Tag: war on poverty

Greta de Jong: Who Lost the War on Poverty?

Poverty may have won in the end, but this outcome was not inevitable. Innovative projects sponsored by the federal government in the 1960s put poor people to work providing needed services in their communities and helped to lift many participants into the middle class. Continue Reading Greta de Jong: Who Lost the War on Poverty?

Interview: Mical Raz on poverty, mental health, and U.S. social policy

Poverty is often seen as a personal failure, whereas success is a mark of hard work; thus economic status serves a surrogate for individual self-worth, and not an indicator of society’s structure and its limitations. Poor men and women are still often portrayed in stereotypical terms as being lazy and unmotivated. Continue Reading Interview: Mical Raz on poverty, mental health, and U.S. social policy

‘Change Comes Knocking’ to air on WUNC-TV tonight

Tonight at 10 p.m. on WUNC-TV will be the broadcast premiere of the documentary film Change Comes Knocking: The Story of the NC Fund. The film explores a bold, biracial initiative to fight poverty in 1960s North Carolina. The anti-poverty project known as the North Carolina Fund is also the subject of a new book by Robert Korstad and James… Continue Reading ‘Change Comes Knocking’ to air on WUNC-TV tonight

Job Programs and Stimulus II: What We Can Learn from New Deal Programs

I’m pleased to have a guest post today from Frank Stricker, author of Why America Lost the War on Poverty — And How to Win It, which we published in 2007. That book focused on the second half of the twentieth century. In his current work, Stricker’s looking more closely at unemployment and job creation, and looking further back in… Continue Reading Job Programs and Stimulus II: What We Can Learn from New Deal Programs