Blog Action Day 2008 – Poverty

Today is Blog Action Day, when over 10,000 sites turn the conversation toward a single issue. Last October 15, the focus was on the environment (I wrote about the risk of lead paint in homes). This year, the subject is poverty.

I can’t claim to know a lot about poverty, only that I know more than I did five years ago, before I spent a fair amount of time in two high schools with the highest number of low-income students in my city. I reflected upon that experience here.

It seems almost a prophetic choice of topics at this moment, when the world has careened into financial chaos. But I have to wonder if our resistance to honest global stewardship and our unwillingness to shoulder financial burdens together have helped bring us to this point. As we seek to recover, I don’t see how we can expect to have a solid economic foundation unless we reevaluate the way we look at and treat poverty.

Here is a list of web resources on poverty compiled by the organizers of Blog Action Day.

The World Bank has an extensive overview of poverty, including how they measure it.

Here is the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent data on poverty.

Here is the Barack Obama/Joe Biden plan to combat poverty.

John McCain’s web site doesn’t appear to list poverty policies anywhere that I can find, although he did make a statement on poverty earlier this year.

The best blog I read that regularly addresses poverty is one plus two, where Jen often writes movingly about her daily work with homeless people. She also hosts one-third of a monthly roundtable that compiles all manner of “Just Posts” from the blogosphere, alongside partners at Under the Mad Hat and creative.mother.thinking.

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