Poverty News

News and links about the struggle of the poor around the world. Half the world – nearly three billion people – live on less than two dollars a day.

Tags: blog; poverty

Poverty In Chicago

Authors: Schodorf, Brian

Publication Date: 2009

This film is an exploration of how the drug afflicted homeless population affects society as a whole with exclusive interviews with Chicago's top social and political leaders. Schodorf's relationship with the men allows the viewer to get a true inside look at what life is like as a permanent resident of the streets. Poverty in Chicago, also, investigates the devastating loss of over 150 lives in the winter of 2006 at the hand of a deadly heroin epidemic. (Authors)

Tags: poverty; chicago; drugs

Poverty Statistics

Authors: Canadian Council on Social Development (CCSD)

Publication Date: 2002

Provides statistical data on poverty by Age, Sex and Family Characteristics

Tags: population; men; women; seniors; youth; families with children; poverty; single men; single women

Poverty by Geography: Urban Poverty in Canada, 2000

Organization: Canadian Council on Social Development (CCSD)

Publication Date: 2000

The recession of the early 1990s cast a long shadow. The growth in the number of poor people across Canada was noteworthy. Canada entered the decade with an already high rate of poverty of 16.2%. This rate rose to 19.7% in 1995 and then fell back to 16.2% in 2000, spurred by economic and employment growth in the late 1990s. Although the economic engine was operating full-steam ahead by the end of the decade, Canada made no progress in reducing its comparatively high level of poverty...

Tags: poverty

Journal of Children & Poverty (JCP)

Authors: The Institute for Children and Poverty (ICP)

Journal Name: The Journal of Children and Poverty (JCP)

Publication Date: 2010

The Journal of Children & Poverty publishes original research in the areas of education, health, public policy, and the socioeconomic causes and effects of poverty. The Journal seeks papers that will influence policy and practice in the fields of child and family welfare. JCP targets an audience that includes policymakers, academics, and community leaders. The Taylor & Francis Group publishes the Journal biannually.

Tags: poverty; policy; practice

Alberta Poverty Facts

Publication Date: 2007

The purpose of this brief is to present key statistics regarding Alberta key municipalities’’ low income population and indicators of poverty based on recent Statistics Canada, Province of Alberta, and City of Calgary data.

Tags: poverty

Canada Without Poverty

Publication Date: 2010

-A blog by Canada Without Poverty- Who they are: Canada Without Poverty is a federally incorporated, non-partisan, not-for-profit and charitable organization dedicated to the elimination of poverty in Canada (charity registration #13091 6638 RR001). Stemming from the Poor Peoples’ Conference in Toronto in 1971 – a national gathering of low-income citizens – we were founded later that year as the National Anti-Poverty Organization. In April 2009, we changed our n...

Tags: blog; poverty

Battering and the Poverty Trap

Authors: Brush, Lisa D.

Journal Name: Journal of Poverty

Publication Date: 2004

Structured interviews with women on welfare (n = 40) reveal the costs of taking a beating. Thirty-five percent of respondents reported having been physically abused by their current or most recent intimate partner. Compared with their peers, physically abused women earned less, worked fewer weeks, & more frequently worked part-time involuntarily. Women whose partners sabotaged their work effort experienced more hardships associated with poverty than did other respondents. The causal connectio...

Tags: battered women; poverty; employment opportunities; constraints; domestic violence

Economic Security: Poverty

This economic security fact sheet includes an analysis of current data on poverty in Canada: - Quick facts; - Measuring poverty using LICO and MBM measures; - Individual, family and child poverty; - Depth and duration of poverty; and, - Provincial poverty data tables. Other economic security fact sheets examine incomes for different family types and levels of geography, as well as expenditure patterns among Canadian households, with a focus on...

Tags: poverty

Child Poverty In Canada

Authors: Crossley, Thomas F.; Curtis, Lori J.

Publication Date: 2006

Poverty among children is often singled out as a social ill of particular and broad concern. There are numerous reasons for this. Low income or poverty are associated with a plethora of adverse childhood outcomes (for example, see Mayer, 1997; Dooley et al., 1998; Phipps, 1999; Curtis et al., 2001; Dooley and Stewart, 2004). Further poverty among children may be seen as inconsistent with “equality of opportunity”; Osberg (2000) notes that poor children may be perceived as th...

Tags: poverty

In This Together: Ending Poverty In Alberta

Authors: Kolkman, John; Ahorro, Joseph; Moore-Kilgannon, Bill; Sigurdson, Lori; Ahorro, Joseph; Christiani, Brittany; MacDonald, Stephen

Organization: Public Interest Alberta, Alberta College of Social Workers & Edmonton Social Planning Council

Publication Date: 2011

The recent recession was challenging for all Alberta families but especially so for those with low and modest incomes. There was a dramatic spike in child and family poverty in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available. Alberta also saw its unemployment rate more than double and a dramatic increase in income support caseloads. As a result, demands on human services community organizations are growing, while available resources from both government and the community...

Tags: poverty

Taking Action Against Poverty

Organization: Canadian Teacher's Federation

Publication Date: 2010

The Canadian Teachers’ Federation (CTF) speaks for approximately 200,000 teachers in Canada as their national voice on education and related social issues. CTF membership includes teacher organizations across Canada. CTF has a long-standing interest in reducing child poverty. Our policy on children and poverty states that: All children, regardless of family income or circumstances, have the right to the full benefits of publicly funded education. We know, through research, that ther...

Tags: poverty

Caring About Poverty

Authors: Cox, Pat; Bilson, Andy

Journal Name: Journal of Children and Poverty

Publication Date: 2007

The practice of using institutional care for children in poverty is examined, drawing on case studies from three countries-the Republic of Moldova, Bulgaria, and Sri Lanka. Research findings reveal that poverty is a major underlying cause of children being received into institutional care and that such reception into care is a costly, inappropriate, and often harmful response to adverse economic circumstances. (exerpt from source: Informaworld http...

Tags: children; poverty; income, employment & education; population; families with children

On Measuring Vulnerability to Poverty

Authors: Foster, James ; Dutta, Indranil ; Mishra, Ajit

Organization: The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy

Publication Date: 2010

There is a growing interest on dynamic and broader concepts of deprivation such as vulnerability, which takes in to account the destitution of individuals from future shocks. We use the framework of decision making under uncertainty to arrive at a new measure of vulnerability to poverty. We highlight the importance of current standard of living to better capture the notion of vulnerability. In conceptualizing the new class of measures of vulnerability we thus move beyond the standard expected...

Tags: poverty

The Dynamics of Poverty in Canada

Authors: Finnie, Ross

Organization: C.D. Howe Institute

Publication Date: 2000

Understanding poverty has suffered in the past from a lack of information about the dynamics of low income — how many people enter and leave low income each year, how long people stay poor, what circumstances accompany entry into and exit out of low income — the characteristics of the long-term poor. As a result, policy has suffered, most essentially because people for whom low income is a temporary setback need different support from those for whom poverty is a long-term condition.....

Tags: poverty

Poverty in the United States: 1999

Authors: Dalaker, Joseph; Proctor, Bernadette

Publication Date: 2000

Poverty is one of the key social indicators we as a country use to measure ourselves. Because poor people in the United States are too diverse to be characterized along any one dimension, this report illustrates how poverty rates vary by selected characteristics—age, race and Hispanic origin, nativity, family composition, work experience, and geography. The estimates in this report are based on interviewing a sample of the population. Respondents provide answers to the best of thei...

Tags: counts; poverty; research and evaluation; race/ethnicity; demographics

The Dynamics of Childhood Poverty

Authors: Corcoran, Mary; Chaudry, Ajay

Journal Name: The Future of Children

Publication Date: 1997

Child poverty rates have remained high since the middle of the 1970s. While several trends, including declines in the number of children per family and increases in parental years of schooling, worked to reduce child poverty rates, several others, including slow economic growth, widening economic inequality, and increases in the proportion of children living in mother-only families, had the opposite effect, pushing more children into poverty. Poverty is a common ri...

Tags: children; poverty

Cycle of poverty thrives

Authors: Kelly, Jim

Publication Date: 2010

Senator Art Eggleton is a frustrated man. As chairman of the Senate sub-committee on cities, Eggleton, who tabled a major report on poverty, housing and homelessness in December, became frustrated and concerned during a two-year cross-country study when he and committee members learned government programs and policies to combat poverty weren‘t working.

Tags: poverty; housing

Facing facts about poverty

Authors: Howard, Robert

Publication Date: 2011

Poverty is not a choice. In fact, a deeply-ingrained sense of hopelessness, of a continuing lack of choices, is both a result and a cause of the continuing cycle that traps about three million Canadians – about one of every nine of us. Being poor is miserable. It is demoralizing, unhealthy, stigmatizing and stressful. It is frustrating and it is discouraging. No one in poverty – or, crucially, the professionals who work to combat poverty – see being poor as a “holiday” from...

Tags: poverty; stereotypes

Homelessness & Poverty in America

Authors: Youth Noise

Publication Date: 2007

"Poverty" section of the website for youth, by youth in USA

Tags: youth; poverty