Peter Brown’s “Remembering the Poor and the Aesthetic of Society” (Journal of Interdisciplinary History) presents a wonderful analysis of charity through a lens of history and society: Looking at the medieval and (largely) early modern societies described herein with more ancient eyes reveals patterns of expectations that are familiar from the longer history of the [...]
It takes a lot of words for academia to say “We’re can’t describe the experience of poverty”. This is from “Using a sustainable livelihoods approach to assessing the impact of ICTs in development” by Sarah Parkinson and Ricardo Ramírez: …the way development professionals conceptualise development and poverty is very different from how poor people themselves [...]
Today is Blog Action Day and this year’s topic is Poverty. Since I’ve recently written about poverty directly, today I’ll be more lateral: Today I am wearing: Cotton American Apparel T-Shirt (with print-design from Woot!) Denim Banana Republic Jeans Saucony Synthetic Running Shoes Old Navy Underwear Hanes Cotton Socks Leather Belt purchased from Brooklyn St. Fair [...]
In my last post exploring poverty, I defined poverty as “the inability to fully participate in or benefit from society”. This definition sought to move beyond a simple definition of poverty as an economic floor, and towards a broader conception of poverty and a goal for society in general. To begin this post, I’d like [...]
We just had our AmeriCorps*VISTA orientation last week—which to our delight and hard work turned out great—and one of the things I’ve been ruminating on since then was one of the powerful dialogue we had around poverty. AmeriCorps*VISTA’s mission is to help individuals and communities out of poverty rather than focus on making poverty more [...]
.!. Because of constructive criticism of some of my organization’s archaic language, I asked the Mission Based Massachusetts Listserv, a nonprofit discussion list, what terms they use in place of “poor people”. Below are all of the responses I got, which were awesome! Some terminology… low-income under-resourced under-served (Barbara humorously notes that “overserved” is a [...]
