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The Economic Case against Work Requirements

NonProfit Quarterly

Image credit: AndreyPopov on istock.com Work requirements—or requiring people to find employment in order to access public benefits—force people to prove that they deserve a social safety net. But where did they come from, and why are they still a central part of economic policy today?

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??How Community-Based Public Space Can Build Civic Trust: Lessons from Akron

NonProfit Quarterly

Ongoing neglect and isolation led to entrenched, concentrated poverty and a growing distrust of civic leaders. That changed when a team from Reimagining the Civic Commons decided to reinvigorate public spaces in Akron’s systemically disinvested neighborhoods, including Summit Lake. The city’s Black business district was devastated.

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How to Eliminate the Myth of Meritocracy and Build the World We Deserve

NonProfit Quarterly

Co-produced with the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), this series examines the many ways that M4BL and its allies are seeking to address the economic policy challenges that lie at the intersection of the struggle for racial and economic justice. These racist stories then shape our policies for years and years.

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Across the Country, Poor and Low-Wage Voters Are Organizing

NonProfit Quarterly

Yet, nearly all low-wage workers in the city are rent-burdened , with 25 percent of children within the city limits living in poverty. As Barber noted, a 2020 report by Robert Paul Hartley, an assistant professor of social work at Columbia University, found that 34 million eligible poor or low-income voters did not vote in 2016. “We

Poverty 94
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Social Housing: How a New Generation of Activists Are Reinventing Housing

NonProfit Quarterly

Image Credit: RDNE Stock project on pexels.com What is social housing? But to make it more than just a slogan, you need policies and institutions to make that right into a reality. Not so long ago, social housing was rarely discussed in the United States. But that hasn’t stopped movements from pushing.

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Nonprofits as Battlegrounds for Democracy

NonProfit Quarterly

While the title of the book might belie the scope of inquiry, Dunning makes the case that using nonprofits as a “tool for addressing urban problems” has led to a form of “urban governance” that uses private organizations to fulfill public, democratic rights. Dunning smartly points out that this approach turned rights into privilege.

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Can a New Social Contract Advance in Minnesota?

NonProfit Quarterly

A new social contract —that is, a structural change in the relationship of the public to the government, the 1930s New Deal being the quintessential US example—seemed to just maybe be at hand. The struggle for a more progressive social contract continues. million children out of poverty. Universal pre-K?