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Helping The Poor and Needy

Categories: Community Service Helping Others

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Published: Sep 1, 2023

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Essay on Helping the Poor

Students are often asked to write an essay on Helping the Poor in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Helping the Poor

Understanding poverty.

Poverty is a global issue. Many people worldwide live under challenging conditions and struggle daily to meet basic needs.

Why Help the Poor?

Helping the poor is important. It’s about compassion, empathy, and making the world a better place. It helps reduce inequality and suffering.

Ways to Help

There are many ways to help. Donating money, food, or clothes can make a big difference. Volunteering time to community service or teaching skills also helps.

Impact of Helping

Helping the poor not only improves their lives but also makes us feel good. It promotes love, unity, and peace in society.

250 Words Essay on Helping the Poor

Introduction.

Helping the poor is not just a humanitarian act, but it is also a powerful tool for societal transformation. It involves more than just providing financial aid; it encompasses understanding, empathy, and a commitment to creating a system that fosters equal opportunities for all.

The Importance of Empathy

The first step towards helping the poor is cultivating empathy. Empathy allows us to understand the challenges faced by the less fortunate, thereby enabling us to devise effective solutions. It is not about pity; it’s about acknowledging their struggles and working towards alleviating them.

Education: The Key to Change

Education is a powerful weapon in the fight against poverty. By providing quality education to the underprivileged, we equip them with the tools to break the cycle of poverty. It fosters self-reliance, opening doors to better job opportunities and a brighter future.

Creating Sustainable Systems

Merely providing aid is not a sustainable solution. We need to create systems that promote equality and provide the poor with the resources they need to improve their circumstances. This includes access to healthcare, clean water, and affordable housing.

Helping the poor is not a one-time act, but a continuous process that requires collective effort. It is about creating a society where every individual has an equal shot at success. By fostering empathy, promoting education, and implementing sustainable systems, we can make a significant difference in the lives of the less fortunate.

500 Words Essay on Helping the Poor

Helping the poor is not just a moral obligation, but a societal necessity that promotes overall societal growth and development. It is a topic that deserves serious attention, especially in an era where wealth inequality is at its peak.

The Moral Imperative

The moral grounds for helping the poor are deeply rooted in empathy and compassion. The understanding that all humans deserve a decent standard of living regardless of their socio-economic status is fundamental. When we help the poor, we are not just giving them a lifeline, but we are also affirming their worth and dignity.

Economic Perspective

From an economic perspective, helping the poor can stimulate economic growth. The poor, when given the right resources and opportunities, can contribute positively to the economy. They can become consumers, producers, and even innovators, thus driving economic growth. This concept is also known as ‘inclusive growth’, which suggests that including everyone in economic development is beneficial for the economy as a whole.

Social Cohesion

Helping the poor also enhances social cohesion. In societies with high levels of poverty, there is often a corresponding increase in social unrest and crime. By addressing poverty, we can reduce these negative social phenomena, thus fostering peace and unity in the society.

Challenges and Solutions

Despite the clear benefits, there are challenges in helping the poor. The first is the issue of dependency. Handouts can create a dependency syndrome, which is counterproductive. To solve this, aid should be linked with empowerment programs that equip the poor with skills and knowledge to break the cycle of poverty.

Secondly, there is the issue of corruption and mismanagement of funds meant for the poor. This can be mitigated by promoting transparency and accountability in the distribution of aid.

In conclusion, helping the poor is a multifaceted issue that involves moral, economic, and social aspects. It is not just about giving handouts, but about empowering the poor to rise above their situation. By addressing the challenges and implementing effective strategies, we can make a significant difference in the lives of the poor and, by extension, the society at large.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Poverty Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on poverty essay.

“Poverty is the worst form of violence”. – Mahatma Gandhi.

How Poverty is Measured?

For measuring poverty United nations have devised two measures of poverty – Absolute & relative poverty. Absolute poverty is used to measure poverty in developing countries like India. Relative poverty is used to measure poverty in developed countries like the USA. In absolute poverty, a line based on the minimum level of income has been created & is called a poverty line. If per day income of a family is below this level, then it is poor or below the poverty line. If per day income of a family is above this level, then it is non-poor or above the poverty line. In India, the new poverty line is Rs 32 in rural areas and Rs 47 in urban areas.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Causes of Poverty

According to the Noble prize winner South African leader, Nelson Mandela – “Poverty is not natural, it is manmade”. The above statement is true as the causes of poverty are generally man-made. There are various causes of poverty but the most important is population. Rising population is putting the burden on the resources & budget of countries. Governments are finding difficult to provide food, shelter & employment to the rising population.

The other causes are- lack of education, war, natural disaster, lack of employment, lack of infrastructure, political instability, etc. For instance- lack of employment opportunities makes a person jobless & he is not able to earn enough to fulfill the basic necessities of his family & becomes poor. Lack of education compels a person for less paying jobs & it makes him poorer. Lack of infrastructure means there are no industries, banks, etc. in a country resulting in lack of employment opportunities. Natural disasters like flood, earthquake also contribute to poverty.

In some countries, especially African countries like Somalia, a long period of civil war has made poverty widespread. This is because all the resources & money is being spent in war instead of public welfare. Countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. are prone to natural disasters like cyclone, etc. These disasters occur every year causing poverty to rise.

Ill Effects of Poverty

Poverty affects the life of a poor family. A poor person is not able to take proper food & nutrition &his capacity to work reduces. Reduced capacity to work further reduces his income, making him poorer. Children from poor family never get proper schooling & proper nutrition. They have to work to support their family & this destroys their childhood. Some of them may also involve in crimes like theft, murder, robbery, etc. A poor person remains uneducated & is forced to live under unhygienic conditions in slums. There are no proper sanitation & drinking water facility in slums & he falls ill often & his health deteriorates. A poor person generally dies an early death. So, all social evils are related to poverty.

Government Schemes to Remove Poverty

The government of India also took several measures to eradicate poverty from India. Some of them are – creating employment opportunities , controlling population, etc. In India, about 60% of the population is still dependent on agriculture for its livelihood. Government has taken certain measures to promote agriculture in India. The government constructed certain dams & canals in our country to provide easy availability of water for irrigation. Government has also taken steps for the cheap availability of seeds & farming equipment to promote agriculture. Government is also promoting farming of cash crops like cotton, instead of food crops. In cities, the government is promoting industrialization to create more jobs. Government has also opened ‘Ration shops’. Other measures include providing free & compulsory education for children up to 14 years of age, scholarship to deserving students from a poor background, providing subsidized houses to poor people, etc.

Poverty is a social evil, we can also contribute to control it. For example- we can simply donate old clothes to poor people, we can also sponsor the education of a poor child or we can utilize our free time by teaching poor students. Remember before wasting food, somebody is still sleeping hungry.

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390 Poverty Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

📑 Aspects to Cover in a Poverty Essay

Students who learn economics, politics, and social sciences are often required to write a poverty essay as part of their course. While everyone understands the importance of this topic, it can be hard to decide what to write about. Read this post to find out the aspects that you should cover in your essay on poverty.

🏆 Best Poverty Topics & Free Essay Examples

👍 powerful topics on poverty and inequality, 🎓 simple & easy topics related to poverty, 📌 interesting poverty essay examples, ⭐ strong poverty-related topics, 🥇 unique poverty topics for argumentative essay, ❓ research questions about poverty.

Topics related to poverty and inequality might seem too broad. There are so many facts, factors, and aspects you should take into consideration. However, we all know that narrowing down a topic is one of the crucial steps when working on an outline and thesis statement. You should be specific enough to select the right arguments for your argumentative essay or dissertation. Below, you will find some aspects to include in your poverty essay.

Poverty Statistics

First of all, it would be beneficial to include some background information on the issue. Statistics on poverty in your country or state can help you to paint a picture of the problem. Look for official reports on poverty and socioeconomic welfare, which can be found on government websites. While you are writing this section, consider the following:

What is the overall level of poverty in your country or state?
Has the prevalence of poverty changed over time? If yes, how and why?
Are there any groups or communities where poverty is more prevalent than in the general population? What are they?

Causes of Poverty

If you look at poverty essay titles, the causes of poverty are a popular theme among students. While some people may think that poverty occurs because people are lazy and don’t want to work hard, the problem is much more important than that. Research books and scholarly journal articles on the subject with these questions in mind:

Why do some groups of people experience poverty more often than others?
What are the historical causes of poverty in your country?
How is poverty related to other social issues, such as discrimination, immigration, and crime?
How do businesses promote or reduce poverty in the community?

Consequences of Poverty

Many poverty essay examples also consider the consequences of poverty for individuals and communities. This theme is particularly important if you study social sciences or politics. Here are some questions that may give you ideas for this section:

How is the psychological well-being of individuals affected by poverty?
How is poverty connected to crime and substance abuse?
How does poverty affect individuals’ access to high-quality medical care and education?
What is the relationship between poverty and world hunger?

Government Policies

Governments of most countries have policies in place to reduce poverty and help those in need. In your essay, you may address the policies used in your state or country or compare several different governments in terms of their approaches to poverty. Here is what you should think about:

What are some examples of legislation aimed at reducing poverty?
Do laws on minimum wage help to prevent and decrease poverty? Why or why not?
How do governments help people who are poor to achieve higher levels of social welfare?
Should governments provide financial assistance to those in need? Why or why not?

Solutions to Poverty

Solutions to poverty are among the most popular poverty essay topics, and you will surely find many sample papers and articles on this subject. This is because poverty is a global issue that must be solved to facilitate social development. Considering these questions in your poverty essay conclusion or main body will help you in getting an A:

What programs or policies proved to be effective in reducing poverty locally?
Is there a global solution to poverty that would be equally effective in all countries?
How can society facilitate the reduction of poverty?
What solutions would you recommend to decrease and prevent poverty?

Covering a few of these aspects in your essay will help you demonstrate the in-depth understanding and analysis required to earn a high mark. Before you start writing, have a look around our website for more essay titles, tips, and interesting topics!

Poverty Research Proposal To justify this, the recent and most current statistics from the Census Bureau shows that the level and rate of poverty in USA is increasing, with minority ethnic groups being the most disadvantaged.
What Causes Poverty in the World One of the major factors that have contributed to poverty in given areas of the world is overpopulation. Environmental degradation in many parts of the world has led to the increase of poverty in the […]
Poverty: A Sociological Imagination Perspective I was raised in a nuclear family, where my mum was a housewife, and my father worked in a local hog farm as the overall manager.
Wordsworth’s Vision of Childhood in His Poems “We Are Seven” and “Alice Fell or Poverty” Specifically, the joint publication he released in 1798 known as “Lyrical Ballads” are considered the most important publications in the rise of the Romantic literature in the UK and Europe.
“The Singer Solution to World Poverty” by Peter Singer The article “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” by author Peter Singer attempts to provide a workable solution to the world poverty problem.
Analysis of Theodore Dalrymple’s “What Is Poverty?” With ethical arguments from Burnor, it can be argued that Dalrymple’s statements are shallow and based on his values and not the experience of those he is judging.
Poverty in the World In this paper, we will be looking at the situation of poverty in the world, its causes and the efforts of the international organizations to manage the same.
Max Weber’s Thoughts on Poverty Weber has contributed to the exploration of the origins of poverty and the impact of religions on the attitude to it.
Poverty Effects on Child Development and Schooling To help children from low-income families cope with poverty, interventions touching in the child’s development and educational outcomes are essential. Those programs campaign against the effects of poverty among children by providing basic nutritional, academic, […]
Consumerism: Affecting Families Living in Poverty in the United States Hence, leading to the arising of consumerism protection acts and policies designed to protect consumers from dishonest sellers and producers, which indicates the high degree of consumer’s ignorance, and hence failure to make decisions of […]
The End of Poverty Philippe Diaz’s documentary, The End of Poverty, is a piece that attempts to dissect the causes of the huge economic inequalities that exist between countries in the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere.
Poverty Areas and Effects on Juvenile Delinquency The desire to live a better life contributes to the youths engaging in crimes, thus the increase in cases of juvenile delinquencies amid low-income families. The studies indicate that the fear of poverty is the […]
Poverty and the Environment The human population affects the environment negatively due to poverty resulting to environmental degradation and a cycle of poverty. Poverty and the environment are interlinked as poverty leads to degradation of the environment.
Relationship Between Crime Rates and Poverty This shows that the strength of the relationship between the crime index and people living below the line of poverty is.427.
The Philippines’ Unemployment, Inequality, Poverty However, despite the strong emphasis of the government on income equality and poverty reduction along with the growth of GDP, both poverty and economic and social inequality remain persistent in the Philippines.
Poverty in India and China India’s slow rate of poverty reduction compared to China is due to the differences in their approach to the economy. Improving the living conditions and general well being of the people is not only the […]
The Problem of Poverty in Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” To see the situation from the perspective of its social significance, it is necessary to refer to Mills’ concept of sociological imagination and to the division of problems and issues into personal and social ones.
Poverty and Its Effects on Childhood Education The foremost strength of Guo’s study is that in it, author succeeded with substantiating the full soundness of an idea that children’s exposure to poverty cannot possibly be thought of as only the factor that […]
Community Work: Helping People in Poverty The first project would be water project since you find that in most villages water is a problem, hence $100 would go to establishing this project and it’s out of these water then the women […]
Poverty in Africa These pictures have been published online to show the world the gravity of the poverty situation in the African continent. The pictures represent the suffering of majority of the African people as a result of […]
Children Living in Poverty and Education The presence of real subjects like children is a benefit for the future of the nation and a free education option for poor families to learn something new and even use it if their children […]
The Singer Solution to World Poverty: Arguments Against The article compares the lives of people in the developed world represented by America and that of developing world represented by Brazil; It is about a school teacher who sells a young boy for adoption […]
Social Issues of Families in Poverty With the tightened budget, parents of the families living in poverty struggle to make ends meet, and in the course of their struggles, they experience many stresses and depressions.
Cause and Effect of Poverty For example, the disparities in income and wealth are considered as a sign of poverty since the state is related to issues of scarcity and allocation of resources and influence.
Analysis of a Social Problem: Poverty Furthermore, the World Bank predicts that both the number of people and the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty will increase in 2020 and 2021 due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Poverty Through a Sociological Lens Poverty-stricken areas, such as slums, rural villages, and places hit by disasters, lack the required economic activities to improve the employment and wealth status of the people.
Poverty and Global Food Crisis: Food and Agriculture Model Her innovative approach to the issue was to measure food shortages in calories as opposed to the traditional method of measuring in pounds and stones.
The Myth of the Culture of Poverty Unfortunately, rather all of the stereotypes regarding poor people are widespread in many societies and this has served to further increase the problem of generational poverty. Poor people are regarded to be in the state […]
Poverty as a Great Social Problem and Its Causes The human capital model assumes that the inadequate incomes of the working poor are the result of characteristics of the labor market rather than the inadequacy of the poor.
“The Hidden Reason for Poverty…” by Haugen It is also noteworthy that some groups of people are specifically vulnerable and join the arrays of those living in poverty.
Poverty Policy Recommendations Different leaders have considered several policies and initiatives in the past to tackle the problem of poverty and empower more people to lead better lives.
Third World Countries and the Barriers Stopping Them to Escape Poverty The phrase Third World was initially used in the Cold War period to represent those countries that were neither on the West NATO nations referred to as the first world countries, nor on the East-Communist […]
The Connection Between Poverty and Mental Health Problems The daily struggle to earn a daily bread takes a toll on an individual mental health and contributes to mental health problem.
Environmental Degradation and Poverty It is however important to understand the causes of the environmental degradation and the ways to reduce them, which will promote the improvement of the environmental quality.
Global Poverty: Famine, Affluence, and Morality In the article Famine, Affluence, and Morality, Michael Slote contends that rich people have a moral obligation to contribute more to charities.
Poverty Simulation Reflection and Its Influence on Life Something that stood out to me during the process is probably the tremendous emotional and psychological impact of poverty on a person’s wellbeing.
Political Economy: Relationship Between Poverty, Inequality, and Nationalism The prevalence of nationalism leads to changes in the education system, as the government tries to justify the superiority of the country by altering the curriculum.
Reflective Analysis of Poverty It can be further classified into absolute poverty where the affected do not have the capability to make ends meet, and relative poverty which refer to the circumstances under which the afflicted do not have […]
Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Development The research focuses on the causes of poverty and the benefits of poverty alleviation in achieving sustainable development. One of the causes of poverty is discrimination and social inequality.
Child Poverty and Academic Achievement Association It is expected to pay attention to the challenges and problems poor children and their families may face in their lives.
War on Poverty in US The term war on poverty officially came into being in 1964 and referred to concerted government efforts to eradicate assiduous poverty in the United States of America.
Is Poverty a Choice or a Generational Curse? The assumption that poverty is a choice persists in public attitudes and allows policy-makers to absolve themselves of any responsibility for ensuring the well-being of the lower socioeconomic stratum of society.
Concept of Poverty The main difference between this definition and other definitions of poverty highlighted in this paper is the broad understanding of the concept.
Children in Poverty in Kampong Ayer, Brunei Part of the reason is likely malnutrition that results from the eating or consumption patterns of the families and also dependency on the children to help out with the family or house chores.
Poverty and Diseases A usual line of reasoning would be that low income is the main cause of health-related problems among vulnerable individuals. Such results that the relationship between mental health and poverty is, in fact, straightforward.
“The End of Poverty” by Phillipe Diaz In the film End of Poverty, the filmmaker tries to unravel the mystery behind poverty in the world. The film is arranged in such a way that the author has persuasively argued his case that […]
Poverty, Government and Unequal Distribution of Wealth in Philippines The author of the book Poverty And The Critical Security Agenda, Eadie, added: Quantitative analyses of poverty have become more sophisticated over the years to be sure, yet remain problematic and in certain ways rooted […]
Poverty in Bambara’s The Lesson and Danticat’s A Wall of Fire Rising It is important to note the fact that culture-based poverty due to discrimination of the past or political ineffectiveness of the nation can have a profound ramification in the lives of its victims.
Poverty, Inequality and Social Policy Understanding The roots of inequality can relate to both welfare and some other factors, for example, the judiciary. Therefore, the principle of equality is violated, and social norms cannot be considered to be respected.
Inequality and Poverty Relationship To begin with, it is necessary to define the concepts of poverty and inequality. As of inequality, it is the difference in access to income, power, education, and whatever.
The Rise of Poverty in the US The main issue that is portrayed in the article is the presence of the invisible poor and the homeless poor in the US.
Poverty and Development Into the 21st Century The choices of citizens in the west influence the consumer, as well as political behaviors of the consumers and voters in the developing regions.
Social Issues; Crime and Poverty in Camden This has threatened the social security and peaceful coexistence of the people in the community. The larger the differences between the poor and the rich, the high are the chances of crime.
We Can Stop Poverty in Ghana Today One of the main disadvantages of the document is that the problem of poverty is not considered separately, but only as a part of other economic and social problems.
Poverty in the Bronx: Negative Effects of Poverty South Bronx is strictly the southwestern part of the borough of Bronx and Bronx is the only borough in New York city in the mainland.
Health, Poverty, and Social Equity: The Global Response to the Ebola Outbreak Canada and Australia, as well as several countries in the Middle East and Africa, were the most active proponents of this ban, halting the movements for both people and goods from states affected by the […]
Social Business Scope in Alleviating Poverty Instead of charity work, social business aims at creating a mechanism in which the poor may be helped in a sustainable manner in that the social business makes profits just like conventional businesses, but the […]
Global Poverty: The Ethical Dilemma Unfortunately, a significant obstacle to such global reforms is that many economic systems are based on the concept of inequality and exploitation.
Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? & How to Judge Globalism The article Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality by Robert Hunter Wade explores the phenomenon of globalization and its influence on the poverty and inequality ratios all over the world.
Poverty in Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” The fact that the structure of society is discussed is especially interesting, and it is suggested that opinions of people that live in poverty are not acknowledged most of the time.
Poverty in Urban Areas The main reason for escalation of the problem of poverty is urban areas is because the intricate problems of urban poverty are considered too small to attract big policies.
How Poverty Contributes to Poor Heath The results show that poverty is the main cause of poor health. The study was purposed to assess the effect of poverty in determining the health status of households.
Global Poverty Project: A Beacon of Hope in the Fight Against Extreme Poverty The organization works with partners worldwide to increase awareness and understanding of global poverty and inspire people to take action to end it.
The Causes of an Increase in Poverty in Atlanta, Georgia The key causes of the high poverty rise in the city include housing policies and instabilities, the lack of transit services and public transportation infrastructure in suburban areas, and childhood poverty.
Thistle Farms: Help for Women Who Are Affected by Poverty As I said in the beginning, millions of women need help and assistance from the community to overcome poverty and heal emotional wounds caused by abuse. You can purchase a variety of its home and […]
Median Household Incomes and Poverty Levels The patterns of poverty in the Denver urban area show that rates are higher in the inner suburb and the core city and lower in the outer suburb.
Poverty: The American Challenge One of the main problems in the world is the problem of poverty, which means the inability to provide the simplest and most affordable living conditions for most people in a given country.
The Poverty Issue From a Sociological Perspective The core of the perspective is the idea that poverty is a system in which multiple elements are intertwined and create outcomes linked to financial deficits.
Saving the Planet by Solving Poverty The data is there to make the necessary links, which are needed when it comes to the economic variations and inadequate environmental impacts of climate change can be distinguished on a worldwide scale.
Anti-Poverty Programs From the Federal Government The programs provide financial assistance to low-income individuals and families to cover basic needs like housing and food. The anti-poverty programs that have been most effective in reducing poverty rates in the United States are […]
Rural Development, Economic Inequality and Poverty The percentage of the rural population is lower for developed countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Thus, the objective of the proposal is to determine how the inhabitants of the country in […]
Global Poverty: Ways of Combating For example, one of such initiatives is social assistance and social protection programs, which ensure the safety and creation of various labor programs that will help increase the number of the working population.
Poverty and Homelessness as a Global Social Problem What makes the task of defining poverty particularly difficult is the discrepancy in the distribution of social capital and, therefore, the resulting differences in the understanding of what constitutes poverty, particularly, where the line should […]
Poverty: Aspects of Needs Assessment The target neighborhood and population for the following analysis are women of reproductive age, defined as 15 to 49 years, in Elmhurst and Corona, Queens. 2, and the percentage of births to women aged over […]
What Is Poverty in the United States? Estimates of the amount of income required to meet necessities serve as the foundation for both the official and supplemental poverty measurements.
The Caribbean Culture: Energy Security and Poverty Issues Globally, Latin American and the Caribbean also has the most expensive energy products and services because of fuel deprivation in the Caribbean and the Pacific regions.
Poverty: The Main Causes and Factors Because of the constant process of societal development, the concept of poverty changes rapidly, adapting to the new standards of modern human life.
How to Overcome Poverty and Discrimination As such, to give a chance to the “defeated” children and save their lives, as Alexie puts it, society itself must change the rules so that everyone can have access to this ticket to success. […]
Poverty and Homelessness in American Society It is connected with social segregation, stigmatization, and the inability of the person to improve their conditions of life. The problem of affordable housing and poverty among older adults is another problem that leads to […]
Private Sector’s Role in Poverty Alleviation in Asia The ambition of Asia to become the fastest-growing economic region worldwide has led to a rapid rise of enterprises in the private sector.
Connection of Poverty and Education The economy of the United States has been improving due to the efforts that have been made to ensure that poverty will not prevent individuals and families from having access to decent education.
The Opportunity for All Program: Poverty Reduction The limiting factors of the program may be the actions of the population itself, which will not participate in the employment program because of the realized benefits.
Early Childhood Financial Support and Poverty The mentioned problem is a direct example of such a correlation: the general poverty level and the well-being of adults are connected with the early children’s material support.
Discussion: Poverty and Healthcare One of the research questions necessary to evaluate this issue is “How do ethical theories apply to the issue?” Another critical research question worth exploring is “Which cultural values and norms influence the problem?” These […]
Explosive Growth of Poverty in America The three richest Americans now own 250 billion USD, approximately the same amount of combined wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the country. Wealth inequality is a disturbing issue that needs to be at […]
The Problems of Poverty and Hunger Subsequently, the cause in this case serves as a path to a solution – more social programs are needed, and wealthy citizens should be encouraged to become beneficiaries for the hungry.
“Life on a Shoestring – American Kids Living in Poverty” by Claycomb Life on a Shoestring – American Kids Living in Poverty highlights the widening disparity between the poor and the wealthy in America and how the economic systems are set up to benefit the rich and […]
Decreasing Poverty With College Enrollment Program In order to achieve that, it is necessary, first and foremost, to increase the high school students’ awareness of the financial aid programs, possibilities of dual enrollment, and the overall reality of higher education.
Poverty in Rural and Urban Areas My main focus is on articles explaining the sources of poverty in rural and urban areas and the key difference between the two.
Reducing Poverty in the North Miami Beach Community The proposed intervention program will focus on the students in the last semester of the 9th and 10th grades and the first semester of the 11th and 12th grades attending the client schools.
Food Banks Board Members and Cycle of Poverty What this suggests is that a large portion of the leadership within these collectives aim to provide assistance and food but not to challenge the current system that fosters the related issues of poverty, unemployment, […]
Poverty as a Social Problem in Burundi The rationale for studying poverty as a social problem in Burundi is that it will help to combat poverty through the advocacy plan at the end of this paper.
Poverty: Subsidizing Programs Subsidizing programs are considered welfare and net initiatives that the government takes to aid low-income families and individuals affected by poverty.
The Problem of Poverty in Chad Thus, the study of the causes of poverty in the Republic of Chad will help to form a complete understanding of the problem under study and find the most effective ways to solve it.
“Poverty, Toxic Stress, and Education…” Study by Kelly & Li Kelly and Li are concerned with the lack of research about poverty and toxic stress affecting the neurodevelopment of preterm children.
Poverty in “A Modest Proposal” by Swift The high number of children born to poor families presents significant problems for a country.”A Modest Proposal” is a satirical essay by Jonathan Swift that proposes a solution to the challenge facing the kingdom.
Life Below the Poverty Line in the US The major problem with poverty in the US is that the number of people living below the poverty threshold is gradually increasing despite the economic growth of the country. SNAP is not considered to be […]
The Relationship Between Single-Parent Households and Poverty The given literature review will primarily focus on the theoretical and empirical aspects of the relationship between single-parent households and poverty, as well as the implications of the latter on mental health issues, such as […]
Poverty and Its Effect on Adult Health Poverty in the UK is currently above the world average, as more than 18% of the population lives in poverty. In 2020, 7% of the UK population lived in extreme poverty and 11% lived in […]
Child Poverty in the United States The causes of child poverty in the United States cannot be separated from the grounds of adult poverty. Thus, it is essential to take care of the well-being of children living in poverty.
Poverty in New York City, and Its Reasons The poverty rate for seniors in New York is twice the poverty rate in the United States. New York City’s blacks and Hispanics have a much higher poverty rate than whites and Asians in the […]
Juvenile Violent Crime and Children Below Poverty The effect of this trend is that the number of children below poverty will continue to be subjected to the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
Poverty and Homelessness as Social Problem The qualifications will include a recommendation from the community to ensure that the person is open to help and willing to be involved in the neighborhood of Non-Return.
Poverty Effects and How They Are Handled Quality jobs will provide income to the younger people and women in the community. The focus on developing and facilitating small and medium-sized enterprises is a great strategy but more needs to be done in […]
Feminization of Poverty and Governments’ Role in Solving the Problem However, women form the greatest percentage of the poor, and the problem continues to spread. Furthermore, the public supports available are inaccessible and inadequate to cater for women’s needs.
Free-Trade Policies and Poverty Level in Bangladesh The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which the end of the quota system and introduction of a free-trade system for the garment industry in Bangladesh has impacted on poverty in […]
Poverty and Risks Associated With Poverty Adolescents that are at risk of being malnourished can be consulted about the existing programs that provide free food and meals to families in poverty.
Poverty and Inequality Reduction Strategies Thus, comprehending the causes of poverty and inequalities, understanding the role of globalization, and learning various theoretical arguments can lead to the establishment of appropriate policy recommendations.
International Aid – Poverty Inc This film, the research on the impact of aid on the states receiving it, and the economic outcomes of such actions suggest that aid is a part of the problem and not a solution to […]
Poverty Effects on American Children and Adolescents The extent to which poor financial status influences the wellbeing of the young children and adolescents is alarming and needs immediate response from the community.
Progress and Poverty Book by Henry George George wrote the book following his recognition that poverty is the central puzzle of the 20th century. Thus, George’s allegation is inconsistent with nature because the number of living organisms can increase to the extent […]
Vicious Circle of Poverty in Brazil The vicious circle of poverty is “a circular constellation of forces that tend to act and react on each other in such a way that the country in poverty maintains its poor state”.
Global Education as the Key Tool for Addressing the Third World Poverty Issue Global education leads to improvements in the state economy and finances. Global education helps resolve the unemployment problem.
Poverty, Partner Abuse, and Women’s Mental Health In general, the study aimed at investigating the interaction between poverty and the severity of abuse in women. The research question being studied in this article is how income intersects with partner violence and impacts […]
America’s Shame: How Can Education Eradicate Poverty The primary focus of the article was global poverty, the flaws in the educational system, as well as the U.S.government’s role in resolving the problem.
Global Poverty and Ways to Overcome It These are some of the strategies, the subsequent application of which would significantly reduce the level of poverty around the world.
Social Work at Acacia Network: Poverty and Inequality Around the 1980s, the number of older adults was significantly increasing in society; the local government of New York established a home for the aged and was named Acacia Network. The supporting staff may bond […]
Poverty and Sex Trafficking: Qualitative Systematic Review The proposed research question is to learn how the phenomenon of poverty is connected to sex trafficking. To investigate the relationship between the phenomenon of poverty and sex trafficking.
End of Extreme Poverty Importantly, the ability to remain the owners of a substantial amount of accumulated wealth is the primary motivation for such individuals.
The Problem of Poverty in the United States The problem of increasing poverty is one of the major political issues in the United States, which became especially agile after the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the difficult economic situation all over […]
Poverty and Unemployment Due to Increased Taxation The government on its side defended the move while trying to justify the new measures’ benefits, a move that would still not benefit the country.
Poverty as a Global Social Problem For example, the research shows that Kibera is the largest slum in the country, and this is where many people move to settle after losing hope of getting employed in towns.
Researching the Problem of Poverty However, the rich people and the rich countries reduce poverty to some extent by providing jobs and markets to the poor, but the help is too little compared to the benefits they get thus accelerating […]
Poverty, Social Class, and Intersectionality I prefer the structural approach to the issue as I believe the created structures are responsible for the existence of diverse types of oppression.
Wealth and Poverty: The Christian Teaching on Wealth and Poverty To illustrate the gap between the world’s richest and the world’s poorest, a recent UN publication reported that the wealth of the three richest persons in the world is greater than the combined wealth of […]
Guns Do Not Kill, Poverty Does It is widely accepted that stricter gun control policies are instrumental in alleviating the problem, as they are supposed to reduce the rate of firearm-related deaths, limiting gun access to individuals at-risk of participating in […]
Poverty’s Effects on Delinquency The economic status of people determines their social class and the manner in which they get their basic needs. Seeing these things and the kind of life rich people lead motivates the poor to commit […]
The Criminalization of Poverty in Canada In this regard, with a special focus on Canada, the objective of this essay is to investigate how public policy has transformed alongside the public perception of social welfare reform.
The Issue of Vicious Circle of Poverty in Brazil The persistence of poverty, regardless of the many shocks that every state receives in the normal course of its survival, raises the feeling that underdevelopment is a condition of equilibrium and that there are pressures […]
Community Health Needs: Poverty Generally, the higher the level of poverty, the worse the diet, and hence the higher the chances of developing diabetes. Consequently, a considerable disparity in the prevalence of diabetes occurs between communities with high levels […]
“Poverty, Race, and the Contexts of Achievement” by Maryah Stella Fram et al. The article “Poverty, race, and the contexts of achievement: examining the educational experience of children in the U.S. Multilevel models were then applied in the analyses of how children varied in their reading scores depending […]
Microeconomic Perspective on Poverty Evolution in Pakistan The periodic spike in poverty levels, notwithstanding economic growth, implies incongruous policy functionality in relation to drivers of poverty and the subsequent failure to improve the indicators.
The Impact of Poverty on Children Under the Age of 11 The strengths of the Marxist views on poverty are in the structural approach to the problem. Overall, the Marxist theory offers a radical solution to the problem of child poverty.
Dependency Theory and “The End of Poverty?” It is also reflected in the film “The End of Poverty?” narrating the circumstances of poor countries and their precondition. It started at the end of the fifteenth century and marked the beginning of the […]
Poverty Reduction and Natural Assets Therefore, the most efficient way to increase the efficiency of agriculture and reduce its environmental impacts is ensuring the overall economic growth in the relevant region.
Corporate Social Responsibility & Poverty Alleviation Researchers state that “preventing and managing the negative impacts of the core business on the poor” are essential indicators of the social responsibility of the company.
Health, Poverty, and Social Equity: Indigenous Peoples of Canada Another problem that much of northern Canada’s Indigenous Peoples face is the availability of healthcare services and people’s inability to access medical help.
The Problem of Childhood Poverty Unequal income distribution, adult poverty, government policies that exclude children and premature pregnancy are some of the items from the long list of childhood poverty causes. Before discussing the causes and effects of childhood poverty, […]
Individualistic Concepts and Structural Views on Poverty in American Society The concepts presented in the book Poverty and power help to better understand the content of the article and the reasons for such a different attitude of people to the same problem.
Poor Kids: The Impact of Poverty on Youth Nevertheless, the environment of constant limitations shapes the minds of children, their dreams and the paths they pursue in life, and, most importantly, what they make of themselves.
Poverty: Causes and Effects on the Population and Country Thesis: There are a great number of factors and issues that lead a certain part of the population to live in poverty and the input that such great numbers of people could provide, would be […]
The Internet and Poverty in Society The information that can be found on the web is a very useful resource but at the same time it is important to consider several things with the treatment and examination of the presented information.
Poverty in Africa: Impact of the Economy Growth Rate Thus, a conclusion can be made that economic growth in Africa will result in the social stability of the local population.
Poverty and Disrespect in “Coming of Age in Mississippi” by Anne Moody Life was not fair to a little Anne the chapters about her childhood are alike to a chain of unfortunate events that happened to her and her relatives.
Vietnam’s Economic Growth and Poverty & Inequality A significant part of the population was active in employment, and this means that the numerous income-generating activities improved the economy of this country.
Poverty and Disasters in the United States Focusing on the precaution measures and the drilling techniques that will help survive in case of a natural disaster is one of the most common tools for securing the population.
Intro to Sociology: Poverty It is challenging to pinpoint the actual and not mythological reasons for the presence of poverty in America. The former can be summed up as a “culture of poverty”, which suggests that the poor see […]
The Notion of “Poverty” Is a Key Word of a Modern Society As far as the countries of the Third World are deprived of these possibilities, their development is hampered and the problem of poverty has become a chronic disease of the society.
The Problem of Poverty in Africa The major aim of the study is to identify the causes of poverty and propose best strategies that can help Africans come out of poverty.
Poverty Sustainability in Sub-Saharan Countries: The Role of NGOs The position of research and statistics in undertaking social-counting work is not queried. It is after the research method is used in other tribulations of the charity that gaps emerge between management and research.
The Effects of Poverty Within Criminal Justice The approach used in this study is deductive since the reasoning in the study proceeds from the general principle regarding the fact that poverty has a role to play in the administering of fairness in […]
The Poverty Rates in the USA Poverty in the U. Officially the rate of poverty was at14.3%.
Poverty in America: A Paradox Many people especially the young people living in other countries and more so in developed countries wish to immigrate to America instead of working hard to achieve the dream of better opportunities.
Values and Ethics: Poverty in Canada The case study1 has indicated for instance, that the number of people living in poverty in 2003 is at 4. A group of individuals would therefore be granted the mandate to lead the others in […]
War and Poverty Connection in Developing Countries The scholars claim that conflict and war in most nations have been found to exacerbate the rate of poverty in the affected nations.
Poverty in United States. Facts and Causes Schwartz carried out a research which showed that in the United States, about 13-17|% of the individuals live below the federal poverty line at any one single time and poverty is one of the main […]
Cultures and Prejudice: Poverty Factors For instance, if the two cultures had in the past interacted in a negative way, the poor culture directs all the blame to the well up culture.
Poverty and Criminal Behavoiur Relation The level of accuracy that the data collected holds cannot be 100%; there is a level of error that affects the reliability of the data collected.
Urban Relationship Between Poverty and Crime The areas with high poverty level in the US urban areas have the highest cases of crime but this is inadequate to justify that poverty is the cause of crime.
The End of Poverty Possibility He presents the difficulty as in inability of each poor country to get to the base rung of the ranking of economic progress if the rank is achieved; a country can drag itself up towards […]
Poverty, Suburban Public School Violence and Solution
Social and Economic Policy Program: Globalization, Growth, and Poverty
Is Poverty From Developing Countries Imagined?
How Gender and Race Structure Poverty and Inequality Connected?
Poverty by Anarchism and Marxism Approaches
Colonial Economy of America: Poverty, Slavery and Rich Plantations
Environmental Deterioration and Poverty in Kenya
Management Issues: The Poverty Business
Marginalization and Poverty of Rural Women
Pockets of Poverty Mar the Great Promise of Canada
Poverty. “How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis
The Underclass Poverty and Associated Social Problems
Child Poverty in Toronto, Ontario
Children’s Brain Function Affected by Poverty
Poverty Issue in America Review
Microeconomics. Poverty in America
Poverty and Inequality in Modern World
Poverty and Its Effects on Females
Poverty and Its Effects on Women
Poverty of America: Economic Assumptions
Poverty as a General Problem
Feminization of Poverty – A Grave Social Concern
Global Poverty Dimensions and Alleviating Approaches
Poverty Level in any Country
Theories of Fertility. Economics Aspect and Poverty.
The Cultural Construction of Poverty
Poverty in the US: Causes and Measures
Poverty Rates Issue in Alberta Analysis
“Old Age Poverty” Study by Kwan & Walsh
Phenomena of Poverty Review
Development Economics: Poverty Traps in Africa
Healthcare Development. Poverty in the 1800s
Social Problem of Poverty in the United States
Poverty and Hip-Hop: Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy”
Globalization Issues and Impact on Poverty and Free Trade
Anthropology: Culture of Poverty
Poverty, Stratification and Gender Discrimination
Teen Pregnancy Can Lead to Suicide and Poverty
Poverty Around the World
Poverty in Los Angeles
“Rethinking the Sociological Measurement of Poverty” by Brady
Poverty in the US: Essentials of Sociology
Econometrics: Poverty, Unemployment, Household Income
Religious Quotes on Poverty and Their Interpretations
Poverty and Inequality in “Rich and Poor” by Peter Singer
The Relation Between Poverty and Justice
Canada and the Imposition of Poverty
Poverty and Politics in “The Bottom Billion” by Collier
The Impact of Poverty in African American Communities
“Poverty and Joy: The Franciscan Tradition” by Short
International Financial Institutions’ Poverty Reduction Strategy
Social Study: Mamelodi Residents Living in Poverty
Video Volunteers’ Interventions Against Poverty
Poverty in American Single-Parent Families
Single-Mother Poverty and Policies in the United States
Poverty and Its Aspects in Historical Documents
Economic Growth vs. Development: Dreze and Sen’s Analysis
Poverty and Its Relative Definitions
Poverty in America: An Ethical Dilemma
Poverty as a Factor of Terrorist Recruitment
Poverty Solution as a Political Issue in Australia
Poverty: An Echo of Capitalism
Breastfeeding Impact on Canadian Poverty Gaps
Urban and Suburban Poverty in the United States
Poverty and Child Health in the US and the UK
Poverty Impact on Life Perception
Energy Poverty Elimination in Developing Countries
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty
Vietnamese Poverty and Productivity Increase
Global Health Governance and Poverty
Poverty Rates Among Whites and Blacks Americans
Culture of Poverty in the “Park Avenue” Documentary
Poverty in the US
Poor Economics and Global Poverty
Poverty as a Cause of the Sudanese Civil War
“Halving Global Poverty” by Besley and Burges
Do Poverty Traps Exist? Assessing the Evidence
Poverty Reasons in Ancient Times and Nowadays
American War on Poverty Throughout US History
Poverty and Challenges in Finding Solutions
Children and Poverty in “Born into Brothels” Documentary
Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States
Poverty in “A Theology of Liberation” by Gutierrez
Poverty Reduction Among American Single Mothers
The Relationship Between Poverty and Education
Divorce Outcomes: Poverty and Instability
African Poverty at the Millennium: Causes and Challenges
Poverty Effect on Children
Poverty and Education: School Funding Reinforces Inequality
Global Poverty and the Endeavors of Addressing It
Global Poverty Reduction: Economic Policy Recommendation
Global Conflict and Poverty Crisis
Poverty in the Novel “Snow” by Orhan Pamuk
Profit From Organizing Tours to Poverty Areas
Poverty: $2.00 a Day in America
Detroit Poverty and “Focus Hope” Organization
Poverty Controversy in the USA
Poverty as the Deprivation of Capabilities
Suburbanisation of Poverty in the USA
The Solution to World Poverty by Peter Singer
The Poverty Across the US Culture
How Racial Segregation Contributes to Minority’s Poverty?
Catholic Dealing With Poverty and Homelessness
Human Capital and Poverty in Scottsdale
Global Poverty Studies and Their Importance
The World Bank and the Poverty of Reform
Challenges of Social Integration: Poverty
Globalization and the Issue of Poverty: Making the World a Better Place
The Economic Effect of Issuing Food Stamps to Those in Poverty
Business and Pollution Inequality in Poor States
“Facing Poverty With a Rich Girl’s Habits” by Suki Kim
What Should You Do? Poverty Issue
Causes of Poverty Traps in an Economy, Its Results and Ways of Avoiding Them
Tourism Contribution to Poverty Reduction
Millennium Development Goals – Energy and Poverty Solutions
Sociological Indicators of Energy Poverty
Energy and Poverty Solutions – Non-Traditional Cookstoves
Energy and Poverty Solutions – World Bank
How do Migration and Urbanization Bring About Urban Poverty in Developing Countries?
Poverty and Domestic Violence
The Rise of Extremist Groups, Disparity and Poverty
Measuring Poverty and Social Exclusion in Australia
Does Poverty Lead to Terrorism?
“Urban and Rural Estimates of Poverty: Recent Advances in Spatial Microsimulation in Australia” by Tanton, R, Harding, A, and McNamara, J
Importance of Foreign Aid in Poverty Reducing
Hispanic Childhood Poverty in the United States
How Poverty Affects Children Development?
Why Is Poverty Important in Contemporary Security Studies?
Millennium Development Goals in Kenya, Ivory Coast, Haiti, and Chad
Development Is No Longer the Solution to Poverty
Issues Underlying Global Poverty and Provision of Aid
Films Comparison: “The Fields” by Roland Joffe and “Hotel Rwanda” by Terry George
Poverty Prevalence in the United States
Terrorism, Poverty and Financial Instability
Global Poverty and Education
Critical Analyses of the Climate of Fear Report From Southern Poverty Law Center
How World Vision International Contributes to Poverty Reduction
Global Poverty, Social Poverty and Education
Global Poverty, Social Policy, and Education
Poverty Reduction in Africa, Central America and Asia
Does Parental Involvement and Poverty Affect Children’s Education and Their Overall Performance?
African Poverty: To Aid, or Not to Aid
Poverty Fighting in Saudi Arabia and in USA
Technological Development in Trade and Its Impacts on Poverty
Social Dynamics: The Southern Poverty Law Centre
Property, Urban Poverty and Spatial Marginalization
Rural Poverty in Indonesia
Is Poverty of Poor Countries in Anyway Due to Wealth of the Rich?
Poverty and Gender Violence in Congo
Correlation Between Poverty and Obesity
Fight Poverty, Fight Illiteracy in Mississippi Initiative
Civil War and Poverty: “The Bottom Billion” by Paul Collier
Analytical Research: Poverty in Thailand: Peculiarities and Perspectives
Poverty Indicators in Developing Countries
Poverty, Homelessness and Discrimination in Australia: The Case of the Aboriginal
Africa’s Poverty: The Influence of Western States
Susceptibility of Women and Aboriginal People to Poverty in Canada
MDG Poverty Goals May Be Achieved, but Child Mortality Is Not Improving
Microcredit: A Tool for Poverty Alleviation
Impacts of Global Poverty Resistance
Reducing Poverty: Unilever and Oxfam
Poverty in the United States
The Mothers Who Are Not Single: Striving to Avoid Poverty in Single-Parent Families
Effect of Poverty on Children Cognitive and Learning Ability
Sweatshops and Third World Poverty
War on Poverty: Poverty Problem in US
Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right and the UN Declaration of Human Rights
The Causes of Poverty Concentration in the Modern World
Poverty in Saudi Arabia
Poverty as Capability Deprivation
Poverty as a Peculiarity of the Economical Development
Capitalism and Poverty
The Problems of Poverty in the Modern World
Poverty Among Women and Aboriginals
On (Not) Getting by in America: Economic Order and Poverty in the U.S.
The Singer Solution to World Poverty
Poverty and Inequality in Jacksonian America
Poverty in America Rural and Urban Difference (Education)
What Is the Relationship Between Race, Poverty and Prison?
Poverty in Russia During the Late Nineteenth Century
Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty: Advantages of Microcredit
Social Welfare Policy That Facilitates Reduction of Poverty and Inequality in the US
Immigrant Status and Poverty: How Are They Linked?
Effects of Poverty on Immigrant Children
Poverty in Brazil
Why Poverty Rates are Higher Among Single Black Mothers
Poverty and Its Impact on Global Health: Research Methodologies
Poverty Concerns in Today’s Society
Literature Study on the Modern Poverty Concerns
Poverty and Wealth in “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara
Peter Singer on Resolving the World Poverty
Aspects of Global Poverty
Concepts of Prenatal Drug Exposure vs. Poverty on Infants
UN Summit in New York: Ending Global Poverty
Why Has Poverty Increased in Zimbabwe?
Should Private Donations Help Eliminate Child Poverty?
Why Was Poverty Re-Discovered in Britain in the Late 1950s and Early 1960?
Why Does Child Labour Persist With Declining Poverty?
Why Are Child Poverty Rates Higher in Britain Than in Germany?
What Are the Principles and Practices for Measuring Child Poverty in Rich Countries?
Why Did Poverty Drop for the Elderly?
What Is the Relationship Between Income Distribution and Poverty Reduction in the UK?
What Are the Pros and Cons of Poverty in Latin America?
Should Poverty Researchers Worry About Inequality?
What Helps Households With Children in Leaving Poverty?
What Is the Connection Between Poverty and Crime?
Why Have Some Indian States Done Better Than Others at Reducing Rural Poverty?
What Is the Relationship Between Lack of Education and Poverty?
Why Are Child Poverty Rates So Persistently High in Spain?
Trade Liberalisation and Poverty: What Are the Links?
What Are Academic Programs Available for Youth in Poverty?
What Are the Main Factors Contributing to the Rise in Poverty in Canada?
Single-Mother Poverty: How Much Do Educational Differences in Single Motherhood Matter?
What Are the Causes and Effects of Poverty in the United?
Why Are Some Countries Poor?
What Is the Link Between Globalization and Poverty?
What Are the Factors That Influence Poverty Sociology?
What Causes Poverty Within the United States Economy?
What Is the Relationship Between Poverty and Obesity?
Why Were Poverty Rates So High in the 1980s?
With Exhaustible Resources, Can a Developing Country Escape From the Poverty Trap?
Why Does Poverty Persist in Rural Ethiopia?
Who Became Poor, Who Escaped Poverty, and Why?
Social Norms Essay Ideas
Drug Abuse Research Topics
Juvenile Delinquency Essay Titles
Segregation Research Topics
Alcohol Abuse Paper Topics
Challenges Essay Topics
Community Service Questions
Discrimination Essay Titles
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Chicago (N-B)

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7 Ways You Can Help Fight Poverty in Your Community

CommonBond Communities
October 5, 2022

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, 7.8 million people have fallen into poverty—the biggest jump in a single year since the government began tracking poverty 60 years ago. It’s easy to think about poverty as a national crisis that is bigger than you, but there are actually lots of things you can do to influence this systemic problem right in your own community. CommonBond works to help fight poverty through housing in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Iowa, and we’ve outlined some examples of how you can help fight poverty in your community .

How to Help Poverty Issues in Your Community

1. challenge ideas and assumptions.

Whether you have preconceived notions about poverty within your community, or as a concept in general, it’s important to challenge those assumptions so you aren’t unintentionally spreading harmful biases. One common misconception, for example, is that people experiencing homelessness choose not to work. This misconception is incredibly harmful because it negates the many uncontrollable and systemic conditions that can cause housing instability or poverty. In reality, there are many factors people have to deal with that make it hard to find employment, including loss of affordable housing , inequitable access to training and tools, and mental illness.

If you recognize this myth, be sure to challenge it. Want to go a step further with how to help the poor and fight poverty in your community? Learn about the specific poverty issues your town or city faces; this will educate you on matters and enable you to apply context and critical thinking while pushing back against assumptions and myths.

2. Create awareness/get informed

Poverty is in every community, so it’s important to know where the issues lie within your own. Get informed about the resources that are already available and those that are still needed. There are local groups doing this work that could use your help—you can then do your part in getting the word out and listening to these community experts about where you can be helpful in fighting poverty in your community. A great resource in Minneapolis, for example, is the Twin Cities Mutual Aid Map . This map shows a myriad of organizations and mutual aid efforts around the Twin Cities area that are accepting donations or other resources.

3. Donate funds and time & find volunteer opportunities

One of the most straightforward ways to help fight poverty in your community is to donate funds to organizations whose mission it is to end these economic disparities. No amount of money is too small or too large. As these donations add up, organizations can put the funds toward fixing housing inequalities, education gaps, food insecurities and more.

Another helpful option is to p artner with local organizations that help the community by donating time. Whether it’s helping out in a food kitchen or working with children after school to get their homework done, there are ways that don’t require money that can still make an impact. We’ve created a volunteer list that you can join to support our work, whether you’re in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, or Iowa.

Fighting Poverty in Your Community is as Simple as Donating a Few Dollars.

Donate Today!

4. Make kits or fundraise for those experiencing homelessness in your neighborhood

In addition to donating time, you can also reach out to local organizational leaders to see what specifically folks who are experiencing poverty in their communities need. To ensure your donations have the most impact, listen to these community experts. Be sure to donate items that are specifically being asked for, not just what you have in your pantry! Use that info to create meal kits or baskets full of food or house cleaning products that will keep people stocked up on essentials for a while, and give it to local organizations and community experts to distribute.

Another option is to hold fundraisers. How about fighting poverty in your community by throwing a pizza party where the proceeds go to local shelters or other organizations that provide critical services? Get bigger local businesses to donate services for a silent auction. Doing fundraisers like this can be a fun way to bring people together for an important cause.

5. Attend demonstrations or rallies to increase awareness

Another way to create and increase awareness and help fight poverty in your community is to attend events like demonstrations and rallies. These may be block parties or parades or any other kind of peaceful event that will grab the community’s attention and turn it toward fighting against systemic poverty. There are organizations that regularly hold events that both raise awareness, as well as stand in solidarity with those affected by poverty—and by joining their work, you may learn how to be a better advocate.

6. Create jobs

If you own a business or an organization in the community, look for areas you could use some help with. Many people living in poverty may not have had access to higher education or specialty certifications, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have skills to contribute. Identifying areas of opportunities within your business or organization, expanding your recruiting pool, and paying a living wage is one way to make a change to help neighbors living in poverty in your community.

DONATE TODAY!

7. Provide paid leave and paid sick days

If you’re a business owner within your community, offer paid leave and paid sick days. Although it’s an investment for you, taking a day off every now and then without pay can seriously hurt some of your employees, especially if they’re under the poverty line. Your employees are going to get sick from time to time—let them rest easy by offering paid sick leave. For staff who are earning under the area median income, consider offering stipends for childcare, or even consider an on-site childcare option to create an environment where working families don’t have to choose between income and childcare.

CommonBond Can Help

Poverty affects more people than you think, and as you now know, there are many ways to help fight poverty in your community. Serving your community by donating time or money is a valuable way to get involved. Our team at CommonBond wants to help you in your fight, whether you’re in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, or Iowa. Get in touch to learn more about how to help the poor and fight poverty in your community today!

Donate Today!

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7 Essays About Poverty: Example Essays and Prompts

Essays about poverty give valuable insight into the economic situation that we share globally. Read our guide with poverty essay examples and prompts for your paper.

In the US, the official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5 percent, with 37.9 million people living below the poverty line. With a global pandemic, cost of living crisis, and climate change on the rise, we’ve seen poverty increase due to various factors. As many of us face adversity daily, we can look to essays about poverty from some of the world’s greatest speakers for inspiration and guidance.

There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

Writing a poverty essay can be challenging due to the many factors contributing to poverty and the knock-on effects of living below the poverty line . For example, homelessness among low-income individuals stems from many different causes.

It’s important to note that poverty exists beyond the US, with many developing countries living in extreme poverty without access to essentials like clean water and housing. For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .

Essays About Poverty: Top Examples

1. pensioner poverty: fear of rise over decades as uk under-40s wealth falls, 2. the surprising poverty levels across the u.s., 3. why poverty persists in america, 4. post-pandemic poverty is rising in america’s suburbs.

5. The Basic Facts About Children in Poverty
6. The State of America’s Children
7. COVID-19: This is how many Americans now live below the poverty line

10 Poverty Essay Topics

1. the causes of poverty, 2. the negative effects of poverty, 3. how countries can reduce poverty rates, 4. the basic necessities and poverty, 5. how disabilities can lead to poverty, 6. how the cycle of poverty unfolds , 7. universal basic income and its relationship to poverty, 8. interview someone who has experience living in poverty, 9. the impact of the criminal justice system on poverty, 10. the different ways to create affordable housing.

There is growing concern about increasing pensioner poverty in the UK in the coming decades. Due to financial challenges like the cost of living crisis, rent increases, and the COVID-19 pandemic, under 40s have seen their finances shrink.

Osborne discusses the housing wealth gap in this article, where many under the 40s currently pay less in a pension due to rent prices. While this means they will have less pension available, they will also retire without owning a home, resulting in less personal wealth than previous generations. Osborne delves into the causes and gaps in wealth between generations in this in-depth essay.

“Those under-40s have already been identified as facing the biggest hit from rising mortgage rates , and last week a study by the financial advice firm Hargreaves Lansdown found that almost a third of 18- to 34-year-olds had stopped or cut back on their pension contributions in order to save money.” Hilary Osborne, The Guardian

In this 2023 essay, Jeremy Ney looks at the poverty levels across the US, stating that poverty has had the largest one-year increase in history. According to the most recent census, child poverty has more than doubled from 2021 to 2022.

Ney states that the expiration of government support and inflation has created new financial challenges for US families. With the increased cost of living and essential items like food and housing sharply increasing, more and more families have fallen below the poverty line. Throughout this essay, Ney displays statistics and data showing the wealth changes across states, ethnic groups, and households.

“Poverty in America reflects the inequality that plagues U.S. households. While certain regions have endured this pain much more than others, this new rising trend may spell ongoing challenges for even more communities.” Jeremy Ney, TIME

Essays About Poverty: How countries can reduce poverty rates?

In this New York Times article, a Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist explores why poverty exists in North America.

The American poor have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most. Matthew Desmond, The New York Times

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released its annual data on poverty, revealing contrasting trends for 2022. While one set of findings indicated that the overall number of Americans living in poverty remained stable compared to the previous two years, another survey highlighted a concerning increase in child poverty. The rate of child poverty in the U.S. doubled from 2021 to 2022, a spike attributed mainly to the cessation of the expanded child tax credit following the pandemic. These varied outcomes underscore the Census Bureau’s multifaceted methods to measure poverty.

“The nation’s suburbs accounted for the majority of increases in the poor population following the onset of the pandemic” Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, Brookings

5. The Basic Facts About Children in Poverty

Nearly 11 million children are living in poverty in America. This essay explores ow the crisis reached this point—and what steps must be taken to solve it.

“In America, nearly 11 million children are poor. That’s 1 in 7 kids, who make up almost one-third of all people living in poverty in this country.” Areeba Haider, Center for American Progress

6. The State of America’s Children

This essay articles how, despite advancements, children continue to be the most impoverished demographic in the U.S., with particular subgroups — such as children of color, those under five, offspring of single mothers, and children residing in the South — facing the most severe poverty levels.

“Growing up in poverty has wide-ranging, sometimes lifelong, effects on children, putting them at a much higher risk of experiencing behavioral, social, emotional, and health challenges. Childhood poverty also plays an instrumental role in impairing a child’s ability and capacity to learn, build skills, and succeed academically.” Children’s Defense Fund

7. COVID-19: This is how many Americans now live below the poverty line

This essay explores how the economic repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic 2020 led to a surge in U.S. poverty rates, with unemployment figures reaching unprecedented heights. The writer provides data confirming that individuals at the lowest economic strata bore the brunt of these challenges, indicating that the recession might have exacerbated income disparities, further widening the chasm between the affluent and the underprivileged.

“Poverty in the U.S. increased in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic hammered the economy and unemployment soared. Those at the bottom of the economic ladder were hit hardest, new figures confirm, suggesting that the recession may have widened the gap between the rich and the poor.” Elena Delavega, World Econmic Forum

If you’re tasked with writing an essay about poverty, consider using the below topics. They offer pointers for outlining and planning an essay about this challenging topic.

One of the most specific poverty essay topics to address involves the causes of poverty. You can craft an essay to examine the most common causes of extreme poverty. Here are a few topics you might want to include:

Racial discrimination, particularly among African Americans, has been a common cause of poverty throughout American history. Discrimination and racism can make it hard for people to get the education they need, making it nearly impossible to get a job.
A lack of access to adequate health care can also lead to poverty. When people do not have access to healthcare, they are more likely to get sick. This could make it hard for them to go to work while also leading to major medical bills.
Inadequate food and water can lead to poverty as well. If people’s basic needs aren’t met, they focus on finding food and water instead of getting an education they can use to find a better job.

These are just a few of the most common causes of poverty you might want to highlight in your essay. These topics could help people see why some people are more likely to become impoverished than others. You might also be interested in these essays about poverty .

Poverty affects everyone, and the impacts of an impoverished lifestyle are very real. Furthermore, the disparities when comparing adult poverty to child poverty are also significant. This opens the doors to multiple possible essay topics. Here are a few points to include:

When children live in poverty, their development is stunted. For example, they might not be able to get to school on time due to a lack of transportation, making it hard for them to keep up with their peers. Child poverty also leads to malnutrition, which can stunt their development.
Poverty can impact familial relationships as well. For example, members of the same family could fight for limited resources, making it hard for family members to bond. In addition, malnutrition can stunt the growth of children.
As a side effect of poverty, people have difficulty finding a safe place to live. This creates a challenging environment for everyone involved, and it is even harder for children to grow and develop.
When poverty leads to homelessness, it is hard for someone to get a job. They don’t have an address to use for physical communication, which leads to employment concerns.

These are just a few of the many side effects of poverty. Of course, these impacts are felt by people across the board, but it is not unusual for children to feel the effects of poverty that much more. You might also be interested in these essays about unemployment .

Different countries take different approaches to reduce the number of people living in poverty

The issue of poverty is a major human rights concern, and many countries explore poverty reduction strategies to improve people’s quality of life. You might want to examine different strategies that different countries are taking while also suggesting how some countries can do more. A few ways to write this essay include:

Explore the poverty level in America, comparing it to the poverty level of a European country. Then, explore why different countries take different strategies.
Compare the minimum wage in one state, such as New York, to the minimum wage in another state, such as Alabama. Why is it higher in one state? What does raising the minimum wage do to the cost of living?
Highlight a few advocacy groups and nonprofit organizations actively lobbying their governments to do more for low-income families. Then, talk about why some efforts are more successful than others.

Different countries take different approaches to reduce the number of people living in poverty. Poverty within each country is such a broad topic that you could write a different essay on how poverty could be decreased within the country. For more, check out our list of simple essays topics for intermediate writers .

You could also write an essay on the necessities people need to survive. You could take a look at information published by the United Nations , which focuses on getting people out of the cycle of poverty across the globe. The social problem of poverty can be addressed by giving people the necessities they need to survive, particularly in rural areas. Here are some of the areas you might want to include:

Affordable housing
Fresh, healthy food and clean water
Access to an affordable education
Access to affordable healthcare

Giving everyone these necessities could significantly improve their well-being and get people out of absolute poverty. You might even want to talk about whether these necessities vary depending on where someone is living.

There are a lot of medical and social issues that contribute to poverty, and you could write about how disabilities contribute to poverty. This is one of the most important essay topics because people could be disabled through no fault of their own. Some of the issues you might want to address in this essay include:

Talk about the road someone faces if they become disabled while serving overseas. What is it like for people to apply for benefits through the Veterans’ Administration?
Discuss what happens if someone becomes disabled while at work. What is it like for someone to pursue disability benefits if they are hurt doing a blue-collar job instead of a desk job?
Research and discuss the experiences of disabled people and how their disability impacts their financial situation.

People who are disabled need to have money to survive for many reasons, such as the inability to work, limitations at home, and medical expenses. A lack of money, in this situation, can lead to a dangerous cycle that can make it hard for someone to be financially stable and live a comfortable lifestyle.

Many people talk about the cycle of poverty, yet many aren’t entirely sure what this means or what it entails. A few key points you should address in this essay include:

When someone is born into poverty, income inequality can make it hard to get an education.
A lack of education makes it hard for someone to get into a good school, which gives them the foundation they need to compete for a good job.
A lack of money can make it hard for someone to afford college, even if they get into a good school.
Without attending a good college, it can be hard for someone to get a good job. This makes it hard for someone to support themselves or their families.
Without a good paycheck, it is nearly impossible for someone to keep their children out of poverty, limiting upward mobility into the middle class.

The problem of poverty is a positive feedback loop. It can be nearly impossible for those who live this every day to escape. Therefore, you might want to explore a few initiatives that could break the cycle of world poverty and explore other measures that could break this feedback loop.

Many business people and politicians have floated the idea of a universal basic income to give people the basic resources they need to survive. While this hasn’t gotten a lot of serious traction, you could write an essay to shed light on this idea. A few points to hit on include:

What does a universal basic income mean, and how is it distributed?
Some people are concerned about the impact this would have on taxes. How would this be paid for?
What is the minimum amount of money someone would need to stay out of poverty? Is it different in different areas?
What are a few of the biggest reasons major world governments haven’t passed this?

This is one of the best essay examples because it gives you a lot of room to be creative. However, there hasn’t been a concrete structure for implementing this plan, so you might want to afford one.

Another interesting topic you might want to explore is interviewing someone living in poverty or who has been impoverished. While you can talk about statistics all day, they won’t be as powerful as interviewing someone who has lived that life. A few questions you might want to ask during your interview include:

What was it like growing up?
How has living in poverty made it hard for you to get a job?
What do you feel people misunderstand about those who live in poverty?
When you need to find a meal, do you have a place you go to? Or is it somewhere different every day?
What do you think is the main contributor to people living in poverty?

Remember that you can also craft different questions depending on your responses. You might want to let the interviewee read the essay when you are done to ensure all the information is accurate and correct.

The criminal justice system and poverty tend to go hand in hand. People with criminal records are more likely to be impoverished for several reasons. You might want to write an essay that hits on some of these points:

Discuss the discriminatory practices of the criminal justice system both as they relate to socioeconomic status and as they relate to race.
Explore just how hard it is for someone to get a job if they have a criminal record. Discuss how this might contribute to a life of poverty.
Dive into how this creates a positive feedback loop. For example, when someone cannot get a job due to a criminal record, they might have to steal to survive, which worsens the issue.
Review what the criminal justice system might be like for someone with resources when compared to someone who cannot afford to hire expert witnesses or pay for a good attorney.

You might want to include a few examples of disparate sentences for people in different socioeconomic situations to back up your points.

The different ways to create affordable housing

Affordable housing can make a major difference when someone is trying to escape poverty

Many poverty-related problems could be reduced if people had access to affordable housing. While the cost of housing has increased dramatically in the United States , some initiatives exist to create affordable housing. Here are a few points to include:

Talk about public programs that offer affordable housing to people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Discuss private programs, such as Habitat for Humanity , doing similar things.
Review the positive impacts that stable housing has on both adults and children.
Dive into other measures local and federal governments could take to provide more affordable housing for people.

There are a lot of political and social angles to address with this essay, so you might want to consider spreading this out across multiple papers. Affordable housing can make a major difference when trying to escape poverty. If you want to learn more, check out our essay writing tips !

Meet Rachael, the editor at Become a Writer Today. With years of experience in the field, she is passionate about language and dedicated to producing high-quality content that engages and informs readers. When she's not editing or writing, you can find her exploring the great outdoors, finding inspiration for her next project.

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Fundraising and Charity

10 Ways to Start Helping the Poor

Last Updated: April 18, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Direct Relief and by wikiHow staff writer, Janice Tieperman . Direct Relief is an award-winning humanitarian aid organization, active in all 50 states and more than 80 countries. They focus on helping people affected by emergencies and natural disasters. Direct Relief has been highly rated by Charity Navigator, GuideStar, and the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at University of Pennsylvania, for their effectiveness, efficiency, and transparency. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 495,595 times.

There’s no denying that poverty is a serious concern all over the world, including your own community. How can we as individuals hope to make a difference when facing such a widespread issue, though? Don’t worry—by offering your voice and using your time and resources wisely, there are plenty of ways for you to make a positive impact on the world around you.

Things You Should Know

Support businesses with a track record of giving back to impoverished communities, like Kroger, The Home Depot, and Johnson & Johnson.
Donate to charities dedicated to helping those in poverty. Resources like Charity Navigator can help you find high-quality organizations to donate to.
Support local food banks in your area by donating groceries.

Support businesses that donate to charity.

A little research can turn your shopping into meaningful advocacy.

The Home Depot
Johnson & Johnson

Give money to reputable charities.

Not all charities and non-profits are created equally.

Evidence Action Inc
Haitian Health Foundation
Amref Health Africa
Equalize Health
Tip: Try to make thoughtful purchases when you go out shopping. Before making an impulse buy, ask yourself if you really need the item. Could that money be better used as a charitable donation?

Donate groceries to local food banks.

A simple food donation can make a big difference in someone’s life.

Not sure where your local food bank is? If you live in the United States, click here .
Does your community not have a local food bank? Think about starting one yourself .

Volunteer your time.

Soup kitchens and homeless shelters are both good options to consider.

Make meals with groups like Orphan Grain Train or No Kid Hungry
Build homes with groups like Habitat for Humanity
Help out at a local soup kitchen
Volunteer at a homeless shelter [3] X Research source

Distribute meal kits to the local homeless community.

Fill large plastic bags with food, water, and helpful toiletries.

Pads and tampons
Toothbrushes and toothpaste

Start a fundraiser.

Bake sales, fun events, and contests are all great ways to raise money.

Hosting a collection drive
Hosting a dance-a-thon
Organizing a charity BBQ
Organizing a charity quiz night

Call your government officials.

Government officials can take more direct action to help the poor.

Not sure who your local representative is or how to contact them? Check out this website for more information.

Advocate on social media.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the low-income families in our community. Did you know that United Way offers healthcare support to families in need?”
“As a new mother myself, it breaks my heart to know that some mothers are struggling to provide for their little ones. I’m grateful and relieved to know that charities like Life of a Single Mom and Bridge of Hope are offering support to this vulnerable community.”

Talk about poverty-related issues with others.

See if you can motivate some of the people in your life to take action.

“Did you know that about 1 in every 6 kids in America is currently experiencing poverty?”
“Did you know that over 15 million Americans are currently making 50% below the poverty level of income?”
“I learned recently that over 10% of American families/households don’t have food security.” [6] X Research source

Live empathetically and help others to the best of your ability "We have a responsibility to be aware of others. We need to make justice the norm, not the exception."

Research and learn more about poverty.

Understanding poverty is a valuable step to help those in poverty.

Poverty USA (poverty in America)
UNICEF (child poverty)
World Bank (learning poverty)
World Vision (global poverty)

Expert Q&A

About This Article

You can help the poor by donating food, clothing, or toiletries to a local shelter or giving your old books to a books for prisoners program. You can also donate your time by volunteering in an community center or soup kitchen. To have a greater impact in your community, try joining an organization or starting a petition to help low-income kids in your community. To learn more ways to help the poor through activism, keep reading. Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

How to Help Low-Income Students Succeed

With all of the talk of education reform and what’s needed to revitalize public schools, it’s refreshing to read Paul Tough’s new book, Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why . In this slim volume, Tough pulls together decades of social science research on the impacts of poverty and trauma on kids’ brains and behavior, and makes a cogent, convincing argument for why this research should lie at the center of any discussions about reform.

Researchers have found that the chronic stress of living in chaotic, impoverished environments affects brain centers involved in executive functioning, which controls things like attention, working memory, planning, reasoning, and inhibition. Children who grow up in stressful environments tend to have more emotional and behavioral problems , making the transition to school problematic. Yet, as Tough points out, more than 50 percent of school-aged kids are now coming from low-income families, without the optimal cognitive or emotional development to succeed as students.

Disadvantaged kids with neuro-cognitive problems should not be blamed for having trouble learning to read and write early on, he writes. It’s understandable that, as academic material gets more difficult, they will likely fall behind further, emotionally and relationally. When these kids hit adolescence, though, they often are labeled as unmotivated or as having attitude problems, which just alienates them even more.

Though the picture looks dire, character strengths like perseverance, conscientiousness, self-control, and optimism can help kids succeed in spite of hardship, according to Tough. They are not easily taught, though, at least not directly. Instead, contextual influences in the environment are what nurture them.

“If we want to improve a child’s grit or resilience or self-control, it turns out that the place to begin is not with the child himself,” writes Tough. “What we need to change first, it seems, is his environment.”

The role of parents

What does Tough mean by environment? The adults in a child’s life, starting at the very beginning with parents.

Research has shown that all young children need certain types of supports from parents to develop in positive directions—starting with consistent, safe, and loving attention. When children come from homes where there is abuse, domestic violence, an incarcerated parent, or a parent with drug or mental health problems, they don’t get that kind of attention and suffer the consequences: higher risks of later-life depression, adolescent pregnancy, alcoholism, drug use, and poor academic performance.

Parents can also shape their children’s life trajectory by how they role-model emotional resilience. If stressed-out parents react to children’s emotions by yelling at or hitting them, or ignoring or neglecting them, they create an unsafe environment that ratchets up the children’s stress and distrust of others. Negative parenting can affect a child’s ability to regulate emotion, which creates problems in interpersonal interactions as well as learning.

“By contrast, parents who are able to help their children handle stressful moments and calm themselves down after a tantrum or scare often have a profoundly positive effect on the children’s long-term ability to manage stress,” writes Tough.

Rather than focusing on heartwarming stories, Tough chooses to spend time detailing the types of interventions that show promise. Programs like FIND , which trains parent coaches to work with low-income, stressed parents, focus less on pointing out what parents do wrong and more on what parents do right, in order to nudge parents toward behaviors that help their kids.

The role of schools

Tough also describes successful programs aimed at preschool-aged kids—like Educare , All Our Kin , and CSRP , all of which focus on improving the learning environment for young kids (rather than direct skills training). In a randomized trial of CSRP , children who spent a pre-K year in CSRP had better cognitive skills and better self-regulation—the ability to sit still, follow directions, and pay attention—than kids who hadn’t gone through CSRP. The improvements were all credited to the stable, nurturing, predictable learning environment, where good behavior was recognized more than bad behavior punished.

“Changing the environment in the classroom made it easier for [the kids] to learn,” writes Tough.

For older kids, Tough eschews our current tactic of offering students extrinsic rewards, and instead encourages teachers to nurture intrinsic motivation, fueled by the basic human need for competence, autonomy, and relatedness (or connection) . Tough suggests teachers assign tasks that are challenging, but not too challenging; minimize coercion and control; and show warmth and respect for students , so they feel part of the learning community.

“These motivational dynamics can play an even greater role in the school experience of low-income students, especially those whose development has been affected by early exposure to toxic stress,” he writes. Punitive policies targeting behavioral problems have been shown to backfire, he adds, putting kids even further behind their peers.

In other words, motivation to learn has little to do with grit and more to do with the learning environment. Tough recounts an experiment by David Yeager and colleagues in which teachers provided feedback to students on their essays and then added a Post-it that said either the comments were given as feedback or the comments reflected the teacher’s high expectations for the student. This relatively small difference had a profound effect, particularly on black students: 72 percent revised their paper if they were told the teacher had high expectations, while only 17 percent revised it otherwise.

“At the very moment when a student might be gearing up to react to the teacher’s comments as a threat, a sign of the teacher’s personal disapproval or bias, the Post-it gave the student an alternative frame through which to view those comments—not as an attack, in other words, but as a vote of confidence,” writes Tough.

It’s also important that teachers provide challenge to students, says Tough. He highlights some of the innovative programs that are working on creating a positive learning environment, both relationally and academically. EL Education is a research-based program that helps schools work with emotionally or behaviorally challenged students in therapeutic ways, then provides curriculum allowing students more autonomy and challenge. Independent evaluators have found that schools embracing EL Education programs significantly advance students’ reading and math abilities in comparison to other schools.

But of course these are only isolated programs, albeit ones that are growing in influence. Though science may inform positive reforms, the reforms may be difficult to scale up, even if they are effective. Education experts have a long history of imposing well-meaning but ineffective policy changes on schools, and the authority to reform schools often lies within each state or even within individual school districts. .

But Tough is hopeful. If we can change our policies and our practices in the classroom, and work with researchers devoted to finding ways to help our children, we can “make a tremendous difference, not only in the lives of individual children and their families, but in our communities and our nation as a whole.”

His book may just help get us there.

About the Author

Jill Suttie

Jill Suttie, Psy.D. , is Greater Good ’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good .

You May Also Enjoy

How Attention Helps Us To Succeed

How Teachers Can Help Students Who Fail in Class to Succeed at Life

How to Help First-Generation College Students Succeed

How Parents Can Help Their Middle Schoolers Succeed

What’s Wrong with Grit?

Parenting for Authentic Success?

Who Are You Calling Underprivileged?

NATASHA RODRIGUEZ

I have come to loathe the word “underprivileged.” When I filled out my college applications, I checked off the Latino/Hispanic box whenever I was asked to give my ethnicity. My parents in turn indicated their income, hoping that we would qualify for financial aid. But while I waited for acceptances and rejections, several colleges I was considering sent me material that made me feel worthless rather than excited about attending those institutions.

The first mailing I received was a brochure that featured a photograph of African-American, Asian, and Latino teens standing around in a cluster, their faces full of laughter and joy. The title of the brochure was “Help for Underprivileged Students.” At first I was confused: “Underprivileged” was not a word that I associated with myself. But there was the handout, with my name printed boldly on the surface.

The author questions the connotations of underprivileged.

The text went on to inform me that, since I was a student who had experienced an underprivileged life, I could qualify for several kinds of financial aid and scholarships. While I appreciated the intent, I was turned off by that one word — “underprivileged.”

I had never been called that before. The word made me question how I saw myself in the world. Yes, I needed financial aid, and I had received generous scholarships to help me attend a private high school on the Upper East Side of New York. Surely that didn’t mean that I had lived a less-privileged life than others. My upbringing had been very happy.

The author then gives a standard definition for underprivileged and explains why she refuses the label.

What does “underprivileged” actually mean? According to most dictionaries, the word refers to a person who does not enjoy the same standard of living or rights as a majority of people in a society. I don’t fit that definition. Even though my family does not have a lot of money, we have always had enough to get by, and I have received an excellent education.

What angered me most about the label was why colleges would ever use such a term. Who wants to be called underprivileged? I’m sure that even those who have had no opportunities would not want their social status rubbed in their faces so blatantly. People should be referred to as underprivileged only if they’re the ones who are calling themselves that.

Misfortune, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It’s not appropriate to slap labels on people that they might not like or even agree with. Social research has found that those who are negatively labeled usually have lower self-esteem than others who are not labeled in that way. So why does the label of “underprivileged” persist?

Most colleges brag about the diversity of their students. But I don’t want to be bragged about if my ethnicity is automatically associated with “underprivileged.” Several colleges that had not even received information on my parents’ finances just assumed that I was underprivileged because I had checked “Latino/Hispanic” on their applications.

The author examines the assumptions colleges make based on ethnicity and income.

That kind of labeling has to stop. Brochures and handouts could be titled “Help for Students in Need” rather than “Help for Underprivileged Students.” I am sure that many people, myself included, are more than willing to admit that they require financial aid, and would feel fine about a college that referred to them as a student in need.

The essay concludes with the author’s own self-definition.

That’s a definition I can agree with. I am a student in need; I’m just not an underprivileged one.

Natasha Rodriguez is a student at Sarah Lawrence College, where she edits the features section of her school newspaper, the Phoenix .

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Poverty Essay for Students in English

Essay on Poverty

Poverty is a disease that has no cure. The deeper this disease is, the deeper its wound. By the way, man lives under compulsion. But usually one wants to avoid it. Poverty is a condition of extreme poverty for any person or human being. This is a situation when a person starts to lack important things in his life such as the roof, necessary food, clothes, medicines, etc. to continue his life.

The causes of poverty are excessive population, fatal and contagious diseases, natural disasters, low agricultural yields, unemployment, casteism, illiteracy, gender inequality, environmental problems, changing trends in the economy of the country, untouchability, little or limited access to people's rights, Problems such as political violence, sponsored crime, corruption, lack of encouragement, inaction, ancient social beliefs, etc. have to be faced.

Poverty has become a big problem of the world, efforts are being made across the world today to remove poverty, but the problem is that it does not take the name of ending. This problem affects a human's economic and daily life. Poverty teaches man to live like a slave in which he has to change the place over time, in this situation due to the lack of education of the poor, his nature and speech also make a difference. Living in a world of poor people has become a curse. Getting enough money to get food is like getting relief from a curse for the poor, that's why they do not have access to education.

Reasons of Poverty

There are many reasons that have continued with carrying it for a long time. Because of this, freedom, mental and physical fitness, and lack of security in a person remains. It is very important that in order to live a normal life, the country and the whole world will have to work together to bring proper physical and mental health, complete education, a home for everyone, and other important things.

In today's time, there is the problem of poverty which gives all the pain, pain, and despair to the poor. Due to the lack of money from poverty, I show the lack of many things. Poverty makes children spend life in compulsion. If forced to make bread, sometimes in bringing children's books. At that time he is also unable to raise children.

We can tell poverty in many ways like it has become a common thing in India. Most of the people here are unable to get the things they need. Here a vast section of the population is illiterate, hungry, and forced to live without clothes and a home. About half of India's population suffers from this epidemic of poverty.

A poor person lives his life without possession of basic things like food for two times, clean water, house, clothes, proper education, etc. There are many reasons for poverty in India. Incorrect distribution of national income is also a reason. People in the low-income group are much poorer than those in the high-income group. Children of poor families never get proper education, nutrition, and a happy childhood environment. The main cause of poverty is illiteracy, corruption, growing population, weak agriculture, the growing gap between rich and poverty, etc.

Measures to Control Poverty

Corruption has to be erased.

Unemployed will have to give proper employment

A growing population will have to be stopped

Farmers have to be given proper facilities for farming

Education should be provided to children for proper education

Poverty is not just a human problem but it is a national problem. It should be solved by implementing some effective methods on a quick basis. Every person should be united by ending corruption. A problem has been created in which he does not get even the basics. That is why at present, many measures are being taken to prevent poverty so that the standard of living of people around the world can be improved.

Short Essays on Poverty

Poverty is akin to being a slave, as a person cannot achieve anything he desires. It has various faces that alter depending on who you are, where you are, and when. It can be defined in various ways depending on how a person feels or experiences it.

Poverty is a state that no one wants to be in, but it must be removed owing to cultural norms, natural disasters, or a lack of adequate education. The individual who is experiencing it frequently wishes to flee. Poverty is a call for poor people to earn enough money to eat, have access to education, have adequate shelter, dress appropriately, and take steps to protect themselves from social and political violence.

It's a problem that goes unnoticed yet significantly impacts a person's social life. Poverty is an entirely avoidable problem, but there are various reasons why it has persisted in the past.

Poverty robs people of their freedom, mental health, physical well-being, and security. Everyone must strive to eradicate poverty from the country and the world, ensuring appropriate physical and mental health, full literacy, a home for all, and other necessities for living a simple life.

When a person cannot do anything according to his will, he is said to be in poverty. Many different faces alter depending on who you are, where you are, and time. It can be characterized in a variety of ways, depending on how the person feels or what they have achieved. Poverty is a circumstance that no one wants to be in, even if it is forced upon them due to a lack of experience, nature, natural disasters, or a lack of suitable education. Humans have won it, but they prefer to stay away from it. Poverty is a call for needed clothing and protection against social and political violence for the poor to earn enough money to buy food, receive an education, and find a suitable place to live.

This is an unseen problem that harms a person's social life. Even though numerous factors have contributed to its long-term persistence, poverty is a perfectly preventable problem. As a result, a person's freedom, mental and physical well-being, and sense of security are all compromised. It is critical to bring poverty and poverty from worldwide to work together to live everyday life, provide adequate physical and mental health, complete education, a home for everyone, and other essential things.

FAQs on Poverty Essay for Students in English

1. What are the Effects of Poverty?

When people are not able to afford their basic necessities. For example medications and hospital fees are impossible to afford for that means they choose crook ways of obtaining money i.e. stealing, robbery, etc.

2. What are the Possible Ways to Remove Poverty?

Since India is a developing country, eliminating poverty here is much tougher than in other countries but still some measures can be taken and government assistance would be much helpful in this step which requires some relevant planning and policies for those who fall under the poverty line. Another major factor of poverty is illiteracy and unemployment. Therefore education is the most efficient tool to confine the poverty line in the country.

3. What is the Poverty Line?

The Below Poverty Line (BPL) signifies the state of people who fall under poverty status. It also symbolizes an economic drawback. In addition, it is used for people who are in need of help and assistance from the government.

4. What are the causes of poverty?

Poverty has several causes, including a lack of access to essentials such as water, food, shelter, education, and healthcare. Poverty is also caused by inequities such as gender or ethnic discrimination, bad governance, conflict, exploitation, and domestic violence. These disparities not only cause a person or a society to fall into poverty, but they can also prevent people from receiving social assistance that could help them get out of it. Due to political upheaval, past or present conflict, corrupt authorities, and lousy infrastructure that restricts access to education, clean water, healthcare, and other essentials, children and communities in fragile states confront greater poverty rates.

5. What can we do to put an end to extreme poverty?

We can aid in the eradication of extreme poverty by determining what causes it in a particular community and then determining what needs to change. Because poverty manifests itself differently in different regions and is caused by different circumstances, the work to end extreme poverty differs depending on the situation. More economic resources are needed to assist people in increasing their income and better providing for themselves and their families. To ensure that poverty does not return, the work must be sustainable, regardless of the solution. As a result, the community must be involved at every stage.

6. What criteria are used to assess poverty?

Each country's government determines poverty levels by conducting home surveys of its citizens. The World Bank, for example, assists and may conduct their surveys, although data collecting is time-consuming and slow. New high-frequency surveys are being created and tested, leveraging estimations and mobile phone technologies. If you want to learn more about these topics, download the Vedantu App that has been specifically designed and curated for students by experts.

7. What is the poverty cycle?

Poverty can be a catch-22 situation. To escape poverty, a person requires access to possibilities such as education, clean water, local medical services, and financial means. Poverty creates a generational cycle if these critical factors are not there. If parents cannot afford to take their children to school, they will struggle to find work when they grow up. Even natural disasters and conflicts can exacerbate the poverty cycle by bringing more people.

8. What are the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of goals for countries worldwide to work together in a global partnership for the benefit of people, the environment, and prosperity. The Sustainable Development Goals aim to abolish extreme poverty for all people everywhere by 2030 and to reduce the proportion of people living in poverty in all forms by at least half. In September 2015, the United Nations member states accepted this objective as one of 17 to end extreme poverty.

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, getting college essay help: important do's and don’ts.

College Essays

If you grow up to be a professional writer, everything you write will first go through an editor before being published. This is because the process of writing is really a process of re-writing —of rethinking and reexamining your work, usually with the help of someone else. So what does this mean for your student writing? And in particular, what does it mean for very important, but nonprofessional writing like your college essay? Should you ask your parents to look at your essay? Pay for an essay service?

If you are wondering what kind of help you can, and should, get with your personal statement, you've come to the right place! In this article, I'll talk about what kind of writing help is useful, ethical, and even expected for your college admission essay . I'll also point out who would make a good editor, what the differences between editing and proofreading are, what to expect from a good editor, and how to spot and stay away from a bad one.

What Kind of Help for Your Essay Can You Get?

What's Good Editing?

What should an editor do for you, what kind of editing should you avoid, proofreading, what's good proofreading, what kind of proofreading should you avoid.

What Do Colleges Think Of You Getting Help With Your Essay?

Who Can/Should Help You?

Advice for editors.

Should You Pay Money For Essay Editing?

The Bottom Line

What's next, what kind of help with your essay can you get.

Rather than talking in general terms about "help," let's first clarify the two different ways that someone else can improve your writing . There is editing, which is the more intensive kind of assistance that you can use throughout the whole process. And then there's proofreading, which is the last step of really polishing your final product.

Let me go into some more detail about editing and proofreading, and then explain how good editors and proofreaders can help you."

Editing is helping the author (in this case, you) go from a rough draft to a finished work . Editing is the process of asking questions about what you're saying, how you're saying it, and how you're organizing your ideas. But not all editing is good editing . In fact, it's very easy for an editor to cross the line from supportive to overbearing and over-involved.

Ability to clarify assignments. A good editor is usually a good writer, and certainly has to be a good reader. For example, in this case, a good editor should make sure you understand the actual essay prompt you're supposed to be answering.

Open-endedness. Good editing is all about asking questions about your ideas and work, but without providing answers. It's about letting you stick to your story and message, and doesn't alter your point of view.

Think of an editor as a great travel guide. It can show you the many different places your trip could take you. It should explain any parts of the trip that could derail your trip or confuse the traveler. But it never dictates your path, never forces you to go somewhere you don't want to go, and never ignores your interests so that the trip no longer seems like it's your own. So what should good editors do?

Help Brainstorm Topics

Sometimes it's easier to bounce thoughts off of someone else. This doesn't mean that your editor gets to come up with ideas, but they can certainly respond to the various topic options you've come up with. This way, you're less likely to write about the most boring of your ideas, or to write about something that isn't actually important to you.

If you're wondering how to come up with options for your editor to consider, check out our guide to brainstorming topics for your college essay .

Help Revise Your Drafts

Here, your editor can't upset the delicate balance of not intervening too much or too little. It's tricky, but a great way to think about it is to remember: editing is about asking questions, not giving answers .

Revision questions should point out:

Places where more detail or more description would help the reader connect with your essay
Places where structure and logic don't flow, losing the reader's attention
Places where there aren't transitions between paragraphs, confusing the reader
Moments where your narrative or the arguments you're making are unclear

But pointing to potential problems is not the same as actually rewriting—editors let authors fix the problems themselves.

Want to write the perfect college application essay? We can help. Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will help you craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay to proudly submit to colleges. Don't leave your college application to chance. Find out more about PrepScholar Admissions now:

Bad editing is usually very heavy-handed editing. Instead of helping you find your best voice and ideas, a bad editor changes your writing into their own vision.

You may be dealing with a bad editor if they:

Add material (examples, descriptions) that doesn't come from you
Use a thesaurus to make your college essay sound "more mature"
Add meaning or insight to the essay that doesn't come from you
Tell you what to say and how to say it
Write sentences, phrases, and paragraphs for you
Change your voice in the essay so it no longer sounds like it was written by a teenager

Colleges can tell the difference between a 17-year-old's writing and a 50-year-old's writing. Not only that, they have access to your SAT or ACT Writing section, so they can compare your essay to something else you wrote. Writing that's a little more polished is great and expected. But a totally different voice and style will raise questions.

Where's the Line Between Helpful Editing and Unethical Over-Editing?

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether your college essay editor is doing the right thing. Here are some guidelines for staying on the ethical side of the line.

An editor should say that the opening paragraph is kind of boring, and explain what exactly is making it drag. But it's overstepping for an editor to tell you exactly how to change it.
An editor should point out where your prose is unclear or vague. But it's completely inappropriate for the editor to rewrite that section of your essay.
An editor should let you know that a section is light on detail or description. But giving you similes and metaphors to beef up that description is a no-go.

Proofreading (also called copy-editing) is checking for errors in the last draft of a written work. It happens at the end of the process and is meant as the final polishing touch. Proofreading is meticulous and detail-oriented, focusing on small corrections. It sands off all the surface rough spots that could alienate the reader.

Because proofreading is usually concerned with making fixes on the word or sentence level, this is the only process where someone else can actually add to or take away things from your essay . This is because what they are adding or taking away tends to be one or two misplaced letters.

Laser focus. Proofreading is all about the tiny details, so the ability to really concentrate on finding small slip-ups is a must.

Excellent grammar and spelling skills. Proofreaders need to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Good proofreaders should correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. They should put foreign words in italics and surround quotations with quotation marks. They should check that you used the correct college's name, and that you adhered to any formatting requirements (name and date at the top of the page, uniform font and size, uniform spacing).

Limited interference. A proofreader needs to make sure that you followed any word limits. But if cuts need to be made to shorten the essay, that's your job and not the proofreader's.

A bad proofreader either tries to turn into an editor, or just lacks the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job.

Some signs that you're working with a bad proofreader are:

If they suggest making major changes to the final draft of your essay. Proofreading happens when editing is already finished.
If they aren't particularly good at spelling, or don't know grammar, or aren't detail-oriented enough to find someone else's small mistakes.
If they start swapping out your words for fancier-sounding synonyms, or changing the voice and sound of your essay in other ways. A proofreader is there to check for errors, not to take the 17-year-old out of your writing.

What Do Colleges Think of Your Getting Help With Your Essay?

Admissions officers agree: light editing and proofreading are good—even required ! But they also want to make sure you're the one doing the work on your essay. They want essays with stories, voice, and themes that come from you. They want to see work that reflects your actual writing ability, and that focuses on what you find important.

On the Importance of Editing

Get feedback. Have a fresh pair of eyes give you some feedback. Don't allow someone else to rewrite your essay, but do take advantage of others' edits and opinions when they seem helpful. ( Bates College )

Read your essay aloud to someone. Reading the essay out loud offers a chance to hear how your essay sounds outside your head. This exercise reveals flaws in the essay's flow, highlights grammatical errors and helps you ensure that you are communicating the exact message you intended. ( Dickinson College )

On the Value of Proofreading

Share your essays with at least one or two people who know you well—such as a parent, teacher, counselor, or friend—and ask for feedback. Remember that you ultimately have control over your essays, and your essays should retain your own voice, but others may be able to catch mistakes that you missed and help suggest areas to cut if you are over the word limit. ( Yale University )

Proofread and then ask someone else to proofread for you. Although we want substance, we also want to be able to see that you can write a paper for our professors and avoid careless mistakes that would drive them crazy. ( Oberlin College )

On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence

Limit the number of people who review your essay. Too much input usually means your voice is lost in the writing style. ( Carleton College )

Ask for input (but not too much). Your parents, friends, guidance counselors, coaches, and teachers are great people to bounce ideas off of for your essay. They know how unique and spectacular you are, and they can help you decide how to articulate it. Keep in mind, however, that a 45-year-old lawyer writes quite differently from an 18-year-old student, so if your dad ends up writing the bulk of your essay, we're probably going to notice. ( Vanderbilt University )

Now let's talk about some potential people to approach for your college essay editing and proofreading needs. It's best to start close to home and slowly expand outward. Not only are your family and friends more invested in your success than strangers, but they also have a better handle on your interests and personality. This knowledge is key for judging whether your essay is expressing your true self.

Parents or Close Relatives

Your family may be full of potentially excellent editors! Parents are deeply committed to your well-being, and family members know you and your life well enough to offer details or incidents that can be included in your essay. On the other hand, the rewriting process necessarily involves criticism, which is sometimes hard to hear from someone very close to you.

A parent or close family member is a great choice for an editor if you can answer "yes" to the following questions. Is your parent or close relative a good writer or reader? Do you have a relationship where editing your essay won't create conflict? Are you able to constructively listen to criticism and suggestion from the parent?

One suggestion for defusing face-to-face discussions is to try working on the essay over email. Send your parent a draft, have them write you back some comments, and then you can pick which of their suggestions you want to use and which to discard.

Teachers or Tutors

A humanities teacher that you have a good relationship with is a great choice. I am purposefully saying humanities, and not just English, because teachers of Philosophy, History, Anthropology, and any other classes where you do a lot of writing, are all used to reviewing student work.

Moreover, any teacher or tutor that has been working with you for some time, knows you very well and can vet the essay to make sure it "sounds like you."

If your teacher or tutor has some experience with what college essays are supposed to be like, ask them to be your editor. If not, then ask whether they have time to proofread your final draft.

Guidance or College Counselor at Your School

The best thing about asking your counselor to edit your work is that this is their job. This means that they have a very good sense of what colleges are looking for in an application essay.

At the same time, school counselors tend to have relationships with admissions officers in many colleges, which again gives them insight into what works and which college is focused on what aspect of the application.

Unfortunately, in many schools the guidance counselor tends to be way overextended. If your ratio is 300 students to 1 college counselor, you're unlikely to get that person's undivided attention and focus. It is still useful to ask them for general advice about your potential topics, but don't expect them to be able to stay with your essay from first draft to final version.

Friends, Siblings, or Classmates

Although they most likely don't have much experience with what colleges are hoping to see, your peers are excellent sources for checking that your essay is you .

Friends and siblings are perfect for the read-aloud edit. Read your essay to them so they can listen for words and phrases that are stilted, pompous, or phrases that just don't sound like you.

You can even trade essays and give helpful advice on each other's work.

If your editor hasn't worked with college admissions essays very much, no worries! Any astute and attentive reader can still greatly help with your process. But, as in all things, beginners do better with some preparation.

First, your editor should read our advice about how to write a college essay introduction , how to spot and fix a bad college essay , and get a sense of what other students have written by going through some admissions essays that worked .

Then, as they read your essay, they can work through the following series of questions that will help them to guide you.

Introduction Questions

Is the first sentence a killer opening line? Why or why not?
Does the introduction hook the reader? Does it have a colorful, detailed, and interesting narrative? Or does it propose a compelling or surprising idea?
Can you feel the author's voice in the introduction, or is the tone dry, dull, or overly formal? Show the places where the voice comes through.

Essay Body Questions

Does the essay have a through-line? Is it built around a central argument, thought, idea, or focus? Can you put this idea into your own words?
How is the essay organized? By logical progression? Chronologically? Do you feel order when you read it, or are there moments where you are confused or lose the thread of the essay?
Does the essay have both narratives about the author's life and explanations and insight into what these stories reveal about the author's character, personality, goals, or dreams? If not, which is missing?
Does the essay flow? Are there smooth transitions/clever links between paragraphs? Between the narrative and moments of insight?

Reader Response Questions

Does the writer's personality come through? Do we know what the speaker cares about? Do we get a sense of "who he or she is"?
Where did you feel most connected to the essay? Which parts of the essay gave you a "you are there" sensation by invoking your senses? What moments could you picture in your head well?
Where are the details and examples vague and not specific enough?
Did you get an "a-ha!" feeling anywhere in the essay? Is there a moment of insight that connected all the dots for you? Is there a good reveal or "twist" anywhere in the essay?
What are the strengths of this essay? What needs the most improvement?

Should You Pay Money for Essay Editing?

One alternative to asking someone you know to help you with your college essay is the paid editor route. There are two different ways to pay for essay help: a private essay coach or a less personal editing service , like the many proliferating on the internet.

My advice is to think of these options as a last resort rather than your go-to first choice. I'll first go through the reasons why. Then, if you do decide to go with a paid editor, I'll help you decide between a coach and a service.

When to Consider a Paid Editor

In general, I think hiring someone to work on your essay makes a lot of sense if none of the people I discussed above are a possibility for you.

If you can't ask your parents. For example, if your parents aren't good writers, or if English isn't their first language. Or if you think getting your parents to help is going create unnecessary extra conflict in your relationship with them (applying to college is stressful as it is!)

If you can't ask your teacher or tutor. Maybe you don't have a trusted teacher or tutor that has time to look over your essay with focus. Or, for instance, your favorite humanities teacher has very limited experience with college essays and so won't know what admissions officers want to see.

If you can't ask your guidance counselor. This could be because your guidance counselor is way overwhelmed with other students.

If you can't share your essay with those who know you. It might be that your essay is on a very personal topic that you're unwilling to share with parents, teachers, or peers. Just make sure it doesn't fall into one of the bad-idea topics in our article on bad college essays .

If the cost isn't a consideration. Many of these services are quite expensive, and private coaches even more so. If you have finite resources, I'd say that hiring an SAT or ACT tutor (whether it's PrepScholar or someone else) is better way to spend your money . This is because there's no guarantee that a slightly better essay will sufficiently elevate the rest of your application, but a significantly higher SAT score will definitely raise your applicant profile much more.

Should You Hire an Essay Coach?

On the plus side, essay coaches have read dozens or even hundreds of college essays, so they have experience with the format. Also, because you'll be working closely with a specific person, it's more personal than sending your essay to a service, which will know even less about you.

But, on the minus side, you'll still be bouncing ideas off of someone who doesn't know that much about you . In general, if you can adequately get the help from someone you know, there is no advantage to paying someone to help you.

If you do decide to hire a coach, ask your school counselor, or older students that have used the service for recommendations. If you can't afford the coach's fees, ask whether they can work on a sliding scale —many do. And finally, beware those who guarantee admission to your school of choice—essay coaches don't have any special magic that can back up those promises.

Should You Send Your Essay to a Service?

On the plus side, essay editing services provide a similar product to essay coaches, and they cost significantly less . If you have some assurance that you'll be working with a good editor, the lack of face-to-face interaction won't prevent great results.

On the minus side, however, it can be difficult to gauge the quality of the service before working with them . If they are churning through many application essays without getting to know the students they are helping, you could end up with an over-edited essay that sounds just like everyone else's. In the worst case scenario, an unscrupulous service could send you back a plagiarized essay.

Getting recommendations from friends or a school counselor for reputable services is key to avoiding heavy-handed editing that writes essays for you or does too much to change your essay. Including a badly-edited essay like this in your application could cause problems if there are inconsistencies. For example, in interviews it might be clear you didn't write the essay, or the skill of the essay might not be reflected in your schoolwork and test scores.

Should You Buy an Essay Written by Someone Else?

Let me elaborate. There are super sketchy places on the internet where you can simply buy a pre-written essay. Don't do this!

For one thing, you'll be lying on an official, signed document. All college applications make you sign a statement saying something like this:

I certify that all information submitted in the admission process—including the application, the personal essay, any supplements, and any other supporting materials—is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented... I understand that I may be subject to a range of possible disciplinary actions, including admission revocation, expulsion, or revocation of course credit, grades, and degree, should the information I have certified be false. (From the Common Application )

For another thing, if your academic record doesn't match the essay's quality, the admissions officer will start thinking your whole application is riddled with lies.

Admission officers have full access to your writing portion of the SAT or ACT so that they can compare work that was done in proctored conditions with that done at home. They can tell if these were written by different people. Not only that, but there are now a number of search engines that faculty and admission officers can use to see if an essay contains strings of words that have appeared in other essays—you have no guarantee that the essay you bought wasn't also bought by 50 other students.

You should get college essay help with both editing and proofreading
A good editor will ask questions about your idea, logic, and structure, and will point out places where clarity is needed
A good editor will absolutely not answer these questions, give you their own ideas, or write the essay or parts of the essay for you
A good proofreader will find typos and check your formatting
All of them agree that getting light editing and proofreading is necessary
Parents, teachers, guidance or college counselor, and peers or siblings
If you can't ask any of those, you can pay for college essay help, but watch out for services or coaches who over-edit you work
Don't buy a pre-written essay! Colleges can tell, and it'll make your whole application sound false.

Ready to start working on your essay? Check out our explanation of the point of the personal essay and the role it plays on your applications and then explore our step-by-step guide to writing a great college essay .

Using the Common Application for your college applications? We have an excellent guide to the Common App essay prompts and useful advice on how to pick the Common App prompt that's right for you . Wondering how other people tackled these prompts? Then work through our roundup of over 130 real college essay examples published by colleges .

Stressed about whether to take the SAT again before submitting your application? Let us help you decide how many times to take this test . If you choose to go for it, we have the ultimate guide to studying for the SAT to give you the ins and outs of the best ways to study.

Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points? We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download them for free now:

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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Why Poverty Persists in America

A Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist offers a new explanation for an intractable problem.

A mother and son living in a Walmart parking lot in North Dakota in 2012. Credit... Eugene Richards

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By Matthew Desmond

Published March 9, 2023 Updated April 3, 2023

In the past 50 years, scientists have mapped the entire human genome and eradicated smallpox. Here in the United States, infant-mortality rates and deaths from heart disease have fallen by roughly 70 percent, and the average American has gained almost a decade of life. Climate change was recognized as an existential threat. The internet was invented.

On the problem of poverty, though, there has been no real improvement — just a long stasis. As estimated by the federal government’s poverty line, 12.6 percent of the U.S. population was poor in 1970; two decades later, it was 13.5 percent; in 2010, it was 15.1 percent; and in 2019, it was 10.5 percent. To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills. The line curves slightly up, then slightly down, then back up again over the years, staying steady through Democratic and Republican administrations, rising in recessions and falling in boom years.

What accounts for this lack of progress? It cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted: Different measures spit out the same embarrassing result. When the government began reporting the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011, designed to overcome many of the flaws of the Official Poverty Measure, including not accounting for regional differences in costs of living and government benefits, the United States officially gained three million more poor people. Possible reductions in poverty from counting aid like food stamps and tax benefits were more than offset by recognizing how low-income people were burdened by rising housing and health care costs.

The American poor have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most.

Any fair assessment of poverty must confront the breathtaking march of material progress. But the fact that standards of living have risen across the board doesn’t mean that poverty itself has fallen. Forty years ago, only the rich could afford cellphones. But cellphones have become more affordable over the past few decades, and now most Americans have one, including many poor people. This has led observers like Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, to assert that “access to certain consumer goods,” like TVs, microwave ovens and cellphones, shows that “the poor are not quite so poor after all.”

No, it doesn’t. You can’t eat a cellphone. A cellphone doesn’t grant you stable housing, affordable medical and dental care or adequate child care. In fact, as things like cellphones have become cheaper, the cost of the most necessary of life’s necessities, like health care and rent, has increased. From 2000 to 2022 in the average American city, the cost of fuel and utilities increased by 115 percent. The American poor, living as they do in the center of global capitalism, have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most. As Michael Harrington put it 60 years ago: “It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed or doctored.”

Why, then, when it comes to poverty reduction, have we had 50 years of nothing? When I first started looking into this depressing state of affairs, I assumed America’s efforts to reduce poverty had stalled because we stopped trying to solve the problem. I bought into the idea, popular among progressives, that the election of President Ronald Reagan (as well as that of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom) marked the ascendancy of market fundamentalism, or “neoliberalism,” a time when governments cut aid to the poor, lowered taxes and slashed regulations. If American poverty persisted, I thought, it was because we had reduced our spending on the poor. But I was wrong.

A black-and-white photograph of a family in a car. The mother is laying down in the front looking up despondently. Two children are crouched in the back. A boy looks out from under pieces of furniture looking directly into the camera from the shadows.

Reagan expanded corporate power, deeply cut taxes on the rich and rolled back spending on some antipoverty initiatives, especially in housing. But he was unable to make large-scale, long-term cuts to many of the programs that make up the American welfare state. Throughout Reagan’s eight years as president, antipoverty spending grew, and it continued to grow after he left office. Spending on the nation’s 13 largest means-tested programs — aid reserved for Americans who fall below a certain income level — went from $1,015 a person the year Reagan was elected president to $3,419 a person one year into Donald Trump’s administration, a 237 percent increase.

Most of this increase was due to health care spending, and Medicaid in particular. But even if we exclude Medicaid from the calculation, we find that federal investments in means-tested programs increased by 130 percent from 1980 to 2018, from $630 to $1,448 per person.

“Neoliberalism” is now part of the left’s lexicon, but I looked in vain to find it in the plain print of federal budgets, at least as far as aid to the poor was concerned. There is no evidence that the United States has become stingier over time. The opposite is true.

This makes the country’s stalled progress on poverty even more baffling. Decade after decade, the poverty rate has remained flat even as federal relief has surged.

If we have more than doubled government spending on poverty and achieved so little, one reason is that the American welfare state is a leaky bucket. Take welfare, for example: When it was administered through the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program, almost all of its funds were used to provide single-parent families with cash assistance. But when President Bill Clinton reformed welfare in 1996, replacing the old model with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), he transformed the program into a block grant that gives states considerable leeway in deciding how to distribute the money. As a result, states have come up with rather creative ways to spend TANF dollars. Arizona has used welfare money to pay for abstinence-only sex education. Pennsylvania diverted TANF funds to anti-abortion crisis-pregnancy centers. Maine used the money to support a Christian summer camp. Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents.

We’ve approached the poverty question by pointing to poor people themselves, when we should have been focusing on exploitation.

A fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them. But this does not fully solve the puzzle of why poverty has been so stubbornly persistent, because many of the country’s largest social-welfare programs distribute funds directly to people. Roughly 85 percent of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program budget is dedicated to funding food stamps themselves, and almost 93 percent of Medicaid dollars flow directly to beneficiaries.

There are, it would seem, deeper structural forces at play, ones that have to do with the way the American poor are routinely taken advantage of. The primary reason for our stalled progress on poverty reduction has to do with the fact that we have not confronted the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor, housing and financial markets.

As a theory of poverty, “exploitation” elicits a muddled response, causing us to think of course and but, no in the same instant. The word carries a moral charge, but social scientists have a fairly coolheaded way to measure exploitation: When we are underpaid relative to the value of what we produce, we experience labor exploitation; when we are overcharged relative to the value of something we purchase, we experience consumer exploitation. For example, if a family paid $1,000 a month to rent an apartment with a market value of $20,000, that family would experience a higher level of renter exploitation than a family who paid the same amount for an apartment with a market valuation of $100,000. When we don’t own property or can’t access credit, we become dependent on people who do and can, which in turn invites exploitation, because a bad deal for you is a good deal for me.

Our vulnerability to exploitation grows as our liberty shrinks. Because labor laws often fail to protect undocumented workers in practice, more than a third are paid below minimum wage, and nearly 85 percent are not paid overtime. Many of us who are U.S. citizens, or who crossed borders through official checkpoints, would not work for these wages. We don’t have to. If they migrate here as adults, those undocumented workers choose the terms of their arrangement. But just because desperate people accept and even seek out exploitative conditions doesn’t make those conditions any less exploitative. Sometimes exploitation is simply the best bad option.

Consider how many employers now get one over on American workers. The United States offers some of the lowest wages in the industrialized world. A larger share of workers in the United States make “low pay” — earning less than two-thirds of median wages — than in any other country belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. According to the group, nearly 23 percent of American workers labor in low-paying jobs, compared with roughly 17 percent in Britain, 11 percent in Japan and 5 percent in Italy. Poverty wages have swollen the ranks of the American working poor, most of whom are 35 or older.

One popular theory for the loss of good jobs is deindustrialization, which caused the shuttering of factories and the hollowing out of communities that had sprung up around them. Such a passive word, “deindustrialization” — leaving the impression that it just happened somehow, as if the country got deindustrialization the way a forest gets infested by bark beetles. But economic forces framed as inexorable, like deindustrialization and the acceleration of global trade, are often helped along by policy decisions like the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, which made it easier for companies to move their factories to Mexico and contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs. The world has changed, but it has changed for other economies as well. Yet Belgium and Canada and many other countries haven’t experienced the kind of wage stagnation and surge in income inequality that the United States has.

Those countries managed to keep their unions. We didn’t. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, nearly a third of all U.S. workers carried union cards. These were the days of the United Automobile Workers, led by Walter Reuther, once savagely beaten by Ford’s brass-knuckle boys, and of the mighty American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations that together represented around 15 million workers, more than the population of California at the time.

In their heyday, unions put up a fight. In 1970 alone, 2.4 million union members participated in work stoppages, wildcat strikes and tense standoffs with company heads. The labor movement fought for better pay and safer working conditions and supported antipoverty policies. Their efforts paid off for both unionized and nonunionized workers, as companies like Eastman Kodak were compelled to provide generous compensation and benefits to their workers to prevent them from organizing. By one estimate, the wages of nonunionized men without a college degree would be 8 percent higher today if union strength remained what it was in the late 1970s, a time when worker pay climbed, chief-executive compensation was reined in and the country experienced the most economically equitable period in modern history.

It is important to note that Old Labor was often a white man’s refuge. In the 1930s, many unions outwardly discriminated against Black workers or segregated them into Jim Crow local chapters. In the 1960s, unions like the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America enforced segregation within their ranks. Unions harmed themselves through their self-defeating racism and were further weakened by a changing economy. But organized labor was also attacked by political adversaries. As unions flagged, business interests sensed an opportunity. Corporate lobbyists made deep inroads in both political parties, beginning a public-relations campaign that pressured policymakers to roll back worker protections.

A national litmus test arrived in 1981, when 13,000 unionized air traffic controllers left their posts after contract negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration broke down. When the workers refused to return, Reagan fired all of them. The public’s response was muted, and corporate America learned that it could crush unions with minimal blowback. And so it went, in one industry after another.

Today almost all private-sector employees (94 percent) are without a union, though roughly half of nonunion workers say they would organize if given the chance. They rarely are. Employers have at their disposal an arsenal of tactics designed to prevent collective bargaining, from hiring union-busting firms to telling employees that they could lose their jobs if they vote yes. Those strategies are legal, but companies also make illegal moves to block unions, like disciplining workers for trying to organize or threatening to close facilities. In 2016 and 2017, the National Labor Relations Board charged 42 percent of employers with violating federal law during union campaigns. In nearly a third of cases, this involved illegally firing workers for organizing.

Corporate lobbyists told us that organized labor was a drag on the economy — that once the companies had cleared out all these fusty, lumbering unions, the economy would rev up, raising everyone’s fortunes. But that didn’t come to pass. The negative effects of unions have been wildly overstated, and there is now evidence that unions play a role in increasing company productivity, for example by reducing turnover. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics measures productivity as how efficiently companies turn inputs (like materials and labor) into outputs (like goods and services). Historically, productivity, wages and profits rise and fall in lock step. But the American economy is less productive today than it was in the post-World War II period, when unions were at peak strength. The economies of other rich countries have slowed as well, including those with more highly unionized work forces, but it is clear that diluting labor power in America did not unleash economic growth or deliver prosperity to more people. “We were promised economic dynamism in exchange for inequality,” Eric Posner and Glen Weyl write in their book “Radical Markets.” “We got the inequality, but dynamism is actually declining.”

As workers lost power, their jobs got worse. For several decades after World War II, ordinary workers’ inflation-adjusted wages (known as “real wages”) increased by 2 percent each year. But since 1979, real wages have grown by only 0.3 percent a year. Astonishingly, workers with a high school diploma made 2.7 percent less in 2017 than they would have in 1979, adjusting for inflation. Workers without a diploma made nearly 10 percent less.

Lousy, underpaid work is not an indispensable, if regrettable, byproduct of capitalism, as some business defenders claim today. (This notion would have scandalized capitalism’s earliest defenders. John Stuart Mill, arch advocate of free people and free markets, once said that if widespread scarcity was a hallmark of capitalism, he would become a communist.) But capitalism is inherently about owners trying to give as little, and workers trying to get as much, as possible. With unions largely out of the picture, corporations have chipped away at the conventional midcentury work arrangement, which involved steady employment, opportunities for advancement and raises and decent pay with some benefits.

As the sociologist Gerald Davis has put it: Our grandparents had careers. Our parents had jobs. We complete tasks. Or at least that has been the story of the American working class and working poor.

Poor Americans aren’t just exploited in the labor market. They face consumer exploitation in the housing and financial markets as well.

There is a long history of slum exploitation in America. Money made slums because slums made money. Rent has more than doubled over the past two decades, rising much faster than renters’ incomes. Median rent rose from $483 in 2000 to $1,216 in 2021. Why have rents shot up so fast? Experts tend to offer the same rote answers to this question. There’s not enough housing supply, they say, and too much demand. Landlords must charge more just to earn a decent rate of return. Must they? How do we know?

We need more housing; no one can deny that. But rents have jumped even in cities with plenty of apartments to go around. At the end of 2021, almost 19 percent of rental units in Birmingham, Ala., sat vacant, as did 12 percent of those in Syracuse, N.Y. Yet rent in those areas increased by roughly 14 percent and 8 percent, respectively, over the previous two years. National data also show that rental revenues have far outpaced property owners’ expenses in recent years, especially for multifamily properties in poor neighborhoods. Rising rents are not simply a reflection of rising operating costs. There’s another dynamic at work, one that has to do with the fact that poor people — and particularly poor Black families — don’t have much choice when it comes to where they can live. Because of that, landlords can overcharge them, and they do.

A study I published with Nathan Wilmers found that after accounting for all costs, landlords operating in poor neighborhoods typically take in profits that are double those of landlords operating in affluent communities. If down-market landlords make more, it’s because their regular expenses (especially their mortgages and property-tax bills) are considerably lower than those in upscale neighborhoods. But in many cities with average or below-average housing costs — think Buffalo, not Boston — rents in the poorest neighborhoods are not drastically lower than rents in the middle-class sections of town. From 2015 to 2019, median monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the Indianapolis metropolitan area was $991; it was $816 in neighborhoods with poverty rates above 40 percent, just around 17 percent less. Rents are lower in extremely poor neighborhoods, but not by as much as you would think.

Yet where else can poor families live? They are shut out of homeownership because banks are disinclined to issue small-dollar mortgages, and they are also shut out of public housing, which now has waiting lists that stretch on for years and even decades. Struggling families looking for a safe, affordable place to live in America usually have but one choice: to rent from private landlords and fork over at least half their income to rent and utilities. If millions of poor renters accept this state of affairs, it’s not because they can’t afford better alternatives; it’s because they often aren’t offered any.

You can read injunctions against usury in the Vedic texts of ancient India, in the sutras of Buddhism and in the Torah. Aristotle and Aquinas both rebuked it. Dante sent moneylenders to the seventh circle of hell. None of these efforts did much to stem the practice, but they do reveal that the unprincipled act of trapping the poor in a cycle of debt has existed at least as long as the written word. It might be the oldest form of exploitation after slavery. Many writers have depicted America’s poor as unseen, shadowed and forgotten people: as “other” or “invisible.” But markets have never failed to notice the poor, and this has been particularly true of the market for money itself.

The deregulation of the banking system in the 1980s heightened competition among banks. Many responded by raising fees and requiring customers to carry minimum balances. In 1977, over a third of banks offered accounts with no service charge. By the early 1990s, only 5 percent did. Big banks grew bigger as community banks shuttered, and in 2021, the largest banks in America charged customers almost $11 billion in overdraft fees. Previous research showed that just 9 percent of account holders paid 84 percent of these fees. Who were the unlucky 9 percent? Customers who carried an average balance of less than $350. The poor were made to pay for their poverty.

In 2021, the average fee for overdrawing your account was $33.58. Because banks often issue multiple charges a day, it’s not uncommon to overdraw your account by $20 and end up paying $200 for it. Banks could (and do) deny accounts to people who have a history of overextending their money, but those customers also provide a steady revenue stream for some of the most powerful financial institutions in the world.

Every year: almost $11 billion in overdraft fees, $1.6 billion in check-cashing fees and up to $8.2 billion in payday-loan fees.

According to the F.D.I.C., one in 19 U.S. households had no bank account in 2019, amounting to more than seven million families. Compared with white families, Black and Hispanic families were nearly five times as likely to lack a bank account. Where there is exclusion, there is exploitation. Unbanked Americans have created a market, and thousands of check-cashing outlets now serve that market. Check-cashing stores generally charge from 1 to 10 percent of the total, depending on the type of check. That means that a worker who is paid $10 an hour and takes a $1,000 check to a check-cashing outlet will pay $10 to $100 just to receive the money he has earned, effectively losing one to 10 hours of work. (For many, this is preferable to the less-predictable exploitation by traditional banks, with their automatic overdraft fees. It’s the devil you know.) In 2020, Americans spent $1.6 billion just to cash checks. If the poor had a costless way to access their own money, over a billion dollars would have remained in their pockets during the pandemic-induced recession.

Poverty can mean missed payments, which can ruin your credit. But just as troublesome as bad credit is having no credit score at all, which is the case for 26 million adults in the United States. Another 19 million possess a credit history too thin or outdated to be scored. Having no credit (or bad credit) can prevent you from securing an apartment, buying insurance and even landing a job, as employers are increasingly relying on credit checks during the hiring process. And when the inevitable happens — when you lose hours at work or when the car refuses to start — the payday-loan industry steps in.

For most of American history, regulators prohibited lending institutions from charging exorbitant interest on loans. Because of these limits, banks kept interest rates between 6 and 12 percent and didn’t do much business with the poor, who in a pinch took their valuables to the pawnbroker or the loan shark. But the deregulation of the banking sector in the 1980s ushered the money changers back into the temple by removing strict usury limits. Interest rates soon reached 300 percent, then 500 percent, then 700 percent. Suddenly, some people were very interested in starting businesses that lent to the poor. In recent years, 17 states have brought back strong usury limits, capping interest rates and effectively prohibiting payday lending. But the trade thrives in most places. The annual percentage rate for a two-week $300 loan can reach 460 percent in California, 516 percent in Wisconsin and 664 percent in Texas.

Roughly a third of all payday loans are now issued online, and almost half of borrowers who have taken out online loans have had lenders overdraw their bank accounts. The average borrower stays indebted for five months, paying $520 in fees to borrow $375. Keeping people indebted is, of course, the ideal outcome for the payday lender. It’s how they turn a $15 profit into a $150 one. Payday lenders do not charge high fees because lending to the poor is risky — even after multiple extensions, most borrowers pay up. Lenders extort because they can.

Every year: almost $11 billion in overdraft fees, $1.6 billion in check-cashing fees and up to $8.2 billion in payday-loan fees. That’s more than $55 million in fees collected predominantly from low-income Americans each day — not even counting the annual revenue collected by pawnshops and title loan services and rent-to-own schemes. When James Baldwin remarked in 1961 how “extremely expensive it is to be poor,” he couldn’t have imagined these receipts.

“Predatory inclusion” is what the historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls it in her book “Race for Profit,” describing the longstanding American tradition of incorporating marginalized people into housing and financial schemes through bad deals when they are denied good ones. The exclusion of poor people from traditional banking and credit systems has forced them to find alternative ways to cash checks and secure loans, which has led to a normalization of their exploitation. This is all perfectly legal, after all, and subsidized by the nation’s richest commercial banks. The fringe banking sector would not exist without lines of credit extended by the conventional one. Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase bankroll payday lenders like Advance America and Cash America. Everybody gets a cut.

Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that. When we ignore the role that exploitation plays in trapping people in poverty, we end up designing policy that is weak at best and ineffective at worst. For example, when legislation lifts incomes at the bottom without addressing the housing crisis, those gains are often realized instead by landlords, not wholly by the families the legislation was intended to help. A 2019 study conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that when states raised minimum wages, families initially found it easier to pay rent. But landlords quickly responded to the wage bumps by increasing rents, which diluted the effect of the policy. This happened after the pandemic rescue packages, too: When wages began to rise in 2021 after worker shortages, rents rose as well, and soon people found themselves back where they started or worse.

Antipoverty programs work. Each year, millions of families are spared the indignities and hardships of severe deprivation because of these government investments. But our current antipoverty programs cannot abolish poverty by themselves. The Johnson administration started the War on Poverty and the Great Society in 1964. These initiatives constituted a bundle of domestic programs that included the Food Stamp Act, which made food aid permanent; the Economic Opportunity Act, which created Job Corps and Head Start; and the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which founded Medicare and Medicaid and expanded Social Security benefits. Nearly 200 pieces of legislation were signed into law in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s first five years in office, a breathtaking level of activity. And the result? Ten years after the first of these programs were rolled out in 1964, the share of Americans living in poverty was half what it was in 1960.

But the War on Poverty and the Great Society were started during a time when organized labor was strong, incomes were climbing, rents were modest and the fringe banking industry as we know it today didn’t exist. Today multiple forms of exploitation have turned antipoverty programs into something like dialysis, a treatment designed to make poverty less lethal, not to make it disappear.

This means we don’t just need deeper antipoverty investments. We need different ones, policies that refuse to partner with poverty, policies that threaten its very survival. We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets, instead of being captured by companies whose low wages are subsidized by government benefits, or by landlords who raise the rents as their tenants’ wages rise, or by banks and payday-loan outlets who issue exorbitant fines and fees. Unless we confront the many forms of exploitation that poor families face, we risk increasing government spending only to experience another 50 years of sclerosis in the fight against poverty.

The best way to address labor exploitation is to empower workers. A renewed contract with American workers should make organizing easy. As things currently stand, unionizing a workplace is incredibly difficult. Under current labor law, workers who want to organize must do so one Amazon warehouse or one Starbucks location at a time. We have little chance of empowering the nation’s warehouse workers and baristas this way. This is why many new labor movements are trying to organize entire sectors. The Fight for $15 campaign, led by the Service Employees International Union, doesn’t focus on a single franchise (a specific McDonald’s store) or even a single company (McDonald’s) but brings together workers from several fast-food chains. It’s a new kind of labor power, and one that could be expanded: If enough workers in a specific economic sector — retail, hotel services, nursing — voted for the measure, the secretary of labor could establish a bargaining panel made up of representatives elected by the workers. The panel could negotiate with companies to secure the best terms for workers across the industry. This is a way to organize all Amazon warehouses and all Starbucks locations in a single go.

Sectoral bargaining, as it’s called, would affect tens of millions of Americans who have never benefited from a union of their own, just as it has improved the lives of workers in Europe and Latin America. The idea has been criticized by members of the business community, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has raised concerns about the inflexibility and even the constitutionality of sectoral bargaining, as well as by labor advocates, who fear that industrywide policies could nullify gains that existing unions have made or could be achieved only if workers make other sacrifices. Proponents of the idea counter that sectoral bargaining could even the playing field, not only between workers and bosses, but also between companies in the same sector that would no longer be locked into a race to the bottom, with an incentive to shortchange their work force to gain a competitive edge. Instead, the companies would be forced to compete over the quality of the goods and services they offer. Maybe we would finally reap the benefits of all that economic productivity we were promised.

We must also expand the housing options for low-income families. There isn’t a single right way to do this, but there is clearly a wrong way: the way we’re doing it now. One straightforward approach is to strengthen our commitment to the housing programs we already have. Public housing provides affordable homes to millions of Americans, but it’s drastically underfunded relative to the need. When the wealthy township of Cherry Hill, N.J., opened applications for 29 affordable apartments in 2021, 9,309 people applied. The sky-high demand should tell us something, though: that affordable housing is a life changer, and families are desperate for it.

We could also pave the way for more Americans to become homeowners, an initiative that could benefit poor, working-class and middle-class families alike — as well as scores of young people. Banks generally avoid issuing small-dollar mortgages, not because they’re riskier — these mortgages have the same delinquency rates as larger mortgages — but because they’re less profitable. Over the life of a mortgage, interest on $1 million brings in a lot more money than interest on $75,000. This is where the federal government could step in, providing extra financing to build on-ramps to first-time homeownership. In fact, it already does so in rural America through the 502 Direct Loan Program, which has moved more than two million families into their own homes. These loans, fully guaranteed and serviced by the Department of Agriculture, come with low interest rates and, for very poor families, cover the entire cost of the mortgage, nullifying the need for a down payment. Last year, the average 502 Direct Loan was for $222,300 but cost the government only $10,370 per loan, chump change for such a durable intervention. Expanding a program like this into urban communities would provide even more low- and moderate-income families with homes of their own.

We should also ensure fair access to capital. Banks should stop robbing the poor and near-poor of billions of dollars each year, immediately ending exorbitant overdraft fees. As the legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran has pointed out, when someone overdraws an account, banks could simply freeze the transaction or could clear a check with insufficient funds, providing customers a kind of short-term loan with a low interest rate of, say, 1 percent a day.

States should rein in payday-lending institutions and insist that lenders make it clear to potential borrowers what a loan is ultimately likely to cost them. Just as fast-food restaurants must now publish calorie counts next to their burgers and shakes, payday-loan stores should publish the average overall cost of different loans. When Texas adopted disclosure rules, residents took out considerably fewer bad loans. If Texas can do this, why not California or Wisconsin? Yet to stop financial exploitation, we need to expand, not limit, low-income Americans’ access to credit. Some have suggested that the government get involved by having the U.S. Postal Service or the Federal Reserve issue small-dollar loans. Others have argued that we should revise government regulations to entice commercial banks to pitch in. Whatever our approach, solutions should offer low-income Americans more choice, a way to end their reliance on predatory lending institutions that can get away with robbery because they are the only option available.

In Tommy Orange’s novel, “There There,” a man trying to describe the problem of suicides on Native American reservations says: “Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping.” The poverty debate has suffered from a similar kind of myopia. For the past half-century, we’ve approached the poverty question by pointing to poor people themselves — posing questions about their work ethic, say, or their welfare benefits — when we should have been focusing on the fire. The question that should serve as a looping incantation, the one we should ask every time we drive past a tent encampment, those tarped American slums smelling of asphalt and bodies, or every time we see someone asleep on the bus, slumped over in work clothes, is simply: Who benefits? Not: Why don’t you find a better job? Or: Why don’t you move? Or: Why don’t you stop taking out payday loans? But: Who is feeding off this?

Those who have amassed the most power and capital bear the most responsibility for America’s vast poverty: political elites who have utterly failed low-income Americans over the past half-century; corporate bosses who have spent and schemed to prioritize profits over families; lobbyists blocking the will of the American people with their self-serving interests; property owners who have exiled the poor from entire cities and fueled the affordable-housing crisis. Acknowledging this is both crucial and deliciously absolving; it directs our attention upward and distracts us from all the ways (many unintentional) that we — we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college-educated, the protected, the lucky — also contribute to the problem.

Corporations benefit from worker exploitation, sure, but so do consumers, who buy the cheap goods and services the working poor produce, and so do those of us directly or indirectly invested in the stock market. Landlords are not the only ones who benefit from housing exploitation; many homeowners do, too, their property values propped up by the collective effort to make housing scarce and expensive. The banking and payday-lending industries profit from the financial exploitation of the poor, but so do those of us with free checking accounts, as those accounts are subsidized by billions of dollars in overdraft fees.

Living our daily lives in ways that express solidarity with the poor could mean we pay more; anti-exploitative investing could dampen our stock portfolios. By acknowledging those costs, we acknowledge our complicity. Unwinding ourselves from our neighbors’ deprivation and refusing to live as enemies of the poor will require us to pay a price. It’s the price of our restored humanity and renewed country.

Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and a contributing writer for the magazine. His latest book, “Poverty, by America,” from which this article is adapted, is being published on March 21 by Crown.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the legal protections for undocumented workers. They are afforded rights under U.S. labor laws, though in practice those laws often fail to protect them.

An earlier version of this article implied an incorrect date for a statistic about overdraft fees. The research was conducted between 2005 and 2012, not in 2021.

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I am a social worker. By virtue of the work I do, I think a lot about privilege. The process of becoming comfortable and open to acknowledging, critiquing, and accepting my own privilege hasn’t been easy. It didn’t happen all at once. I have had many "aha" movements that have helped me to understand my own privilege in relation to the clients I am serving and the world at large.

My profession puts me in the position of assisting individuals who are in need of resources, and who are often facing economic, educational, and environmental conditions different than my own. Further, when assigned a new case, I immediately hold a degree of authority over the client. Social workers are gatekeepers to resources that an individual needs - and are often unable to access without assistance. It’s a complicated dynamic. Good social workers attempt to curb the power imbalance, but it’s critical we acknowledge a simple truth: as professional social service workers we are, by-and-large, working from positions of privilege over our clients.

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Thinking about privilege and challenging it is an ongoing exercise. It’s something that has become part of my daily consciousness. But it’s a difficult concept to grapple with - and one that I didn't come easily. I am constantly learning to challenge my position in the world, and understand the power imbalances that I am a part of. With friends, I sometimes will bring up the subject of privilege (not in a preachy way, I swear!) and am always surprised at how divisive the topic is.

Case in point: At a dinner with a friend to who works on Wall Street, I began discussing a recent New York Times article that looked at how high school students challenged and thought about privilege. I said, “I find it sad that a student was quoted as saying that she didn’t want to be called privileged, just because her parents were able to buy things.” There was a long pause, and my dining companion responded, “Well, who is to say she is privileged? She could be experiencing a lot of things that make her life hard.”

Photo: Pearly

This comment is the crux of the issue when discussing privilege and how many misunderstand the term. Having privilege does not mean that an individual is immune to life’s hardships, but it does mean having an unearned benefit or advantage one receives in society by nature of their identity. Examples of types of identity that can afford an individual privilege include: race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic status, country of origin, lanuage, and/or ability.

I’ll use myself as an example: my privilege stems from my whiteness, cisgenderedness, middle-class upbringing, education, resources to food, access to health care, and familial support. In many ways, I am an expert on the ways my privilege has benefitted me. This is not to ignore that my gender, femininity, and introversion don’t at times put me at a disadvantage, but it doesn’t take away from the many unearned benefits I was handed simply from being born with certain traits and resources.

When I explained this to my friend during our fancy West Village meal, he became defensive. He cited his struggles learning to read, being born into a household with parents who had immigrated from Europe, and being in debt from school as reasons that he should not be assumed to be privileged. While he did reference the disadvantages that women and minorities experience, he would not identify with the label of privilege.

In my experience, his level of defensiveness is not unusual when discussing privilege. When I think about unacknowledged privilege as a phenomenon, I recognize that since hierarchies in most societies are interlocking, there is most likely a lot of privilege (be it gendered, white, heteronormative, socioeconomic) that is denied and protected. As a white person, I realize that I have been taught about privilege as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but I haven’t been taught to see one of its corally aspects - that my privilege puts me at an advantage over others. What I am reflecting in this article is not my inherent understanding of privilege, but rather a reflection on the knowledge I have gained through friends, mentors, teachers, observation, and reading.

As society generally does not give lessons on how to combat and speak about privilege, it puts the onus on us, global citizens, to address imbalances. While privilege is a tricky subject to talk about, and can spark misunderstanding. From my work as a social worker, I suggest a list of five tactics I use when discussing privilege with others - or with yourself.

1. Lead with empathy. Get an understanding of individual experience.

Photo: pocho.com

I find that part of the issue in discussing privilege, is that even individuals who have LOTS of privilege want to be acknowledged for their hardships. This makes sense - we all want empathy towards our life challenges.

When I first enter into a conversation about privilege, I start by asking about the ways in which the person does not have privilege. This is helpful not only in understanding the person more, but also extending empathy. In a conversation as touchy as one on privilege, it’s important to try to disarm defensives and cultivate open dialogue. Then, after speaking with the person about the ways in which they don’t hold privilege, I ask in what ways they do. (I’ll use myself as an example: while I am a woman, dyslexic, and have a chronic medical condition, I ALSO have the privilege of being upper-middle class, living in the United States, holding a graduate degree, having financial resources, and being white.)

I find that structuring a conversation that includes the way people have and don’t have privileges makes it easier for others to understand the power of privilege in creating a system of oppression - and this process is transformative.

2. Understanding the relativity of privilege

Photo: nachoganyreserve.com

For instance, I am right handed, and in turn, have never been forced to write from a desk that is not fitted for me. It’s a privilege I have by nature of my birth. But it’s not to say that my right-handed privilege has the same social responsibility as the privilege that is my white skin color, wealth, and sexual orientation. The point I am trying to make is this: our identities are nuanced and intersectional.

Some of my close friends will get defensive when discussing privilege because they are afraid that the discussion will not talk about the powerful ways in which they do not have privilege, and as a defense, they deflect to speaking to only these things.

It’s important to understand – just because we have don’t have certain kinds of privileges, it doesn’t mean that we don’t benefit from other kinds of privileges. If we realize this, it’s easier to work together with folks who share our privileges and those who don’t to create a better, more equal, world.

3. Systematic injustice is good for no one

Photo: thedailyblog.co.nz

Systemic privilege hurts everyone.

Consider white privilege - For instance, in the US white privilege is a construction created by rich Europeans who wanted to combine their wealth by pitting poor Europeans against Indigenous and African peoples working as slaves. Poor white people were made to feel that they were superior to other races, and were given small privileges over people of color to create diversion. What this meant was that poor white individuals got to be superior to blacks, but still were not on equal footing with wealthy whites. Ultimately, these privileges don’t create advantage for the vast majority of the population, and subsequently, this division creates unfairness – and that’s bad.

Similarly, men have social and economic privileges over women. This is created from a deep rooted patriarchy that prioritizes men over women. Male privilege isn’t helping anyone ultimately though - it doesn’t help families where mothers make less than male partners, and it doesn’t benefit women in helping to advance the fields of science, math, technology, journalism, finance, and engineering. We all lose when people are treated unfairly and not on the merit of their person.

Ultimately, in order to move from a space of marginalization, people need to confront their privileges and recognize that inequality helps no one. As global citizens, we have the revolutionary ability to transform the political, economic, and social environment by recognizing that injustice creates a societal imbalance that negatively impacts everyone.

4. You don’t need to feel guilty or defensive when discussing privilege

Photo: thefec.org

One of the best life-lessons my father taught me was that guilt is a useless emotion. And it’s true. Guilt is a feeling that ultimately does nothing in bringing about change. I try to use this concept when I talk to friends about privilege. A lot of time, people will respond with defensives, or guilt. I have had my fair share of conversations where someone will literally (and I mean literally) throw up their arms and say, “It’s unfair, sure! But what am I going to do?”

To this I respond with a reminder that each of us is able to undermine the system of oppression by refusing to live with unchecked or unacknowledged privilege. Simply by reflecting and challenging our privileges, and working to change the system of discrimination through direct discussion, we can help to shift the status quo.

5. Consider ways in which to equalize power

Photo: wehearit.com | some people carry “lesser” burdens

To create change, it’s important to frame discussion on privilege with actions. As such, the conversation shouldn’t be, “Check your privilege, stupid!” but rather, “How can we work to make sure that we are understanding and undermining the system of oppression and privilege that hurts all of us?”

By framing the dialogue on action, and steps toward liberation, the conversation is more accessible and powerful. For instance, ask yourself questions like, “Can I, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time?” If the answer to this question is yes, challenge yourself to address why this is. Is it strictly due to demographics, or are those demographics shaped by historical discrimination? (For a list of anti-oppression questions, visit Dr. Peggy McIntosh’s open letter here ).

For more actionable change, reach out to like-minded people within your community. I will give a personal example on how addressing my privilege got me involved in grassroots organizing: After a year of working as a social worker, I was dismayed by inequalities within social services. I reached out to a group that mobilized social service workers who were committed to addressing injustice. By joining with others with similar interests, I felt I was working to transform a broken welfare system, and it resulted in my professional work being more impactful.

I encourage all global citizens to reflect on the privileges you have, and the privileges you don’t have. Extend this conversation to your friends and family members to build a world that is focused on equality and fairness.

In order to break the systems of oppression within our societies, it is important to intentionally set-aside time to think about justice, and whether or not our values are aligning with the ways in which we live our lives.

What are your thoughts on privilege? Is it a topic you have familiarity with? Share your thoughts in the comments, and continue the discussion about privilege with friends and family members!

Demand Equity

Why It's Important to Think About Privilege — and Why It's Hard

Feb. 27, 2015

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Use Your Everyday Privilege to Help Others

Dolly Chugh

Your advantages can benefit those without them.

Most of us have some kind of ordinary privilege —that is, the ability to forget about aspects of who you are because they represent the majority demographics of your country or organization. But instead of feeling bad about it, we should use it to our advantage. Research repeatedly confirms that those with ordinary privilege have the power to speak up on behalf of those without it, and have particularly effective influence when they do.

I often forget I am straight. I just don’t think about it much. When asked what I did this weekend, or when setting family photos on my desk at work, I have no reason to wonder if what I say will make someone uncomfortable, or lead to a “joke” at my expense, or cause a co-worker to suddenly think I am attracted to them. Our culture is set up for straight people like me to be ourselves with very little thought. But for some gay colleagues, a simple question about the weekend or a decision of how to decorate the workspace carries significant stress—how to act, who to trust, what to share. A recent study found that 46% of LGBTQ employees are closeted in the workplace, for reasons ranging from fear of losing their job to being stereotyped. Unlike me, a non-straight person is unlikely to have the privilege of going an entire day without remembering their sexual orientation.

DC Dolly Chugh is the Jacob B. Melnick Term Professor at New York University Stern School of Business and author of the book The Person You Mean To Be: How Good People Fight Bias (Harper Business, 2018).

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Importance of Education for Underprivileged Children

Every child must have access to quality education as it develops essential skills to earn a living and make informed decisions. An educated individual is more capable of navigating through hard times and contributing to the growth of society in comparison to an individual who never received formal education.

Quality education helps children realise their maximum potential and attain financial independence. Education also plays a vital role in eradicating poverty and achieving social justice. India has made great strides in increasing literacy rates across the country. The Right to Education Act 2009 enabled millions of children to get formal education. But according to the 2011 Census, there are approximately 8.4 crore children in the 5-17 age group who do not go to a school . It is a matter of grave concern that such a large number of children are not getting educated.

Here are some reasons why education is important for underprivileged children:

Education is essential for developing critical thinking.
Education plays a pivotal role in getting higher-paying jobs.
Kids who are educated can communicate effectively.
Education promotes gender equality and helps create a society that empowers the underprivileged.
Education reduces child labour.
Education can eradicate social evils like child marriage and dowry.
Education increases creativity and imagination.
Education is a powerful tool to break free from generational poverty.
Quality education about health, nutrition and hygiene and drastically reduce preventable deaths.

How CARE India Helps Underprivileged Children Get Educated?

CARE India is a not-for-profit organisation working towards empowering marginalised women and girls with our holistic interventions in Health, Livelihood, Education and Disaster Relief & Resilience . CARE India works on individual, community and systemic levels to create a lasting impact, and we are aiming to impact the lives of more than 30 million people by 2024 .

CARE India’s Girls’ Education Program (GEP) is playing an important role in girls’ education and improving the whole education system. The goal of GEP is to empower 5 million Dalit and Adivasi girls and women . Quality education builds self-esteem, leadership and confidence, and it can help marginalised women bring change in their families, schools and communities.

CARE India has reached 124,879 children, including 71,554 girls, and helped them in becoming a part of the Indian education system. More than 3590 schools across 7 states are benefiting through our 15 projects. Do read about our key programmes like Kanya Sampoorna , STEM Laboratories and Udaan . As an NGO, we rely on the generosity of our donors to fund our programmes and reach more children and women. If you want to play a part in impacting the lives of thousands of people, you can donate to CARE India .

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A modest intervention that helps low-income families beat the poverty trap

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Many low-income families might desire to move into different neighborhoods — places that are safer, quieter, or have more resources in their schools. In fact, not many do relocate. But it turns out they are far more likely to move when someone is on hand to help them do it.

That’s the outcome of a high-profile experiment by a research team including MIT economists, which shows that a modest amount of logistical assistance dramatically increases the likelihood that low-income families will move into neighborhoods providing better economic opportunity.

The randomized field experiment, set in the Seattle area, showed the number of families using vouchers for new housing jumped from 15 percent to 53 percent when they had more information, some financial support, and, most of all, a “navigator” who helped them address logistical challenges.

“The question we were after is really what drives residential segregation,” says Nathaniel Hendren, an MIT economist and co-author of the paper detailing the results. “Is it due to preferences people have, due to having family or jobs close by? Or are there constraints on the search process that make it difficult to move?” As the study clearly shows, he says, “Just pairing people with [navigators] broke down search barriers and created dramatic changes in where they chose to live. This was really just a very deep need in the search process.”

The study’s results have prompted U.S. Congress to twice allocate $25 million in funds allowing eight other U.S. cities to run their own versions of the experiment and measure the impact.

That is partly because the result “represented a bigger treatment effect than any of us had really ever seen,” says Christopher Palmer, an MIT economist and a co-author of the paper. “We spend a little bit of money to help people take down the barriers to moving to these places, and they are happy to do it.”

Having attracted attention when the top-line numbers were first aired in 2019, the study is now in its final form as a peer-reviewed paper, “ Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice ,” published in this month’s issue of the American Economic Review .

The authors are Peter Bergman, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Raj Chetty, a professor at Harvard University; Stefanie DeLuca, a professor at Johns Hopkins University; Hendren, a professor in MIT’s Department of Economics; Lawrence F. Katz, a professor at Harvard University; and Palmer, an associate professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management.

New research renews an idea

The study follows other prominent work about the geography of economic mobility. In 2018, Chetty and Hendren released an “Opportunity Atlas” of the U.S., a comprehensive national study showing that, other things being equal, some areas provide greater long-term economic mobility for people who grow up there. The project brought renewed attention to the influence of place on economic outcomes.

The Seattle experiment also follows a 1990s federal government program called Moving to Opportunity, a test in five U.S. cities helping families seek new neighborhoods. That intervention had mixed results : Participants who moved reported better mental health, but there was no apparent change in income levels.

Still, in light of the Opportunity Atlas data, the scholars decided revisit the concept, with a program they call Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO). This provides housing vouchers along with a bundle of other things: Short-term financial assistance of about $1,000 on average, more information, and the assistance of a “navigator,” a caseworker who would help troubleshoot issues that families encountered.

The experiment was implemented by the Seattle and King County Housing Authorities, along with MDRC, a nonprofit policy research organization, and J-PAL North America. The latter is one of the arms of the MIT-based Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a leading center promoting randomized, controlled trials in the social sciences.

The experiment had 712 families in it, and two phases. In the first, all participants were issued housing vouchers worth a little more than $1,500 per month on average, and divided into treatment and control groups. Families in the treatment group also received the CMTO bundle of services, including the navigator.

In this phase, lasting from 2018 to 2019, 53 percent of families in the treatment group used the housing vouchers, while only 15 percent of those in the control group used the vouchers. Families who moved dispersed to 46 different neighborhoods, defined by U.S. Census Bureau tracts, meaning they were not just shifting en masse from one location to one other.

Families who moved were very likely to want to renew their leases, and expressed satisfaction with their new neighborhoods. All told, the program cost about $2,670 per family. Additional research scholars in the group have conducted about changes in income suggest the program’s direct benefits are 2.5 times greater than its costs.

“Our sense is that’s a pretty reasonable return for the money compared to other strategies we have to combat intergenerational poverty,” Hendren says.

Logistical and emotional support

In the second phase of the experiment, lasting from 2019 to 2020, families in a treatment group received individual components of the CMTO support, while the control group again only received the housing vouchers. This way, the researchers could see which parts of the program made the biggest difference. The vast majority of the impact, it turned out, came from receiving the full set of services, especially the “customized” help of navigators.

“What came out of the phase two results was that the customized search assistance was just invaluable to people,” Palmer says. “The barriers are so heterogenous across families.” Some people might have trouble understanding lease terms; others might want guidance about schools; still others might have no experience renting a moving truck.

The research turned up a related phenomenon: In 251 follow-up interviews, families often emphasized that the navigators mattered partly because moving is so stressful.

“When we interviewed people and asked them what was so valuable about that, they said things like, ‘Emotional support,’” Palmer observes. He notes that many families participating in the program are “in distress,” facing serious problems such as the potential for homelessness.

Moving the experiment to other cities

The researchers say they welcome the opportunity to see how the Creating Moves to Opportunity program, or at least localized replications of it, might fare in other places. Congress allocated $25 million in 2019, and then again in 2022, so the program could be tried out in eight metro areas: Cleveland, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Orleans, New York City, Pittsburgh, and Rochester. With the Covid-19 pandemic having slowed the process, officials in those places are still examing the outcomes.

“It’s thrilling to us that Congress has appropriated money to try this program in different cities, so we can verify it wasn’t just that we had really magical and dedicated family navigators in Seattle,” Palmer says. “That would be really useful to test and know.”

Seattle might feature a few particularities that helped the program succeed. As a newer city than many metro areas, it may contain fewer social roadblocks to moving across neighborhoods, for instance.

“It’s conceivable that in Seattle, the barriers for moving to opportunity are more solvable than they might be somewhere else.” Palmer says. “That’s [one reason] to test it in other places.”

Still, the Seattle experiment might translate well even in cities considered to have entrenched neighborhood boundaries and racial divisions. Some of the project’s elements extend earlier work applied in the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program, a voucher plan run by the Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership. In Seattle, though, the researchers were able to rigorously test the program as a field experiment, one reason it has seemed viable to try replicate it elsewhere.

“The generalizable lesson is there’s not a deep-seated preference for staying put that’s driving residential segregation,” Hendren says. “I think that’s important to take away from this. Is this the right policy to fight residential segregation? That’s an open question, and we’ll see if this kind of approach generalizes to other cities.”

The research was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, the Surgo Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and Harvard University.

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Volunteer your time.

Distribute meal kits to the local homeless community.

Start a fundraiser.

Call your government officials.

Advocate on social media.

Talk about poverty-related issues with others.

Research and learn more about poverty.

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