#antipoverty

[nando161mando]

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Prateep Ungsongtham Hata

Prateep Ungsongtham Hata was born in 1952 in Bangkok, Thailand. Born to an impoverished family on the slums of Bangkok, Hata worked from a young age and had to drop out of school at the age of ten. When she was 16, she started her own school, where she taught reading, writing, and basic math in a single room in her family home. After just a month, there were 60 students. With both public and private support, Hata built the Pattana Village Community School, which grew to enroll over 600 children in grades one through six. In 1978, she won the Ramon Magsaysay Award, and used the prize money to establish the Duang Prateep Foundation. The foundation has supported a variety of programs for the inhabitants of slums, including special education for the hard of hearing, an AIDS project, and a lunch and nutrition program. The foundation also worked on COVID-19 relief in Thailand. In 2004, Hata won the World Children's Prize. In 2021, she received the Order of the Rising Sun from the Japanese government.

[heterorealism]

[bothpartiesarebad]

(via Anarchy4Everyone: Death to all Government!)

[tigergingicat]

The Democrat who steps up to be the Presidential candidate is all but guaranteed to continue these.

[socialistjesus]

(via Socialist Jesus Leftist Solidarity Antipoverty Social Policy - Etsy)

[phonakins-blog]

Sympathy for the Sober

Was it a fun night for you?Speeding down I-5, no cops on the mapScreaming out, “I’d die for you”But after all the stops and starts, crashes and carnageI’m just carsick I’ve mentioned a couple of times how you get more sympathy for some things when you’re sober – some rightly so and some perhaps a little harsh. Some, like running your car up on the kerb – way more sympathy when you’ve done it…

[probablybadrpgideas]

Ways to make your villain morally ambiguous:

Eats babies, but only for medical reasons.

Every time they kill someone they make a clone, ensuring that strictly speaking they're having no effect on the amount of life in the universe

Want to end all bad things but only has a gun to do it with.

Has exactly five (5) noble traits: tips waiters, donates to medical gofundmes, tidies your bathroom, buys milk for orphans, once gave a dog a hat.

Never attacks anyone who can't fight back unless it's convenient for their plans or they really want to.

Uses your correct pronouns when informing you about the horrible death trap they put you in.

Actually has an antipoverty machine powered by blending orphans. Look, they know its contrived, but you can only play the cards you're dealt, right?

Is pretty sure they're doing the right thing. They haven't actually checked, they've been busy, but they're pretty sure!

Is only doing evil because they got hit by an Evil Ray that makes you violent and dangerous.

Hasn't ever done anything wrong and is actively helping the heroes. It's a very light shade of morally grey.

[the-cimmerians]

Today, ProPublica reports on yet another big change that stands to solve a decades-long problem we first learned about back in 2016, closing a huge loophole that allowed states to divert federal antipoverty funds to governors’ pet projects, like promoting abstinence, holding “heathy marriage” classes that did nothing to prevent out-of-wedlock births, funding anti-abortion “clinics” to lie about abortion “risks,” sending middle-class kids to private colleges, and other schemes only tangentially related to helping poor kids. It’s the same loophole that Mississippi officials tried to drive a truck through to divert welfare funds to former sportsball man Brett Favre’s alma mater, for a volleyball palace. [ ]

The agency has proposed new rules — open for public comment until December 1 — aimed at nudging states to actually use TANF funds to give cash to needy parents, not fill budget holes or punish poor people.

One change will put an end to the scheme Utah used to substitute LDS church funds for welfare, by prohibiting states

from counting charitable giving by private organizations, such as churches and food banks, as “state” spending on welfare, a practice that has allowed legislatures to budget less for programs for low-income families while still claiming to meet federal minimums.

Another new rule will put the kibosh on using TANF to fund child protective services or foster care programs, which are not what TANF is supposed to be for, damn it.

And then there’s the simple matter of making sure that funds for needy families go to needy families, not to pet projects that have little to do with poverty:

The reforms would also redefine the term “needy” to refer only to families with incomes at or below 200% of the federal poverty line. Currently, some states spend TANF money on programs like college scholarships — or volleyball stadiums — that benefit more affluent people.

[gatheringbones]

[“Poverty is embarrassing, shame inducing. Misery (misère), the French sociologist Eugène Buret once remarked, “is poverty felt morally.”

You feel it in the degradation rituals of the welfare office, where you are made to wait half a day for a ten-minute appointment with a caseworker who seems annoyed you showed up. You feel it when you go home to an apartment with cracked windows and cupboards full of cockroaches, an infestation the landlord blames on you. You feel it in how effortlessly poor people are omitted from movies and television shows and popular music and children’s books, erasures reminding you of your own irrelevance to wider society. You may begin to believe, in the quieter moments, the lies told about you. You avoid public places—parks, beaches, shopping districts, sporting arenas—knowing they weren’t built for you.

Poverty might consume your life, but it’s rarely embraced as an identity. It’s more socially acceptable today to disclose a mental illness than to tell someone you’re broke. When politicians propose antipoverty legislation, they say it will help “the middle class.” When social movement organizers mobilize for higher wages or housing justice, they announce that they are fighting on behalf of “working people” or “families” or “tenants” or “the many.” When the poor take to the streets, it’s usually not under the banner of poverty. There is no flag for poor rights, after all.

Poverty is diminished life and personhood. It changes how you think and prevents you from realizing your full potential. It shrinks the mental energy you can dedicate to decisions, forcing you to focus on the latest stressor—an overdue gas bill, a lost job—at the expense of everything else. When someone is shot dead, the children who live on that block perform much worse on cognitive tests in the days following the murder. The violence captures their minds. Time passes, and the effect fades until someone else is dropped.

Poverty can cause anyone to make decisions that look ill-advised and even downright stupid to those of us unbothered by scarcity. Have you ever sat in a hospital waiting room, watching the clock and praying for good news? You are there, locked on the present emergency, next to which all other concerns and responsibilities feel (and are) trivial. That experience is something like living in poverty. Behavioral scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir call this “the bandwidth tax.” “Being poor,” they write, “reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going a full night without sleep.” When we are preoccupied by poverty, “we have less mind to give to the rest of life.” Poverty does not just deprive people of security and comfort; it siphons off their brainpower, too.”]

matthew desmond, from poverty: by america, 2023

[madtomedgar]

I have at least 2 family members who were reliable republicans until the last 8 years. One switched parties because she is a devout Christian, and the republican party embracing trump caused her to do some serious soul searching about what her values were and how she could best live them. In the end she decided that antipoverty measures, decency, welcoming the stranger, and being supportive of people's right to be who they are was more important to her as a Christian than banning abortion. One had one of his kids come out as queer, and decided supporting his child, who he loves, was more important than his attachment to his grievances as a white dude, and switched to the party that would do right by his kid. So the idea that the only reason republicans are switching parties is because dems are moving right, which they don't appear to be, makes little sense with my experience of former republicans.

[nando161mando]

They need to hear this!

[youthincare]

Rich people get therapy Poor people go to jail Rich people get empathy and help Poor people get lectures and scoffs Rich people enjoy drugs recreationally Poor people suffer from substance use Rich people deal with illness Poor people die from illness Rich people sacrifice their time Poor people sacrifice their lives Rich people go into detox Poor people wait for detox Rich people watch their heath Poor people watch their budget Rich people become independent Poor people become "selfish" Rich people watch their stress Poor people watch their community Rich people create art Poor people create "slang"

"Why are people who live in poverty disproportionately affected by mental illness?

Research shows that mental illness reduces employment and therefore income, and that psychological interventions generate economic gains.

Negative economic shocks cause mental illness

Antipoverty programs such as cash transfers improve mental health.

A crucial step toward the design of effective policies is to better understand the mechanisms underlying these causal effects."

[heterorealism]

(via (1) Pinterest)

[bothpartiesarebad]

(via Socialist Solidarity Progressive Christian Button - Etsy)

[mariacallous]

FLINT, Michigan ― The story of a wildly successful antipoverty program is also one of the most disheartening tales of Joe Biden’s presidency.

In 2021, Biden and congressional Democrats expanded a tax credit for children, transforming it from a targeted, sliding-scale subsidy to a simpler, more straightforward form of financial assistance. It was a version of an idea that’s become the hottest concept in antipoverty policy ― just giving people money, without restrictions on its use or complex eligibility procedures. By nearly all accounts, it worked magnificently. That year, the U.S. poverty rate hit a record low. The expansion was one of the COVID-19 relief measures in the American Rescue Plan, which passed on party lines. Biden and his allies had hoped to extend the program, making it permanent. But to do that, they needed every single vote from their 50-seat Democratic majority in the Senate. And they couldn’t get Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia, to go along. The program expired at the end of the year.

Now, with the tax credit back to its more complicated, restrictive version, poverty is back up. And although a year’s worth of helping low-income families with kids surely did a lot of good, neither Biden nor the Democrats have gotten much credit for that. Few Americans are even aware of the program, or of Biden’s role in it. And among those familiar with the program’s history, the prevailing sentiment seems to be disappointment at the failure to make it permanent.

But there’s a coda to this story involving a new initiative in Flint, Michigan, that’s already helping hundreds of families. And it’s got political relevance, given that it probably wouldn’t have happened without the help of Biden and other Democrats.

If the program lives up to its billing, it could inspire copycat efforts around the country, fueling calls to resurrect a federal version of the program. But the prospects for those efforts depend on keeping sympathetic leaders in office, which in turn depends on what happens in the next election.