivefold since the 1960s and a staggering 57% since the late ‘90s.  Her piece is visually stunning with maps, infographics, and photo galleries that document hungry families in rural Iowa, suburban Texas, and urban New York. McMillan begins by asking us to picture what hunger looks like, and then details how many hungry families, like the Driers of Iowa, do not fit common stereotypes: they are “white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight.” McMillan asserts that the root issue is the widespread decline of living wage jobs.

When Poverty Makes You Sick, a Lawyer Can Be the Cure, by Tina Rosenberg (New York Times)

Being poor can make you sick. Where you work, the air you breathe, the state of your housing, what you eat, your levels of stress and your vulnerability to crime, injury and discrimination all affect your health. These social determinants of health lie outside the reach of doctors and nurses.

Mold, infestations, and overwhelming heat. In our worsening housing affordability crisis, many low-income families are forced to live in rental units that are poorly maintained and toxic to their health. Rosenberg details the rise of medical-legal partnerships to advocate for patients in poverty, as many now recognize the links between poverty and poor health. At last count, 231 medical-legal partnerships exist across the country, and these innovative models are producing real gains for both people in poverty and the hospitals themselves.

Fight Inequality – Schedule Fair Work Hours, by Eric Mar and Samantha Adame (SFGate)

Many retail workers aren’t living paycheck to paycheck, they’re living hour to hour, subject to erratic scheduling practices that make it impossible to set a budget, let alone schedule medical appointments or arrange for care for their loved ones, or even work a second job or upgrade their skills by going back to school. On top of their irregular and ever-changing schedules, workers find themselves kept on call, thrusting their lives even further into precarious situations.

Mar and Adame assert that simply raising wages is not enough to ensure that workers can make ends meet; we also must address the fact that roughly 8 million of us are forced to work irregular, part-time hours. Mar and Adame explain how irregular, part-time work exacerbates poverty, and highlight ongoing efforts in San Francisco to improve labor standards.

Check out our top reads of the week:

Three Steps We Can Take to Solve Poverty, From Someone Who Knows Firsthand, by Tianna Gaines-Turner (Moyers & Company)

When my son was sick, I had to stay at the hospital with him, so I couldn’t go to work; my husband had to stay home with our twin babies, so he couldn’t work. Here’s the problem: neither of us had paid sick leave, so we lost hours on the job, and we lost pay, too. The result was we could not afford to pay our rent on time, nor our light bill. From there, we became homeless.

As to be expected, Paul Ryan’s most recent War on Poverty hearing included stale, demeaning rhetoric from some members of Congress about poverty. For instance, according to Representative Tom Rice of South Carolina, “the only way out of poverty is to be self-reliant and find yourself a job.” Lucky for the American people, we had a game-changer: Tiana Gaines-Turner, the first person actually living in poverty to testify. This week, our first-must read comes from Ms. Gaines-Turner, who published a list of policy recommendations to alleviate poverty that she had included in her testimony. As Gaines-Turner states, “It’s time to call in the experts. My family, my neighbors and people like me know the solutions.” We couldn’t agree more.  Her recommendations are comprehensive and strikingly commonsense, because they are informed by real experiences.

Want to hear more from Ms. Gaines-Turner about her experience testifying before the House of Representatives? Check out her interview with Melissa Harris Perry on MSNBC:

It is Illegal for Homeless People to Sit on the Sidewalk in More than Half of U.S. Cities, by Scott Keyes (ThinkProgress)

Criminalization is an ineffective approach for the simple fact that it does “nothing to address the underlying causes of homelessness.” These laws do not provide housing to poor people, or help alcoholics with their disease, or provide childcare to struggling parents. They simply trap homeless people in a cycle that criminalizes their very existence.

In 9% of U.S. cities, it is against the law to share your food with a homeless person. Yes, you read that correctly. This is just one of many kinds of anti-homeless ordinances that have been cropping up across the United States in recent years. Keynes presents data from a recent National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty study that found sharp increases in laws criminalizing homelessness since 2009. These measures are not just cruel; they’re lousy policy. Keynes explains that tax payers spend millions of dollars each year to jail homeless men and women for “quality-of-life” offenses. As it turns out, this policy approach is three times more expensive than an alternative that actually addresses the root issue: giving the homeless a place to live.

Obama Should Set His Sights Higher, by Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Washington Post)

The U.S. government is the largest employer of low-wage workers in the nation, with the $1.3 trillion it spends on purchasing goods and services. The president, standing in the proud tradition of Roosevelt, could issue a Good Jobs Executive Order that would reward companies who pay their workers a living wage, allow them a voice at the workplace without having to go on strike, adhere to federal workplace safety and fair labor standards and limit the pay of their chief executives to some reasonable ratio to that of their average workers.

How should President Obama react to Republican threats to sue over his use of executive orders? According to vanden Heuvel, he should “double down and raise the stakes” by enacting a Good Jobs Executive Order, which could put 21 million Americans on the road to the middle class through measures like living wages. Vanden Heuvel contextualizes the need for a Good Jobs Executive Order by linking the historical decline of unions to today’s staggering inequality. Of course, she recognizes that low-wage worker protections will not come without furious pushback from corporate and conservative forces. However, vanden Heuvel asserts, “well-paid, productive workers aren’t simply an idle luxury; they are a vital necessity to any prosperous economy.”

Should Housing Policy Support Renters More? The Opinion Pages: Room for Debate (New York Times)

In many of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, buying a home again looks like a risky investment, and in places like Boston, Miami and Washington prices have risen enough that buying is no longer the bargain it seemed to be a few years ago. That perhaps explains why the American public is now divided on whether homeownership is a good long-term investment, and a majority now see homeownership as less appealing than it once was. Should housing policy be more balanced, supporting rental housing and homeownership on a more equal footing?

Smart housing policy is essential to our goal of cutting poverty in half in the next decade. Only when we have a secure home, are we able to truly thrive and benefit from other poverty-reducing measures like quality jobs and schools. Because housing policy debates can get complicated, this week’s New York Times Opinion feature is helpful in unpacking the tough issues. It features op-eds from six housing policy experts, each weighing in on a key issue—the fact that American housing policies disproportionately benefit homeowners over renters. As former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros writes, “About two-thirds of [federal] spending subsidizes home ownership, while just one-third supports affordable rental housing.” Sure, homeownership may be viewed as part of the “American Dream,” but it’s not the reality for many of us, especially low-income families. These conversations are essential in a time of skyrocketing rents and rising inequality, as critical programs like Section 8 are on the chopping block.

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One Storm Shy of Despair: A Climate-Smart Plan for the Administration to Help Low-Income Communities by Cathleen Kelly and Tracey Ross (Center for American Progress)

Only 6,800 people arrived at shelters, even though 375,000 New Yorkers—including 45,000 public housing residents—lived in the mandatory evacuation zone hit hard by the hurricane. Workers eventually discovered the nightmare lurking behind low shelter turnout. Many low-income elderly and disabled residents of New York City’s public housing complexes were stranded in their dark and cold apartments without heat, backup generators, emergency boilers, or working elevators, the latter preventing many of these residents from descending multiple flights of stairs. Others endured these conditions because they had no other affordable place to stay or no reasonable means of leaving their neighborhoods because mass transit was shut down, among other reasons. 

For many, Superstorm Sandy was a tragic reminder that climate change is indeed happening, and that its effects will be costly. President Obama recently announced a final task force meeting to help state, local, and tribal leaders prepare their communities for climate change. Kelly and Ross present a critical perspective that leaders and policymakers must keep in mind when planning for disaster: our most vulnerable citizens often face the greatest environmental hazards and risks, yet they have not been a strong focus of federal recovery efforts. Kelly and Ross cover key climate change-related risks for low-income communities, from extreme heat, to food insecurity, to deep poverty. We need to do better in the face of our changing climate, and these policy recommendations are a wise step.

Here are our top picks this week:

Paying Employees to Stay, Not Go, by Steven Greenhouse & Stephanie Strom (New York Times)

“If we really wanted our people to care about our culture and care about our customers, we had to show that we cared about them,” Mr. Pepper said. “If we’re talking about building a business that’s successful, but our employees can’t go home and pay their bills, to me that success is a farce.”

We’ve heard the refrain from conservative pundits and musty Intro Economics textbooks: raising the minimum wage will cause widespread job loss and hurt the economy overall. In practice, however, we often see the exact opposite outcome. In fact, states that raised their minimum wages this year saw higher levels of job growth. How can this be? Greenhouse and Strom show how employers who pay higher than the minimum wage actually benefit. Specifically, the article examines fast food chains like Boloco and Shake Shack, which offer workers competitive wage and benefit packages and yield positive returns like reduced turnover and enhanced customer service.

I Clean High School Bathrooms, and My New $15/Hour Salary will Change Everything, By Raul Meza (Washington Post)

I feel fortunate for what I have. I also feel tired a lot, from all the work and from lack of sleep; sometimes I get as little as two hours a night. But what I miss most is time with my son. He’s always asking, “Daddy, where are you going?” Leaving breaks my heart every time. When I think about making $15 an hour, I think mostly of the time that money could buy with my son.

A critical piece often left out of minimum wage debates are the stories of the workers and families who will benefit from a raise. Raul Meza is one such worker whose life is about to change, as his union just negotiated a contract that will raise the wages of 20,000 school workers to $15/hour by 2016. Because Meza has never made more than $10/hour, he’s constantly forced to forego time with his son to work evenings and weekends. As Meza anticipates what life will be like at his new wage, we’re reminded of how raising the minimum wage not only strengthens bank accounts, but also strengthens families.

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50 Years After Civil Rights Act, Many Households of Color Still Struggle to Get Ahead, by Alicia Atkinson (CFED)

Many want to believe the injustice is over, yet we see over and over again how these factors compound and leave households of color with significantly lower amounts of wealth compared to white households. Specifically, the average African-American and Latino household still owns only six and seven cents, respectively, for every dollar in wealth held by the typical white family. At CFED, we know that income alone is not enough to succeed in the American economy. Having wealth and owning assets like a house or car can improve families’ lives by providing a stable place to live and reliable transportation to get to work.

July marks the 50^th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. While it’s important to celebrate how far we’ve come in combatting systemic racial discrimination, Alicia Atkinson of CFED reminds us how far we still need to go, specifically in addressing the persistent racial wealth gap. As Atkinson explains, today “we face a quieter, more insidious discrimination” that erects barriers to building savings and wealth in communities of color. It’s important to look closely at the research Atkinson presents on how the financial market is currently serving communities of color in order. To best honor the Civil Rights Movement’s legacy, we must keep fighting to ensure that equal opportunity is not an unfulfilled promise.

This is What Happened When I Drove my Mercedes to Pick Up Food Stamps, by Darlena Cunha (Washington Post)

“We didn’t deserve to be poor, any more than we deserved to be rich. Poverty is a circumstance, not a value judgment. I still have to remind myself sometimes that I was my harshest critic. That the judgment of the disadvantaged comes not just from conservative politicians and Internet trolls. It came from me, even as I was living it.”

Cunha details what it’s like to turn to social safety net programs like WIC and Medicaid as a white, college-educated woman from an affluent background. A constellation of factors led her to apply for assistance, including the housing market crash, a sudden layoff, and the unexpected birth of twins with serious medical needs. Cunha’s story underscores the fact that poverty is much more common and fluid than many realize; in fact, research shows that more than 40% of American adults will be poor for at least a year of their lives. Cunha relates to the stigma that so many people who receive public assistance face, detailing the judgment she experienced in the grocery store while using her food stamps. Of course, what sets Cunha apart from many other WIC recipients is that her story has a happy ending: she recovers financially and is able to keep her Mercedes. The article suggests the role of social privilege in helping people like Cunha regain financial footing.

Meet the First Poor Person Allowed to Testify at Any of Paul Ryan’s Poverty Hearings, by Bryce Covert (ThinkProgress)

Gaines-Turner certainly knows what it means to struggle. She and her husband have weathered two bouts of homelessness together and two of her children suffer from epilepsy while all three suffer from asthma, afflictions that mean they all have to take medication daily. “I know what it’s like to be homeless and to couch surf, to miss meals so my children can have a nutritional meal,” she said. “I know what it’s like to wake up every day wondering where the next meal will come from or how to pay the bills today or will someone come today and cut off the water. I’ve been through all of that.”

As the title suggests, Covert profiles Tianna Gaines-Turner, who testified at Paul Ryan’s fifth hearing on poverty on Wednesday. Of course, it seems commonsense that those who actually have turned to America’s safety net programs would be the most important people to listen to about how they work and can be improved. However, Covert explains how it has not been an easy road to ensure that voices like Ms. Gaines-Turner’s are included in the hearings. Ms. Gaines-Turner now has a chance to tell her powerful story about struggling to make ends meet while faced with serious obstacles. The question is, will lawmakers listen?

To keep up with our reading list throughout the week, make sure to like TalkPoverty on Facebook and follow us on Twitter (@TalkPoverty)! You can also sign up for our weekly emails on the TalkPoverty.org homepage.

Authentic stories and good reporting play an essential role in the fight to dramatically reduce poverty in America, because silence and misinformation are among the biggest barriers to progress. When the media is not reporting the real data, or when low-income people do not have the opportunity to share their real experiences, then the vacuum is filled with the same old lies and stereotypes, and poverty solutions continue to be ignored.

Each week, we will share five must-read articles that contribute to a stronger antipoverty movement. These are works that grapple with critical issues, inspire us to action, challenge us, and push us to see both problems and solutions from new angles.

Here are this week’s five stories:

Let Them Eat Cash, by Christopher Blattman (New York Times)

“Midway through a meal of sesame-crusted tuna and filet of beef, some 200 homeless people discovered that they would not be getting money. Instead, the Rescue Mission would accept $90,000 on their behalf. You can imagine the anger and humiliation. ”

Blattman tackles the issue of cash transfer programs to the very poor, specifically Americans’ resistance to a model that has proven successful in reducing poverty in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. If you give a homeless person in New York City a lump sum of cash, will it help to lift them out of poverty or be exchanged for drugs and alcohol? What does the evidence show? As Blattman states, “We must be skeptical of stereotypes of those we purport to help.”

Don’t Call Them Dropouts: A Report on the Nation’s Nongraduates, by Linda Shaw ( The Seattle Times)

“The Alliance titled its report “Don’t Call Them Dropouts” because many of the 200 young people it interviewed asked it to stop using that term. They may not have graduated, the interviewees said, but they haven’t given up. Many are enrolled in high-school completion programs or have returned to school.”

Shaw highlights data on students who do not graduate high school on time, both in Washington State and across the nation.  Importantly, she raises the issue of how we as a society label these students and why the “drop out” label denotes preconceived notions. While many people have faced serious hardships that have kept them from school, it does not mean that they have given up on their education.

The South is Essentially a Solid, Grim Block of Poverty, by Mark Gongloff (Huffington Post)

“This should not be much of a shock, as Southern states consistently lag the rest of the country in good things like wages, economic mobility and access to health care, while leading it in bad things like poverty, obesity and general unhappiness. Another thing Southern states have in common is Republican political leaders that have spent the past decade shrinking the social safety net.”

Gongloff breaks down some of the more troubling data from a new U.S. Census report, released this week, which found that over 25% of Americans now live in “poverty areas.”  As the graphics reveal, the rise in people living in poverty areas from 2000 to 2010 was not evenly distributed throughout the country.

Top Restaurant Industry CEOs Made 721 Times More than Minimum-Wage Workers in 2013, by Lawrence Mishel, Ross Eisenbrey, and Alyssa Davis (Economic Policy Institute)

The current minimum wage is $15,080 if earned full-time, while the average pay of top restaurant CEOs in 2013 was $10,872,390—721 times more than minimum-wage workers. These corporate CEOs earn more on the first morning of the year than a minimum-wage worker will earn over the course of a full year.

We can count on Economic Policy Institute for hard-hitting data on labor market inequalities, and this snapshot is no exception. Just look at the spike in the Restaurant CEO-to-minimum wage worker pay ratio from 2006 to 2013. This piece adds an enlightened and needed perspective to ongoing debates about raising the minimum wage and economic inequality.

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Beating the Odds by Kavitha Cardoza (WAMU 88.5)

“During that summer, the bills were so high so it was either, we wouldn’t have any food or we had to get rid of our electricity and our water for some time. At home, it was really bad because it was hot, the food was going bad. We all slept in a bed in our basement because it was the coolest room in our house. We couldn’t take showers in the house.”

Our final must-read is a series of ten stories from education reporter, Kavitha Cardoza. Each profiles a young D.C. area student who has overcome massive challenges in pursuit of a high school diploma. These deeply moving stories put a face on a range of poverty-related issues, including incarceration, immigration, disability, homelessness, and the death of a parent. Ultimately, we’re struck by each student’s resilience, and their hopes for the future.

To keep up with our reading list throughout the week, make sure to like TalkPoverty on Facebook and follow us on Twitter (@TalkPoverty)! You can also sign up for our weekly emails on the TalkPoverty.org homepage.

With the swipe of a paintbrush or click of a camera, your child can make a difference in the fight to end poverty.  Not only that, they have the chance to win exciting prizes, and have their artwork showcased in a national campaign.

As part of its mission to build the political and public will to cut poverty in half in ten years, the Half in Ten Campaign is hosting our first ever nationwide art competition with the theme Our American Dream—What Will It Take To Get There?, and the June 30^th submission deadline is only two weeks away. We are calling on everyone, ages 4 to 24, to unleash their creativity and engage in a national conversation with their families, teachers, and community members about poverty and what we need to do as a nation to tackle it.

We need your help to encourage your children to participate. Moms and dads across the nation play an essential role in achieving our goal to reduce poverty as we know firsthand how important it is that children have enough nutritious food on the table, that we and/or our partners have good jobs with good wages, and that our families are secure and stable. Together, we must work to build the country that we want our kids to grow up in, and Half in Ten’s art competition is the perfect opportunity to engage our children in the process.

Aside from the chance to win prizes such as an art kit, an iPad, or a trip to DC, we will feature several winning selections in our campaign materials and reports. It’s time to build a movement against poverty—to raise our voices for the millions of fellow parents and children who struggle to make ends meet. And with your help, we can harness our kids’ collective energy and imagination to push forward.

The decisions our policymakers make today have a profound impact on children. Half in Ten’s National Art Competition offers an opportunity for children to reflect on what poverty means to them and the changes they envision for their community and the country so that everyone can achieve the American Dream.

With that, it’s time to break out the art supplies and register!  Please visit our website for further guidance, details, and frequently asked questions about the competition.

In January 2012, we created a weekly blog, This Week in Poverty, because we felt that media coverage of poverty was woefully inadequate.  The blog focused on people living in poverty, solutions to poverty, and ways for people to get involved in the fight against poverty.

I felt honored that so many people shared their stories with me—stories that really exposed the vulnerability of the people telling them.   The most vulnerable of all, of course, are the people actually living in poverty—46.5 million people now, more than 1 in 7 of us—living on less than about $18,300 annually for a family of three.  They are vulnerable to the stereotyping and venom that they so often receive from society; to the huge stakes involved in policy decisions that deeply affect their lives; and especially vulnerable to the daily challenges of their own lives—just finding a time and place to talk is a challenge, and doing so with a reporter they didn’t even know was a real leap of faith.

The people who dedicate themselves to fighting poverty are also vulnerable.  They are often ignored or even mocked; sometimes struggle with a sense of isolation, or a feeling of powerlessness, or burnout; and many feel a frustration that readily apparent solutions—solutions that could dramatically reduce the number of people living in poverty—are not even on the radar of most elected leaders and the general public.

I think that’s why the response to This Week in Poverty was so strong—because we valued the experiences of people living in poverty and we weren’t doing “gotcha” coverage; and we valued the work of people engaged in the issue.  We also valued getting the facts on poverty straight.

We developed a real community—people who were knowledgeable and passionate about this issue, and wanted a way to speak up.  At no time was that more clear than when we ran a series of blogs called “#TalkPoverty: Questions for President Obama and Governor Romney” during the presidential campaign.  We profiled low-income people, advocates, and researchers, and gave them a chance to ask President Obama and Governor Romney the questions that they wanted answers to.  In the end, the Obama campaign responded to our questions, the Romney campaign didn’t, and now we all know why there is no President Romney.

While that might not be true, what is true is that #TalkPoverty took off and continues to thrive on Twitter today.

After two years, any separation between my work as a poverty reporter and my desire to work as an anti-poverty activist had disappeared.  I started pitching ideas to advocates (they used at least .000003% of them!).  Additionally, while the decision about what to write every week wasn’t hard, deciding what not to write was.  There are so many stories out there that need to be heard—whether about low-income workers; people with barriers to employment who can’t receive assistance; segregated schools; the demonization of people in poverty; the cradle-to-prison pipeline; Native American poverty; the costs of continuing education…. and though there are a number of very dedicated reporters who now cover poverty, there aren’t nearly enough.  I felt that no matter how hard we worked, we were barely making a dent in telling the story of poverty in America and what we as a nation can do about it.

So I got to thinking, what if we didn’t have to wait for media to tell the stories that need to be told?  What if we went directly to low-income people, and to people working on poverty, and they told the stories themselves?  Some could write them, some could do video or audio—couldn’t we create a single website where people would be able to find more stories about poverty than are currently available?

When I decided to leave reporting, approaching the Half in Ten Education Fund for this project was in some ways like coming full circle.  I’d discovered Half in Ten in 2007 when I worked as a researcher for my friend Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor and Publisher of The Nation.  I was very impressed with the campaign’s ability to demonstrate in a concrete way that we could in fact cut poverty in half over ten years with the right policy choices.

In 2011, as we prepared to launch This Week in Poverty, Melissa Boteach, who ran Half in Ten at the time, was an invaluable adviser.  She introduced me to incredible grassroots groups like Witnesses to Hunger, and strong national organizations like the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) and the National Women’s Law Center; great researchers like Donna Pavetti and Arloc Sherman at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; and stellar advocates like Debbie Weinstein at the Coalition on Human Needs.  Not to mention, Half in Ten clearly understood the importance of story—to give people in poverty a platform to speak out; and to make policy debates less abstract and more human, in order to affect change.

This past December, it took me, Half in Ten Associate Director Erik Stegman, and Melissa—who now runs the poverty team at the Center for American Progress—less than a cup of coffee to realize that we were all passionate about this idea. Not only could we have a home for the stories of people living in poverty and people working on the issue, we could also provide data to raise awareness and counter misinformation, and link people with groups that are fighting poverty all over the country.

And so here we are today with the launch of TalkPoverty.org. We want this to be your community—a place where we build bridges with one another, grow the movement, and work to dramatically reduce poverty.  We want your ideas and your involvement, so reach out.

Right now, more than 46 million people are living in poverty in America, including more than 1 in 5 children; another 60 million people are just a single hardship away from falling into poverty.  The Talkpoverty.org community is dedicated to them: with our words, our actions, and our shared commitment.

Greg Kaufmann is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Editor of TalkPoverty.org.