Tag: poverty

Two friends, Hurricane Katrina, a suicide, and the pain and beauty that holds us all together.

How youth in Rochester, New York, are working to save their neighborhood — and themselves — by forging pathways away from violent street crime.

Korean director Bong Joon-ho on his new film, Parasite

Healing crystals move from poor villages to first world consumers along a trail of death, ecological destruction, and capitalistic concentration of wealth.

Amber Leventry recalls how getting sober forced them to confront and reveal important truths about their identity.

The working homeless exist in a modern purgatory.

Living off the grid isn’t just for landlubbers.

An entire subculture of Bay Area residents survives by reselling wealthy residents’ trash.

Like so many of our lofty ideals, the “American Work Ethic” is actually two different standards — one for the wealthy and one for the poor — with two different interpretations of what work looks like.

Melissa Chadburn challenges her own belief that environmental justice issues are reserved for people of privilege.

When she attends an elite private college on scholarship, Alison Stine discovers that education isn’t quite the equalizer she expected it to be.

In an excerpt from her debut memoir, Stephanie Land recalls being poor, and moving with her young daughter from a homeless shelter to transitional housing.

“Yet money was a lie—pieces of paper and metal suggesting prices for goods, services, labor, and human beings themselves in a way that often had more to do with profit than with true value.”

Asking difficult questions often comes at a cost.

Disneyland’s painfully low wages make for an unmagical kingdom.

“There’s an idea that laborers end up in their role because it’s all they’re suited for. What put us there, though, was birth, family history — not lack of talent for something else.”

Sharmila Sen grew up understanding distinctions between castes and religions, between the educated and the illiterate. Race was a distinction she didn’t understand until she came to America.

Three meals a day don’t erase the scars of a childhood marked by hunger, violence, and loneliness.

It’s time to end the pernicious myth that giving money directly to panhandlers won’t help them.

Although many states legally allow the use of medical marijuana, federal law still prohibits its possession in federally subsidized housing, so many residents live in fear of eviction.

“What seemed to me life-saving was that I couldn’t lie. I couldn’t put a candy-coated gloss on anything.”

Paying attention to the Poor People’s Campaign.

Lilly Dancyger speaks out about her humble upbringing.

An amateur geographer travels to an undocumented island off the coast of Haiti after stumbling upon it on Google Earth.

Many American cities offer the homeless free bus tickets to move somewhere, but do these relocation programs do vunerable populations more harm than good?

Melissa Chadburn goes undercover as a temp worker.

Two baseball teams — one from the tough streets of West Oakland and the other from Havana — decide to play each other. When they meet in Cuba, a Berkeley documentary filmmaker captures it all.

Sarah Smarsh’s brother has sold his plasma for the last decade to make ends meet under mounting credit card debt and student loans.

How gentrification, apathy, and government negligence failed the residents of Grenfell Tower.

Meeting an apparently less fortunate child in her daughter’s kindergarten class transports Amber Leventry back to her own painful youth.