(April 6) – Despite the challenge of growing up in tough areas with few resources, thousands of inner city kids manage to excel academically. But even some students who seem to thrive early on run a significant risk of faltering on their quest for college degrees or the elite jobs they once envisioned. So what’s the deciding factor behind kids who meet their potential and those who wind up falling short?

(April 6) – He’s a Bangladeshi who’s been knighted by the Queen of England. A former accountant who left an executive position at Shell Oil to devote himself to the world’s poorest. And when it comes to eliminating poverty, he may be the most influential man you’ve never heard of. Meet Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder and head of a nongovernmental international development organization called BRAC. Today the University of Michigan honors Abed, who is 80, with its Thomas Francis Jr. Medal in Global Public Health.

(April 5) – In most cases, poverty is the main reason children and teens worldwide end up homeless or living on the streets, according to a new review of past research. About 40 percent of youths reported poverty as the main reason they were homeless, according to the report in JAMA Pediatrics. Family conflict and abuse were also among the most commonly reported reasons for living on the streets.

(April 5) – The rising cost of housing in U.S. cities like San Francisco and New York is a well-known problem. Flying under the radar: an affordable housing crisis is growing in every state in the union. More than one in four renter families across the country now pay more than half of their income on housing, a staggering statistic that has leapt from 7.5 million to 11.4 million households since 2001 with no signs of stopping.

(April 4) – From the first federal social welfare program for Civil War widows to Social Security and the 1960s War on Poverty, government support for poor families in the United States has attempted to enforce a moral hierarchy based on marriage: Widows got pensions they were considered to have earned, for example, while single mothers got shame and stigma for their moral misdeeds.

(April 4) – As part of its laudable goal to end family, youth, and child homelessness by 2020, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has issued national instructions in its funding announcements, prioritizing investments in rapid re-housing, putting homeless people in apartments first, and then working to address their need for social services.

(April 1) – An explosion of data has already changed how we market products and politicians. Now a similar innovation is beginning to change how we combat poverty around the world. Consider an unlikely problem: finding the poor. Even in a world riddled with poverty, nearly every government, nonprofit and aid agency struggles with this issue.

(April 1) – As many as 1 million Americans will stop receiving food stamps this year, the consequence of a controversial work mandate that took effect this week in 21 states as the economy improves. The revival of the mandate, which was hotly debated when adopted in the 1990s, is reigniting a discussion among policymakers and advocates for the poor about the fairness and wisdom of the social safety net in the new U.S. economy.

(April 1) – After years of economic desperation, American workers are finally regaining some of the ground they lost in the last decade’s recession and the pallid recovery that followed. Companies have been hiring in recent months at a pace not seen before in this century. Wages are rising faster than inflation. Joblessness is hovering near the low levels last reached in 2007 before the economy’s downturn.

(Mar. 31) – The Great Recession may have ended in 2009, but despite the subsequent jobs rebound and declining unemployment rate, the number of people living below the federal poverty line in the United States remains stuck at recession-era record levels. The rapid growth of the nation’s poor population during the 2000s also coincided with significant shifts in the geography of American poverty. Poverty spread beyond its historic urban and rural locales, rising rapidly in smaller metropolitan areas and making the nation’s suburbs home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country.