Ten years ago, I traveled to India with friends. On the last day there, I spent some time meeting with prostitutes. I expected to talk to them about the risk of AIDS, but they wanted to talk about stigma. Most of these women had been abandoned by their husbands, and that’s why they’d gone into prostitution. They were trying to make enough money to feed their kids. They were so low in the eyes of society that they could be raped and robbed and beaten by anybody – even by police – and nobody cared.
.. Talking to them about their lives was so moving to me. But what I remember most is how much they wanted to touch me and be touched. It was as if physical contact somehow proved their worth. As I was leaving, we took a photo of all of us with our arms linked together.
.. The stigma of AIDS is vicious – especially for women – and the punishment is abandonment.
.. The community they formed became a platform for everything. They were able to set up speed-dial networks to respond to violent attacks. Police and others who raped and robbed them couldn’t get away with it anymore. The women set up systems to encourage savings. They used financial services that helped some of them start businesses and get out of sex work. This was all done by people society considered the lowliest of the low.
.. The pessimists are wrong in my view, but they’re not crazy. If technology is purely market-driven and we don’t focus innovation on the big inequities, then we could have amazing inventions that leave the world even more divided.
Can Hillary Manage Her Unruly Coalition?
“What I really took away from this was the fact that in order to get subsidized housing into the suburbs, you have to be sneaky about it,” Robert Strupp, the executive director of Baltimore Neighborhoods Inc., a liberal fair housing advocacy group, told The Sun:
Because if they found out about it in advance, they wouldn’t let it happen. That’s the sign to me that discrimination still exists. It’s classic Nimbyism. That’s today’s reality just as it was in the 1950s and 1960s.
.. There is no way the Clinton campaign wants housing integration to become a central issue of the 2016 campaign. The same is true of the more general issue of poverty.
.. The agenda as stated does not address the fundamental problem that is at the root of the concentration of poverty — the ability of local governments to effectively exclude lower-income people from their communities through zoning and restrictive land use policies.
.. But the Republican Party has been most successful when it has been able to drive a wedge between competing Democratic constituencies,
.. Then, on the other hand, there are the competing goals of black Democrats in the Sandtown-Winchesterneighborhood of Baltimore, home of Freddy Gray — where 51.8 percent of the residents in 2012 were out of work. These Democrats enroll their kids in a public school system where 79.5 percent of the high school students have not met proficiency standards in English, and 90.2 percent have not met those standards in Algebra.
This Republican mayor has an incredibly simple idea to help the homeless. And it seems to be working.
Next month will be the first anniversary of Albuquerque’s There’s a Better Way program, which hires panhandlers for day jobs beautifying the city. In partnership with a local nonprofit that serves the homeless population, a van is dispatched around the city to pick up panhandlers who are interested in working. The job pays $9 an hour, which is above minimum wage, and provides a lunch. At the end of the shift, the participants are offered overnight shelter as needed.
.. In less than a year since its start, the program has given out 932 jobs clearing 69,601 pounds of litter and weeds from 196 city blocks. And more than 100 people have been connected to permanent employment.
.. The program hasn’t weeded out all panhandling in the city, and supporters say that’s not really the point. It’s connecting people who would otherwise not seek help to needed services. And it’s showing them when they are at their lowest that they have real value, and that others are willing to show them kindness to help them have a better life.
Why American Schools Are Even More Unequal Than We Thought
Nearly half of students nationwide are eligible for a subsidized meal in school. Children whose families earn less than 185 percent of the poverty threshold are eligible for a reduced-price lunch, while those below 130 percent get a free lunch. For a family of four, the cutoffs are $32,000 for a free lunch and $45,000 for a reduced-price one. By way of comparison, median household income in the United States was about $54,000 in 2014.
.. But when we look more closely, we see that just 14 percent have been eligible for subsidized meals every year since kindergarten. These children are the poorest of the poor — the persistently disadvantaged... This places disadvantaged children roughly two grades behind their classmates. By contrast, the gap based on persistent disadvantage is much wider: 0.94 standard deviations, or nearly three grades of learning... When we look at third-grade scores, nearly all of the eighth-grade score deficit is already in place. By third grade, those children who will end up spending all of primary school eligible for subsidized meals have already fallen far behind their classmates... Among children who were eligible for subsidized meals through eighth grade, household income during kindergarten was just $20,000. For those who were only occasionally eligible, it was closer to $47,000, and for those never eligible, $80,000... But schools that have identical shares of students eligible for subsidized meals may differ vastly in the share of students who are deeply poor. The schools with the most disadvantaged children have greater challenges and arguably need more resources.