The Souls of Poor Folk is a collection of essays in the tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois's classic The Souls of Black Folk. The essays move between the scholarly, the narrative, and the testimonial just as they do in Du Bois's book. This text is meant to be a contribution to the critical dialogue around ways to alleviate poverty in our world. The contributors are diverse in their experience, origin, perspectives, and beliefs about the appropriate means to alleviate poverty and its many causes. This book is an essential companion to a multimedia initiative featuring a documentary and original music compilation available on compact disc that invites readers, listeners, and viewers to journey beyond the veil that hides the scars and blemishes of social problems, such as homelessness and poverty, especially in America. To learn more about the successful non-profit "Greater Love Project" initiative or to purchase other companion items including the CD, please visit: www.thesoulsofpoorfolk.org.

Multifaceted social problems like disaster relief, homelessness, health care, and academic achievement gaps cannot be adequately addressed with isolated and disconnected public service agencies. The Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy model addresses the limitations to traditional approaches to American public administration.

The purpose of this report is to provide an alternative approach to measuring educational opportunity for all children being served by The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) assisted housing programs that can be used nationally to promote these children's educational well-being. This alternative approach was developed to improve the precision and accuracy of HUD's original approach to measuring educational opportunity (access to high quality schools) and well-being (children's successful academic and behavioral progress) for students in assisted housing. The original approach links children's assisted housing data from HUD with education data available through the Department of Education aggregated at the school level. Because education data are only available at the school level for the original approach, it is impossible to determine the child's actual school of enrollment and the child's individual educational outcomes. This measure of educational opportunity would be substantially limited because it assumes that (a) proximity to a high performing school equals attendance at that school, and (b) this proximity to a high performing school would equate to improved educational outcomes for children. Without individual-level educational records, these assumptions cannot be tested. The alternative approach presented in this report provides a framework for developing more precise and accurate measures of educational opportunity and well-being for children in HUD's assisted housing programs using data at the individual level. There is currently no consensus in the education field regarding how to best measure school quality to inform children's educational opportunity. The alternative approach also provides a recommended strategy for improving upon current school quality measures that depend primarily upon average standardized achievement test scores in each school.

The authors summarize the progress made in the past decade toward making homeless assistance programs more accountable to funders, consumers, and the public. They observe that research on the costs of homelessness and cost offsets associated with intervention programs has been limited to people who are homeless with severe mental illness. But this research has raised awareness of the value of this approach, such that dozens of new studies in this area are underway, mostly focused on "chronic homelessness." Less progress has been made in using cost and performance data to systematically assess interventions for families, youth, and transitionally homeless adults. The authors present case studies of promising practices from the State of Arizona and Columbus, Ohio, demonstrating innovative uses of client and program data to measure performance and improve program management toward state policy goals, such as increased housing placement rates, reduced lengths of homelessness, and improved housing stability.