Category: Poverty

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A woman walks on the U.S. side of the border as smoke pours over the wall from Nogales, Sonora. The smoke smelled of burning plastic. Photos by Jeffry D. Scott

Bridging Troubled Waters in Ambos Nogales

In the hillside shantytowns of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, people get drinking water from trucks and store it in barrels salvaged from the dump or nearby factories. They have no choice. The city’s crumbling, 50-year-old water distribution system doesn’t extend to where they live. Even most

Bruce C. Vladeck, the outgoing administrator of the U.S. Health Care Financing Administration.

The Medical Gold Rush for Poor Patients

Just a few short months ago, a New York medical insurance plan called AssureCare, Inc. hoped to reap hearty profits caring for thousands of society’s poorest people. Bankrolled by a Florida entrepreneur with a $480 million personal fortune, the HMO seemed likely to snatch up

Marian Wright Edelman (far right) cuts the ribbon opening the Head Start center named for her in rural Hurtsboro, Alabama. Also at the festivities at the refurbished school building were Jerry Roden, Jr., executive director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations, Hurtsboro Mayor Mary K. Tapley, and Head Start program director Nancy Spears.

Head Start: Helping Alabama’s Poor Survive

Question: Which of these activities involves Head Start? A woman sets as her goal obtaining a commercial bus driver’s license, succeeds, and then aims at a new target- taking the test for her high school equivalency diploma. A child sees commitment to service in adults

Clara and Elery Corson 1983. Husband and wife.

Time And Time Again: Poverty In A Maine Village

Photographers enter people’s lives for periods as short as minutes or as long as weeks. Constrained by deadlines and journalism’s compressed time, the assignment ends and we leave. We never stay, we rarely know what becomes of the people we photograph. Editors may permit an

The Jamaica Progressive League attracted more than 300 people in a new voter/citizens drive held a Guayanan retaurant in Brooklyn's Flatbush section this March. Would-be citizens paid $120 each for photographs, fingerprints and notarized registration forms. The first citizens will be sworn in this summer. Photo by Rachel L. Cobb

Brooklyn’s Anti-Poverty Workers: Caribbean Immigrants

Family values, religion and community renewal are among the pillars of conservative ideology, and rallying-points of Republican legislators who tend to represent districts that are rural, white and affluent. In Democratic Brooklyn, particularly the mainly black, mainly poor neighborhood called Fort Greene, the Republican Personal