Poverty Informed Practice LLC

Jane was my child long before I knew her name. She worried me from the very beginning. She refused to line up headfirst and had to be delivered by C-section, and within moments of her birth doctors were running tests because they’d discovered a heart defect. We learned she would need surgery, although it would wait until age one. I remember the panic of those early hours, watching monitors, waiting to hear whether her heart could wait. In many ways, it was always like that. J

My youngest child dropped out of college about eight weeks ago. It was probably a good idea. The picture is them just a few years back as we prepped for a road trip together After a year and a half of trying different kinds of classes, they were struggling to find anything that spoke to them. They were also going through the young adulthood ordeal of figuring out who they really were. They alternated A’s and B’s with drops for non-attendance, and I watched them try to evade m

I’ve spent a long time working in the poverty space, and the longer I do this work, the more obvious it becomes: poverty isn’t about individual choices, it’s about systems that never allow people enough stability to make choices at all. And yet, many of our services are still built around the smallest possible intervention. Recently, I heard a nonprofit describe their approach as “doing the most good with the least.”  It was meant as responsible stewardship. But here’s the tr

Over and over, we hear the same refrain in policy and media: Are people taking advantage of the system? Are there those who could work but won’t? Are taxpayers being cheated? It is a damaging and corrosive narrative and it must end. Lately, that debate has exploded into public view thanks to the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history. With the shutdown came uncertainty for millions: children, seniors, people with disabilities who rely on SNAP found themselves won

When I was 12, my mom got married for the second time. My little brother and I walked her down the “aisle”, in reality just the hallway...

The author on the right, age 5 I’ve shared often that a large part of my childhood and much of my twenties were spent in poverty. I’d say...