Showing results by publisher "----RM Alexander" in Poverty & Homelessness

Bridges Out of Poverty is a unique and powerful tool designed specifically for social, health, and legal services professionals. Based in part on Dr. Ruby K. Payne's myth-shattering A Framework for Understanding Poverty, Bridges reaches out to the millions of service providers and businesses whose daily work connects them with the lives of people in poverty.

In the Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality, the beloved pope exhorts the world to combat environmental degradation and its impact on the poor. In a stirring, clarion call that is not merely aimed at Catholic listeners but rather at a wide, lay audience, the pope cites the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change and does not hesitate to detail how it is the result of a historic level of unequal distribution of wealth.

An inspiring personal story of redemption, second chances, and the transformative power within us all, from the founder and CEO of the nonprofit charity: water. In the tradition of such best-selling books as Shoe Dog and Mountains Beyond Mountains, Thirst is a riveting account of how to build a better charity, a better business, a better life - and a gritty tale that proves it’s never too late to make a change.

The Blue Sweater is the inspiring story of a woman who left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty. It all started back home in Virginia, with the blue sweater, a gift that quickly became her prized possession - until the day she outgrew it and gave it away to Goodwill. Eleven years later in Africa, she spotted a young boy wearing that very sweater, with her name still on the tag inside.

While free markets have brought positive change, traditional capitalism cannot solve problems of inequality and poverty because of its view of people as solely profit-driven. In fact, humans have other drives and passions, including spiritual, social, and altruistic.

Nobody who works hard should be poor in America, writes Pulitzer Prize-winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.

Based on years of investigative reporting and unprecedented fieldwork, Walking the Bowl immerses readers in the daily lives of four unforgettable characters: Lusabilo, a determined waste picker; Kapula, a burned-out brothel worker; Moonga, a former rock crusher turned beggar; and Timo, an ambitious gang leader. These children navigate the violent and poverty-stricken underworld of Lusaka, one of Africa’s fastest growing cities.

Three of the nation’s top scholars ­– known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there.

In 2016, a United Nations report found the UK government culpable for ‘grave and systematic violations’ of disabled people’s rights. Since then, driven by the Tory government’s obsessive drive to slash public spending whilst scapegoating the most disadvantaged in society, the situation for disabled people in Britain has continued to deteriorate. Punitive welfare regimes, the removal of essential support and services and an ideological regime that seeks to deny disability has resulted in a situation described by the UN as a ‘human catastrophe’.

Drawing on twenty-five years of research, programming, and advocacy efforts, Mariana Chilton compellingly demonstrates that food insecurity is created and maintained by people in power. Taking the listener back to the original wounds in the United States caused by its history of colonization, genocide, and enslavement, she forces us to reckon with hard questions about why people in the US allow hunger to persist. The Painful Truth about Hunger in America reinvigorates our commitment to uprooting the causes of poverty and discrimination, and points to a more generative and humane world.

In this compelling new book, relying on original reporting from the most dangerous corners of Rio to the halls of power in Washington, DC, Dave Zirin examines how sports and politics are colliding in remarkable fashion in Brazil, opening up an international conversation on the culture, economics, and politics of sports.

From the opening conversation on a railroad trestle, Beggars of Life rattles along like the Fast Flyer Virginia that Tully boards midway through the story. This is the book that defined Tully’s hard-boiled style and set the pattern for the 12 books that followed over the next two decades. Startling in its originality and intensity, Beggars of Life is a breakneck journey made while clinging to the lowest rungs of the social ladder.

Take a close look at today’s Democratic Party power brokers and you’ll quickly realize most of them share one thing in common: California. Residents are fleeing the Golden State in droves, the state’s homelessness crisis is the worst in the country, drug-related deaths are skyrocketing, and violent crime and smash-and-grab retail theft is now commonplace. For too many across the state, pursuing the Californian Dream is now a fool’s errand. But what people don't know is what's driving these failures and why California leaders have allowed them to spiral.

In Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country.

As a care-leaver who has experienced homelessness, award-winning investigative journalist Daniel Lavelle has spent his life navigating social services that are not fit for purpose and leave many vulnerable people slipping through the cracks. For though the right to adequate housing is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the reality is another, much grimmer, story.

Inequality is rising globally, and rising inequality is destabilizing. A status quo of increasing inequality self-destructs. To avoid this fate, we must answer this question: Why is the gulf between the wealthy and everyone else widening? The answer boils down to one word: privilege. There are many types of privilege, but they all share two characteristics: Privilege delivers benefits, wealth, and power that are unearned. Privilege is destabilizing for many reasons: The dead weight of privilege reduces productivity, generates perverse incentives, and fuels social injustice.

When it comes to Skinheads, I see a lot of people these days re-writing history, whitewashing the youth cult or bending the truth to suit their political narrative. I spent over ten years of my young life as a London Bootboy and became one of the most famous Skinheads in the world. Being a Skinhead had a profound effect on me. Even though I walked away from that life, and left it in the last century, I still feel the shockwaves of my experience and still find people with nefarious agendas trying to tell their version of my story.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the government launched its ‘Everyone In’ programme, aiming to house the homeless through lockdown. The Prince Rupert, a four-star hotel in Shrewsbury with four poster beds and suits of armour, was asked to play their part and host 33 rough sleepers. This is the story of how the hotel owners and rough sleepers—many of whom had been out of housing for decades—spent months locked in together and wound up transforming each other’s lives.

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

Progress and Poverty by Henry George explores the paradox of increasing inequality in periods of economic growth. George proposes that land speculation is the root cause of wealth disparities, advocating for a single tax on land value to promote fairness and reduce poverty. This influential work is critical for understanding economic and social theories regarding land reform and taxation.