(May 12) – A House Democrat is taking aim at a proposed Agriculture Department rule that would keep restaurants from accepting food stamps, saying it would make it harder for low-income families to get access to healthy foods. 

(May 10) – Each May, private charities in Boston organize a Walk for Hunger to help the Massachusetts households that require hunger relief. A well-meaning concern, but poor Americans have now joined the ranks of the overeaters. Food-assistance programs need to catch up.

(May 10) – When he runs out of options, some nights Sam sleeps in his car. The students he attends class with at Milwaukee Area Technical College don’t know his bright smile, carefully assembled outfits, and optimistic chatter are all they see. But his friend Angel understands; he and his three sisters are barely able to make it day to day since their mom was deported. His older sister works full-time to support them and their elderly grandmother while Angel works on his associate’s degree.

(May 2) – Demagogues always do well in economic downturns, but this surreal presidential cycle has so far been defined by the rise of populist anger during an economic expansion. One reason why: The recovery from the great recession has not been equally distributed.

(May 2) – That’s why we should celebrate initiatives that ease the burden on low-income schools. The Community Eligibility Provision, enacted in 2010, does just that; the program simplifies the school meal process and helps ensure that kids have something to eat during the school day, all at very little cost.

(May 1) – This first real initiative, announced just this month, comes from the charity GiveDirectly, which, well, gives money directly to very, very, very poor families in Kenya and Uganda. It plans on providing a basic income to at least 6,000 Kenyans for a decade or longer, an initiative that will flush millions of dollars to some of the most vulnerable households on Earth.

(April 30) – There’s a long-held debate in education. ” ‘Do you fix education to cure poverty or do you cure poverty to cure education?’ And I think that’s a false dichotomy,” says the superintendent of Camden schools in New Jersey, Paymon Rouhanifard. “You have to address both.”

(April 29) – An estimated one in seven Americans faced inadequate or inconsistent access to food at some point in 2014. That figure has held pretty constant since the 2008 financial crisis, according to a Feeding America report released Thursday. “There’s plenty of food in America,” Feeding America CEO Diana Aviv said. “This is more about a transportation problem, a distribution problem, a political will problem. It’s not about lack of availability.”

(April 28) – A church in Honolulu, Hawaii, has come up with a solution they say will end homelessness on Oahu: igloos. But these temporary shelters aren’t the kind of igloos that would disappear on hot day on the paradise island.

(April 28) – The overall U.S. housing market has recovered from the crisis that plunged the country into recession. But a new analysis by The Washington Post shows that the recovery has been deeply uneven, creating winners and losers along lines of race, income and geography.