Publisher Description

Ela Bhatt is widely recognized as one of the world's most remarkable pioneers and entrepreneurial forces in grassroots development. Known as the "gentle revolutionary," she has dedicated her life to improving the lives of India's poorest and most oppressed citizens. In India, where 93 percent of the labor force are self-employed, 94 percent of this sector are women. Yet self-employed women have historically enjoyed few legal protections or worker's rights. In fact, most are illiterate and subject to exploitation and harassment by moneylenders, employers, and officials. Witnessing the terrible conditions faced by women working as weavers, stitchers, cigarette rollers, and waste collectors, Ela Bhatt began helping these women to organize themselves. In 1972, Ela Bhatt founded the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) to bring poor women together and give them ways to fight for their rights and earn better livings. Three years after SEWA was founded, it had 7,000 members. Today it has a total membership of 700,000 women, making it the largest single primary trade union in India. Bhatt lead SEWA to form a cooperative bank in 1974 - with a share capital of $30,000 - that offered microcredit loans to help women save and become financially independent. Today the SEWA Cooperative Bank has $1.5 million in working capital and more than 30,000 depositors with a loan return rate of 94 percent. Through years of organization and strategic action, Ela Bhatt developed SEWA from a small, often ignored group into a powerful trade union and bank with allies around the world. During the last three decades, SEWA's efforts to increase the bargaining power, economic opportunities, health security, legal representation, and organizational abilities of Indian women have brought dramatic improvements to hundreds of thousands of lives and influenced similar initiatives around the globe. We Are Poor but So Many is a first-hand account of the vision, rise, and success of SEWA, in India as well as internationally. The book begins with a history of the early days of SEWA and an exploration of the Ghandian philosophy that helped shape SEWA's formation and vision. It follows with an account of the struggles and challenges that SEWA faced in its journey and describes how these were addressed and overcome. It then explores the freedom that SEWA has facilitated for women working in the informal economy by presenting several inspirational stories of individual SEWA members. The final chapter describes the international extension of SEWA's work, the challenges that women face in the informal economy worldwide, and how SEWA can be effectively replicated in other parts of the world. This volume is unique in that it will elaborate the specific experience and knowledge of Ela Bhatt in her and SEWA's journey and provide insights and knowledge that no outside researcher would ever be in a position to replicate.

To the modern mind, the concept of poverty is often confused with destitution. But destitution emphatically is not the Gospel ideal. A love-filled sharing frugality is the message, and Happy Are You Poor explains the meaning of this beatitude lived and taught by Jesus himself. But isn't simplicity in lifestyle meant only for nuns and priests? Are not all of us to enjoy the goodness and beauties of our magnificent creation? Are parents to be frugal with the children they love so much? The renowned spiritual writer Dubay gives surprising replies to these questions. He explains how material things are like extensions of our persons and thus of our love. If everyone lived this love there would be no destitution. After presenting the richness of the Gospel message, more beautiful than any other world view, he explains how Gospel frugality is lived in each state of life.

“A competent, thorough assessment from a veteran expert in the field.” —Kirkus Reviews Income disparities in our wealthy nation are wider than at any point since the Great Depression. The structure of today’s economy has stultified wage growth for half of America’s workers—with even worse results at the bottom and for people of color—while bestowing billions on the few at the very top. In this “accessible and inspiring analysis”, lifelong anti-poverty advocate Peter Edelman assesses how the United States can have such an outsized number of unemployed and working poor despite important policy gains. He delves into what is happening to the people behind the statistics and takes a particular look at young people of color, for whom the possibility of productive lives is too often lost on the way to adulthood (Angela Glover Blackwell). For anyone who wants to understand one of the critical issues of twenty-first century America, So Rich, So Poor is “engaging and informative” (William Julius Wilson) and “powerful and eloquent” (Wade Henderson).

The real-life Nickel and Dimed—the author of the wildly popular “Poverty Thoughts” essay tells what it’s like to be working poor in America. ONE OF THE FIVE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS OF THE YEAR--Esquire “DEVASTATINGLY SMART AND FUNNY. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed, which tells the story of my own brief attempt, as a semi-undercover journalist, to survive on low-wage retail and service jobs. TIRADO IS THE REAL THING.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, from the Foreword As the haves and have-nots grow more separate and unequal in America, the working poor don’t get heard from much. Now they have a voice—and it’s forthright, funny, and just a little bit furious. Here, Linda Tirado tells what it’s like, day after day, to work, eat, shop, raise kids, and keep a roof over your head without enough money. She also answers questions often asked about those who live on or near minimum wage: Why don’t they get better jobs? Why don’t they make better choices? Why do they smoke cigarettes and have ugly lawns? Why don’t they borrow from their parents? Enlightening and entertaining, Hand to Mouth opens up a new and much-needed dialogue between the people who just don’t have it and the people who just don’t get it.

With more than 300,000 copies in print, When Helping Hurts is a paradigm-forming contemporary classic on the subject of poverty alleviation. Poverty is much more than simply a lack of material resources, and it takes much more than donations and handouts to solve it. When Helping Hurts shows how some alleviation efforts, failing to consider the complexities of poverty, have actually (and unintentionally) done more harm than good. But it looks ahead. It encourages us to see the dignity in everyone, to empower the materially poor, and to know that we are all uniquely needy—and that God in the gospel is reconciling all things to himself. Focusing on both North American and Majority World contexts, When Helping Hurts provides proven strategies for effective poverty alleviation, catalyzing the idea that sustainable change comes not from the outside in, but from the inside out.

Popular wisdom holds that the years since 1973 -- the end of the "postwar miracle" -- have been a time of economic decline and stagnation: lackluster productivity, falling real wages, and lost competitiveness. The rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, and most of us have barely held on while watching all the best jobs disappear overseas. As Myths of Rich and Poor demonstrates, this picture is not just wrong, it's spectacularly wrong. The hard numbers, simple facts, and iconoclastic arguments of this book will change the way you think about the American economy.