The Poverty Initiative would like to warmly welcome all the new students entering Union’s walls this year! You come to Union during a time when poverty and inequality are rapidly increasing. From the subsistence farmer in West Africa who is being decimated by a speculative commodities markets, to students in the US graduating with mountains [...]
Posts under ‘Ending Poverty’
“The City is For All” – Poverty Initiative Meets With Hungarian Anti-Poverty Organization
Several of us at the Poverty Initiative had a chance recently to sit down with PhD student and Hungarian activist Udvarhelyi Tessza. We discussed the work of the Poverty Initiative and to think about how what we do here might be in solidarity with the work in Budapest. The relationship with Tessza was developed through [...]
Jubilee in a Student Debt Crisis
By Sarah Cairatti Jubilee, the season of liberty, is named for the ram’s horn (the yowbel) that sounds its blasts through the cities, declaring the joy of return and release. The Jubilee year is named for a sound, a reverberation through the human body. Worshiping in an old church in Brooklyn, Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, [...]
The Right to Adequate Food: An Answer to Food Insecurity
By Shailly Barnes Recently, Laurie Garrett, Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, claimed that every aspect of our food production – from farming, harvesting, delivery and distribution – must improve dramatically to meet our growing global demand for food. Her assertion is a commonly held belief and practice, evident in [...]
Poverty Scholar Christine Lewis on Colbert Report
Domestic Workers United, founded in 2000, is an organization of Caribbean, Latina and African nannies, housekeepers, and elderly caregivers in New York organizing for power, respect, fair labor standards and to help build a movement to end exploitation and oppression for all. They have a dream that one day, all work will be valued equally. [...]
About “A New & Unsettling Force”
Martin Luther King Jr. saw the reality of millions of poor and disposed living in this country and world as a contradiction of God’s will and Jesus’ ministry. For King it was also a fundamental corruption of US society’s founding principles. King believed that the poor, whether they are white, black, brown, young, old, urban, [...]