Surviving Poverty carefully examines the experiences of people living below the poverty level, looking in particular at the tension between social isolation and social ties among the poor. Joan Maya Mazelis draws on in-depth interviews with poor people in Philadelphia to explore how they survive and the benefits they gain by being connected to one another. Half of the study participants are members of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a distinctive organization that brings poor people together in the struggle to survive. The mutually supportive relationships the members create, which last for years, even decades, contrast dramatically with the experiences of participants without such affiliation. In interviews, participants discuss their struggles and hardships, and their responses highlight the importance of cultivating relationships among people living in poverty. Surviving Poverty documents the ways in which social ties become beneficial and sustainable, allowing members to share their skills and resources and providing those living in similar situations a space to unite and speak collectively to the growing and deepening poverty in the United States. The study concludes that productive, sustainable ties between poor people have an enduring and valuable impact. Grounding her study in current debates about the importance of alleviating poverty, Mazelis proposes new modes of improving the lives of the poor. Surviving Poverty is invested in both structural and social change and demonstrates the power support services can have to foster relationships and build sustainable social ties for those living in poverty.

Radical Discipleship engages the structural evils of homelessness, mass incarceration, and capital punishment, arguing that to be faithful to the gospel, Christians must become disciples of, not simply believers in, Jesus. Jennifer McBride argues that disciples must work to overcome the social evils that bar beloved community. Unfolding the social and political character of the good news, the book organically connects liturgy with activism and theological reflection enabling a radical discipleship that takes seriously the Jesus of the Gospels.

This encyclopedia presents important research on the United Kingdom. Some of the topics discussed herein include the United Kingdom's relations with the United States; human trafficking; the modern slavery bill; homelessness in England; environmental issues; the history of the parliamentary franchise; and voting.

For ten years James Robertson walked the twenty-one-mile round-trip from his Detroit home to his factory job; when his story went viral, it brought him an outpouring of attention and support. But what of Robertson's Detroit neighbors, likewise stuck in a blighted city without services as basic as a bus line? What they're left with, after decades of disinvestment and decline, is DIY urbanism-sweeping their own streets, maintaining public parks, planting community gardens, boarding up empty buildings, even acting as real estate agents and landlords for abandoned homes. DIY Detroit describes a phenomenon that, in our times of austerity measures and market-based governance, has become woefully routine as inhabitants of deteriorating cities "domesticate" public services in order to get by. The voices that animate this book humanize Detroit's troubles-from a middle-class African American civic activist drawn back by a crisis of conscience; to a young Latina stay-at-home mom who has never left the city and whose husband works in construction; to a European woman with a mixed-race adopted family and a passion for social reform, who introduces a chicken coop, goat shed, and market garden into the neighborhood. These people show firsthand how living with disinvestment means getting organized to manage public works on a neighborhood scale, helping friends and family members solve logistical problems, and promoting creativity, compassion, and self-direction as an alternative to broken dreams and passive lifestyles. Kimberley Kinder reveals how the efforts of these Detroiters and others like them create new urban logics and transform the expectations residents have about their environments. At the same time she cautions against romanticizing such acts, which are, after all, short-term solutions to a deep and spreading social injustice that demands comprehensive change.

The Syrian refugee crisis, which began in 2011, is one of the most pressing disasters in the world today, with its effects reverberating around the globe. By the end of 2015, more than 7.6 million of the country's people had been internally displaced and 4.3 million were registered refugees. The number of internally displaced persons and refugees amounts to about half of Syria's precrisis population. Thousands have died while trying to reach safety. Due to the large humanitarian response, there is now a wealth of available information on refugees' income and expenses, food and nutrition, health, education, employment, vulnerability, housing, and other measures of well-being. These data have been little explored, as humanitarian organisations face daily challenges that make the full use of existing data very difficult. The Welfare of Syrian Refugees: Evidence from Jordan and Lebanon aims to assess the poverty and vulnerability of these refugees and evaluate existing and alternative policies designed to help them. The authors find that current policies, including cash transfers and food vouchers, are effective in reducing poverty, but fail to lead to- nor are they designed to yield-economic inclusion and self-reliance. Those goals would require a different humanitarian and development paradigm, one that focuses on growth policies for areas affected by refugees where the target population has a mix of refugees and hosting populations. This volume is the result of the first comprehensive collaboration between the World Bank Group and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and aims to better understand and ultimately improve the well-being of Syrian refugees living in Jordan and Lebanon

The causes of homelessness and determining how best to assist those who find themselves homeless became particularly prominent, visible issues in the 1980s. The concept of homelessness may seem like a straightforward one, with individuals and families who have no place to live falling within the definition. However, the extent of homelessness in this country and how best to address it depend upon how one defines the condition of being homeless. This book discusses the elements and considerations taken within the federal homeless assistance programs.

Welfare Reform in Canada provides systematic knowledge of Canadian social assistance by assessing provincial welfare regimes and emphasizing changes since the late twentieth century. The book examines activation, social investment, and economic inequalities and provides nuanced perspectives on social welfare across Canada's provinces in relation to trends and issues in the country and beyond. These conceptual, international, and historical perspectives inform in-depth case studies of social assistance reform in each province. The key issues of social assistance in Canada, including gender relations, immigrants, Aboriginal peoples, and the impact of activation programs, are addressed, as is the possibility of convergence taking place in provincial welfare policy. This book is the second volume in the Johnson-Shoyama Series on Public Policy, published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, an interdisciplinary centre for research, teaching, and executive training with campuses at the Universities of Regina and Saskatchewan.

Each year, approximately 25,000 youth exit the foster care system before being reunified with their family of origin, being adopted, or achieving another permanent living arrangement. These youth often have limited resources with which to secure safe and stable housing, which leaves them at heightened risk of experiencing homelessness. This book documents a series of research activities designed to address knowledge gaps related to the housing options available to youth who have aged out of foster care. Furthermore, this book describes the extent to which -- and how -- communities are using Family Unification Program (FUP) to support youth; reviews the characteristics of the young people, their risk of homelessness, and the barriers they face in securing stable housing, along with relevant federal and, to a lesser extent, state policies; and describes a wide range of housing programs for young people aging out of foster care, present a program typology, and conclude with the identification of a small group of innovative housing programs that may warrant closer exploration.

In Better Must Come, Matthew D. Marr reveals how social contexts at various levels combine and interact to shape the experiences of transitional housing program users in two of the most prosperous cities of the global economy, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Marr, who has conducted fieldwork in U.S. and Japanese cities for over two decades, followed the experiences of thirty-four people as they made use of transitional housing services and after they left such programs. This comparative ethnography is groundbreaking in two ways-it is the first book to directly focus on exits from homelessness in American or Japanese cities, and it is the first targeted comparison of homelessness in two global cities.Marr argues that homelessness should be understood primarily as a socially generated, traumatic, and stigmatizing predicament, rather than as a stable condition, identity, or culture. He pushes for movement away from the study of "homeless people" and "homeless culture" toward an understanding of homelessness as a condition that can be transcended at individual and societal levels. Better Must Come prescribes policy changes to end homelessness that include expanding subsidized housing to persons without disabilities and experiencing homelessness chronically, as well as taking broader measures to address vulnerabilities produced by labor markets, housing markets, and the rapid deterioration of social safety nets that often results from neoliberal globalization.

Combining institutional ethnography and community-based research, Youth Work is a sophisticated examination of the troubling experiences of young people living outside the care of parents or guardians, as well as of the difficulties of the frontline workers who take responsibility for assisting them. Drawing from more than a year of on-site research at an Ontario youth emergency shelter, Naomi Nichols exposes the complicated institutional practices that govern both the lives of young people living in shelters and the workers who try to help them.

A troubling account of how a managerial focus on principles like "accountability" and "risk management" has failed to successfully coordinate and deliver services to vulnerable members of society, Youth Work shows how competitive funding processes, institutional mandates, and inter-organizational conflicts complicate the lives of the young people that they are supposed to help. Nichols's book is essential reading for those involved in education, social services, mental health, and the justice system, as well as anyone with an interest in social justice.

The Education for Homeless Children and Youth program (EHCY) provides formula grants to state educational agencies (SEAs) to help ensure that all homeless children and youth have equal access to the same free and appropriate public education, including public preschool education that is provided to other children and youth. It is the only federal education program exclusively focused on homeless children and youth. This book provides an overview of the purposes and program structure of EHCY; the history of the program's funding; issues that have arisen regarding the implementation of ESEA Title I-A set-asides for homeless students; data on the number of LEAs receiving EHCY grants and on the characteristics of homeless students; and a discussion of proposed changes to EHCY included in bills introduced in the 112th Congress to reauthorise the ESEA. The book also describes the challenges in defining and counting the runaway and homeless youth population, as well as the factors that influence homelessness and leaving home.

Native Americans living in tribal areas experience some of the poorest housing conditions in the United States. Native Americans in tribal areas are several times more likely to live in housing that is physically substandard or overcrowded than the U.S. population as a whole. They are also more likely to live in poverty than the general population, further contributing to housing problems. In addition, a number of issues, such as the legal status of tribal land, pose unique barriers to housing for many people living in tribal areas. This book discusses federal assistance, challenges faced and efforts made to address these challenges for Native American housing.

Schools are facing increasing numbers of homeless students and school social workers and other related professionals are often at the front line of addressing the negative impact homelessness brings to individual students and the school overall. School social workers and other school-based personnel must contend with a myriad of policies and other factors related to homelessness to help students obtain an education. School-based Practice with Children and Youth Experiencing Homelessness is one of the first books to focus on this topic in the context of our social work practice. This book guides practitioners through the conceptualization of homelessness, how experiencing homelessness impacts the children we serve, the policies that govern us, and finally a practice perspective. Written with practitioners in mind, School-based Practice with Children and Youth Experiencing Homelessness is loaded with case studies and practice examples and is an accessible handbook to addressing homelessness in our schools.

This book contains diverse chapters examining homelessness from a myriad of perspectives, from global perspectives to clinical perspectives. An international group of authors consider clinical and theoretical factors in the lives of people that are homeless and the services and policies that affect their lives. The international chapters provide different perspectives regarding the culturally-embedded nature of our perceptions of homelessness including definitions of homelessness, mental illness, and the expectations of family and support systems. These chapters include information from Ireland, a number of Asian countries, South Africa, Spain, the Czech Republic, and North America. From within the United States, the book presents different models for understanding, developing, and disseminating interventions for people that are homeless, and have mental illnesses and/or substance use disorders. The book explores the needs of special populations such as racial and ethnic minorities as well as those who experience mild developmental delays as well as mental illness and homelessness. Two chapters explore attitudes towards people that are homeless and that may have behavioral health problems. Finally, the role of climate and the forces of nature are reviewed for unique perspectives on homelessness. These multidisciplinary perspectives on an important issue are both thought-provoking and educational.

Popular opinion holds that public housing is a failure; so what more needs to be said about seventy-five years of dashed hopes and destructive policies? Over the past decade, however, historians and social scientists have quietly exploded the common wisdom about public housing. Public Housing Myths pulls together these fresh perspectives and unexpected findings into a single volume to provide an updated, panoramic view of public housing.With eleven chapters by prominent scholars, the collection not only covers a groundbreaking range of public housing issues transnationally but also does so in a revisionist and provocative manner. With students in mind, Public Housing Myths is organized thematically around popular preconceptions and myths about the policies surrounding big city public housing, the places themselves, and the people who call them home. The authors challenge narratives of inevitable decline, architectural determinism, and rampant criminality that have shaped earlier accounts and still dominate public perception.Contributors: Nicholas Dagen Bloom, New York Institute of Technology; Yonah Freemark, Chicago Metropolitan Planning Council; Alexander Gerould, San Francisco State University; Joseph Heathcott, The New School; D. Bradford Hunt, Roosevelt University; Nancy Kwak, University of California, San Diego; Lisa Levenstein, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Fritz Umbach, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY; Florian Urban, Glasgow School of Art; Lawrence J. Vale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Rhonda Y. Williams, Case Western Reserve University

Since the 1960s, new and more diverse waves of immigrants have changed the demographic composition and the landscapes of North American cities and their suburbs. The Housing and Economic Experiences of Immigrants in U.S. and Canadian Cities is a collection of essays examining how recent immigrants have fared in getting access to jobs and housing in urban centres across the continent. Using a variety of methodologies, contributors from both countries present original research on a range of issues connected to housing and economic experiences. They offer both a broad overview and a series of detailed case studies that highlight the experiences of particular communities. This volume demonstrates that, while the United States and Canada have much in common when it comes to urban development, there are important structural and historical differences between the immigrant experiences in these two countries.

Homeless women and their children who reside in a transitional housing facility or shelter have experienced multiple traumas and disruptions in their earliest attachments. These multiple, chronic traumas often result in disorganized attachment disorders, which, in turn, affect all future development. Although there are a dearth of programs and interventions that work with disorganized attachment disorder within the homeless population, there are few studies that explore the difficulties that homeless mothers experience in forming positive attachments with their children. Mothering without a Home: Attachment Representations and Behaviors of Homeless Mothers and Children explores the attachment style of homeless mothers and its effect on the resulting attachment style of their children. Ann Smolen utilizes psychoanalytically informed interventions with the goal of aiding these women in developing a deeper capacity to understand and be attuned to their children's emotional needs.

This book provides background information on government policy on tackling statutory homelessness (ie: those households for whom local authorities, after receiving an application, have a duty to secure accommodation because they are unintentionally homeless). It also discusses "how services can be managed in a way that prevents all households, regardless of whether they are families, couples, or single people, from reaching a crisis point where they are faced with homelessness", and the duties owed to the non-statutory homeless.

In All That is Solid Danny Dorling offers an agenda-shaping look at the UK's dangerous relationship with housing - and how it's all going to come crashing down Housing was at the heart of the financial collapse, and our economy is now precariously reliant on the housing market. In this ground-breaking book, Danny Dorling argues that housing is the defining issue of our times. Tracing how we got to our current crisis and how housing has come to reflect class and wealth in Britain, All That Is Solid shows that the solution to our problems - rising homelessness, a generation priced out of home ownership - is not, as is widely assumed, building more homes. Inequality, he argues, is what we really need to overcome. 'An urgent book about an urgent topic' - Lynsey Hanley, New Statesman 'A brilliantly original study of our national obsession' - Nick Cohen, Observer Danny Dorling is Halford Mackinder Professor in Geography at the University of Oxford. He has worked both with the British government and the World Health Organization and is frequently asked to comment on current issues on TV and the radio. He has published more than twenty-five books, including Injustice: Why Social Inequality Exists, So You Think You Know About Britain? and The 32 Stops for Penguin Underground Lines.

Growing up in East St. Louis, Illinois isn't easy. For a long time, it has been one of America's poorest and deadliest cities. Many residents turn to drugs, crime, and other vices. Most struggle to make ends meet, and relatively few become successful. Despite overwhelming odds, Courtney R. Logan escaped, becoming a prominent litigation attorney, professor, and family man. In these chilling and transformational pages, Logan describes his humble beginnings, setbacks, and incredible journey. Shaped by Fire will inspire others to hold onto hope and become something greater than just another statistic. This tale is for those trapped in despair and doubt whether they can have a brighter future. Prepare to be inspired by one man's remarkable, heart-wrenching tale growing up. Courtney R. Logan, Esq. is a sought-after keynote speaker and author. While not speaking and writing, he spends his time mentoring and motivating youth to make wise choices. He is on an international mission to save youth by empowering them with his message of hope. You can find him on Twitter at @courtneyrlogan and his home page is www.courtneyrlogan.com.

For much of the twentieth century, discrimination by private real estate agents and rental property owners helped establish and sustain stark patterns of housing and neighbourhood inequality. Beginning in the late 1970s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has rigorously monitored trends in racial and ethnic discrimination in both rental and sales markets. This book presents findings from the fourth such study, which applied paired-testing methodology in 28 metropolitan areas to measure the incidence and forms of discrimination experienced by black, Hispanic, and Asian renters and home buyers.

Often the church's efforts addressing poverty involve performing acts of service for or to the poor. These acts are sometimes motivated more by one's own needs or self-interest than by a genuine concern for the poor. Tina Carter and Mindy Johnson-Hicks invite readers to take a different approach. In The Wealth of Poverty they invite readers to develop mutual relationships with persons of different economic groups and to foster a deeper understanding of the culture of poverty and the surprising wealth found there. - Rev. Adam Hamilton, founding pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas.

A reverse mortgage is a special type of home loan for older homeowners that requires no monthly mortgage payments. Borrowers are still responsible for property taxes and homeowner's insurance. Reverse mortgages allow seniors to access the equity they have built up in their homes now, and defer payments of the loan until they die, sell, or move out of the home. The original purpose envisioned for reverse mortgages was to convert home equity into cash that borrowers could use to help meet expenses in retirement. Borrowers could choose between an income stream for everyday expenses, a line of credit for major expenses (such as home repairs and medical expenses), or a combination of the two. This book examines the changes that have taken place in the marketplace and in the consumers who use reverse mortgages, with a focus on consumer protection concerns.