(April 15) – Amazon is turning over an empty building near its new Seattle headquarters to a local organization for use as a homeless shelter for the next year, according to local reports. King5, the local NBC affiliate, was first to report that a nonprofit, Mary’s Place, will convert an old Travelodge Hotel into a shelter for homeless women and their families.

(April 14) – Whitesburg, Kentucky, was an area once known for coal mining but most of those jobs have dried up. Limited opportunities force many residents to leave, but some are able to find their way back.

(April 14) – On any given night in the United States, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, over half a million people are without a home. That number may have decreased nationwide in the past few years, but California remains on the forefront of the problem, accounting for 20 percent of the country’s homeless in 2014. With the winter’s freezing temperatures and El Niño’s massive rainstorms, what to do about the thousands living in our city streets has been making headlines on both the East and West coasts.

(April 13) – A new report shows that the poverty-related needs of the American people increased in 2015 – the first spike in the index since 2012. The report by the Human Needs Index (HNI) is a collaboration between Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and the Salvation Army. Based on the social services provided across the U.S. by the Salvation Army, HNI takes into consideration seven needs: meals, groceries, clothing, furniture and assistance provided with housing, medical and energy bills

(April 13) – While broad economic measures improved last year, one measure of the acute needs of poor Americans worsened. It’s another example of a two-tiered recovery in which wealthier households have advanced while middle- and lower-income Americans struggle, a theme in this year’s presidential race. The Salvation Army’s Human Needs Index, which measures seven types of poverty-related assistance provided at the charity’s 7,500 centers, turned upward, reversing sharp improvement it showed in 2013-14.

(April 13) – More than three in four Americans believe poverty has held steady or spread in the past four years, and an even larger share want the presidential candidates to propose plans to help the poor, according to new data.

(April 13) – The economy grew and added jobs steadily last year, but the Human Needs Index from the Salvation Army turned up after several years of declining. The upturn is national, with the greatest increase in need seen in North Dakota, which has been hurt by falling oil prices. Washington held steady in 2015.

(April 11) – For poor Americans, the place they call home can be a matter of life or death. The poor in some cities — big ones like New York and Los Angeles, and also quite a few smaller ones like Birmingham, Ala. — live nearly as long as their middle-class neighbors or have seen rising life expectancy in the 21st century. But in some other parts of the country, adults with the lowest incomes die on average as young as people in much poorer nations like Rwanda, and their life spans are getting shorter.

(April 8) – It’s well known that poverty is not good for children. Kids who grow up poor have higher rates of asthma, obesity, and poor language development and are likely to experience toxic stress, which can lead to lifelong physical, psychological, and behavioral difficulties. New research from Eric Chyn, an economist from the University of Michigan, tells us that a good way to obviate some of these effects is by allowing more poor parents to raise their children in economically diverse neighborhoods.

(April 8) – In 2014, the official overall poverty rate in the United States was at almost 15 percent. For children under the age of 18 years old, that statistic jumped significantly to more than 21 percent—almost a full quarter of our nation’s children. We have heard the phrase “cycle of poverty” repeated for so long at this point that we have forgotten just how very real the struggle to be financially stable is. And that is just in America. Today, over a quarter of the world’s population—so somewhere around 1.8 billion people—still don’t earn enough to have reliable access to food. And a billion people are “extremely poor,” earning less than $1.25 a day.