Barbara Ehrenreich still taking chances, telling it like it is:

Preying On the Poor

…the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them. The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.

Poolside in Poverty

Margot Page wants her family to learn Spanish. She’d like her children to understand, really understand, what a privileged life they lead in the U.S. She takes them to Nicaragua. Her kids aren’t the only ones to realize that our world is unfair, complicated, and confusing on the norm.

What Would it Take to for social entrepreneurship to help pull people out of poverty? An interview with Solomon Prakash, India’s local director of Ashoka.

What would it take for social entrepreneurship to make serious inroads into poverty? 

If you tackle a problem like poverty head on, you need a set of people on your core team who share your vision. This can be a challenge.

The difference between a social entrepreneur and a business entrepreneur is one of commitment and vision. In a business, you might bail out once you’d made enough money. In social entrepreneurship, you believe you can solve a problem and that others will work with you to solve that problem. That core team needs to grow; otherwise, you don’t have the skills to manage the project as it grows. You need talented people who are both committed and dedicated, who are willing to live and work in isolated areas in poor conditions for very little money. Sometimes people want to work in a social enterprise because the work is different. “I may not have much money,” they say, “but my soul is satisfied and I feel happy because I’ve made a contribution.”

We also need to think creatively about funding because there are serious challenges in the kind of finances available. Increasingly, granting organizations are looking at things like returnable grants or interest-free loans to make their money last longer. Some people are talking about “social venture” funding, which is a similar model to private venture capital funding. They’re expecting returns similar to microfinancing, which was hugely profitable. But that’s not going to happen.

Keep reading …

The data on the poor in this country announced Tuesday by the Census Bureau was not good, and due to measures already taken by Congress and those likely to come, the outlook doesn’t provide much reason for hope. Read what commentators at Mother Jones, In These Times, The Take Away, City Limits, and The Atlantic have to say about it …

secretrepublic:

The Suburbanization of Poverty: An Infographic

(via ziatroyano)