In the News

(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 […]

(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 […]

(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 […]

(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 […]

(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 […]

(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 […]

(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 […]

(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, […]

(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 […]

(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 […]