(November 7) – In Greensboro, N.C., Eyeisha Holt spends her days as a full-time child care worker at Head Start. But after a decade’s work in early education she still earns only $11.50 an hour — barely enough, she says, to cover the basics as a single mom of two. So every weekday evening she heads to her second job, as a babysitter. “Are you ready to go to bed?” she asks, as she oversees bath time for her 3-year-old daughter and another of her charges. For 25 hours a week, Holt cares for toddler twins, in addition to her daughter and teenage son.

(November 3) – There’s a reason presidential nominee Donald Trump’s message of a declining America is inspiring support in Republican strongholds: poverty is worsening in his party’s congressional districts, a new analysis by the Brookings Institution shows. The poverty rate increased in nearly all — 96 percent — of the Republican-controlled districts between 2000 and the 2010-2014 period, according to a study by Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow with the Washington-based institute. She analyzed Census data and figures from the American Community Survey. The population living in poverty in all Republican districts climbed by 49 percent, compared with a 33 percent increase in Democratic areas.

(November 3) – In a growing number of states, Medicaid directors have come to believe they could save money by housing the homeless. The federal government is providing money to find out if they’re right. There’s good reason to think this is an experiment worth trying. The idea arose from two developments. First, Obamacare’s drastic expansion of eligibility for Medicaid coverage has raised the number of homeless people who sign up. These beneficiaries often suffer from unmanaged illnesses, which lead to higher health-care costs and put a strain on Medicaid budgets.

(October 31) – Far too many children — more than one in five — live in poverty across America. It is an unacceptable reality that has loomed large over the past year in my work with President Obama’s Advisory Council for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Charged to make ongoing recommendations to the Obama Administration to advance the fight against poverty, the Council brought together two dozen leaders from diverse faith traditions to work together and lift up a vision for a stronger, more equitable Union focused on ending poverty.

(October 29) – Grinding poverty in the United States has long been synonymous with the Deep South, where low wages, poor health and diminished opportunity are more pervasive than in other parts of the country. But there are other ways to think about poverty that yield a strikingly different pattern. According to Census data that take into account the costs of living in each state and the role of federal aid in coping with those costs, California has the highest poverty rate in the nation, at 20.6 percent of the population, compared with 17.9 percent for Louisiana, 17 percent for Mississippi and 16.8 percent for Georgia. Over all, the West, with an alternative poverty rate of 15.7 percent, is virtually tied with the South, at 15.4 percent.

(October 28) – Russ Feingold ’s life in government was interrupted in 2010, and apparently the Wisconsin Democrat didn’t use his eviction into the real economy to learn anything about its virtues. This week Mr. Feingold—now bidding to reclaim the Senate seat he lost to Ron Johnson —even denigrated a private antipoverty partnership because of insufficient central planning and government control. The Joseph Project is a faith-based job-training clinic put on by the Greater Praise Church of God in Christ with the help of Mr. Johnson and his staff. Students—mostly black residents of all ages on Milwaukee’s impoverished north side—are taught “soft skills,” like how to interview.

(October 28) – You know her as the tough-as-nails defense attorney Analise Keating on the ABC series “How to Get Away with Murder.” But in real life, actress Viola Davis fights for a different cause: ending poverty. Davis knows all too well what it’s like to live in poverty. “I grew up poor so there is a human face on it for me,” she said. In 2015, the US Census reported 13.5% of the national population lives in poverty. In Viola’s hometown of Central Falls, Rhode Island, a staggering 31.7% live below the poverty line, and one in three adults report being in fair or poor health.

(October 28) – Here’s the kind of person whom America’s presidential candidates just don’t talk about: a sweet, grinning, endangered 13-year-old boy named Emanuel Laster. Emanuel has three televisions in his room, two of them gargantuan large-screen models. But there is no food in the house. As for the TVs, at least one doesn’t work, and the electricity was supposed to be cut off for nonpayment on the day I visited his house here in Pine Bluff: Emanuel’s mother deployed her pit bull terrier in the yard in hopes of deterring the utility man. (This seemed to work.)

(October 28) – James Branch’s life seemed destined to follow a familiar arc in the streets that surround the Marlin Steel factory, where he bends metal from sunrise until near dark. He fathered a child while in high school, dropped out, then spent a dozen years selling drugs. He went to prison and, afterward, squatted in abandoned houses in West Baltimore. He worked the fryer at Popeyes and fought the temptation to go back to dealing on street corners that many Americans will know from the television series “The Wire.”

(October 25) – Both GOP nominee Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton have, in their own way, acknowledged that Americans’ financial success or failure depends at least in part on where they live. During the third presidential debate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Trump said America’s inner cities are “a disaster” and that residents, who he insinuated were mostly African-Americans and Latinos, “have no education. They have no jobs.” “I will do more for African-Americans and Latinos than she can ever do in 10 lifetimes,” he said.