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 If you know someone who supports a child on a minimum-wage job, you know someone who is poor.
In 2001, in no state does a full-time minimum wage job enable a family to afford (at 30 percent of income) the federal fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment.
—Joint Center for Housing Studies’ "State of the Nation’s Housing: 2001”
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 Poor children often become poor adults.
The percentage of poor children who were economically inactive at age 24 (not employed or in school) in 1997 was 15.9, almost twice as high as the percentage of non-poor children who were economically inactive.
—The Future of Children, Summer/Fall 1997
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 Welfare does not provide relief from poverty.
Until 1996, the largest cash assistance program in the United States for poor families with children was Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Federal welfare reform laws repealed the AFDC program in 1996 and replaced it with a block grant program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. Current TANF benefits and food stamps combined are below the poverty level in every state.
—National Coalition for the Homeless
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 You may be closer to poverty than you think.
By 1995, the middle 20 percent of income-earners in the United States had only enough savings to maintain their current standard of living for 1.2 months (i.e., if they lost their jobs). That’s down from 3.6 months in 1989.
—Global Policy Forum fact sheet
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 Current efforts to end poverty are insufficient.
The number of the world’s poorest nations under the U.N.’s criteria (per capita income come of less than $900 a year) has grown from 25 to 49 since 1971. Despite the billions of dollars wealthier nations have given in aid to these countries, U.N. officials say the amount of aid has dropped by 45 percent since 1990.
—United Nations
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 AIDS worsens poverty.
AIDS generates new poverty as people lose housing tenure and employment. In Botswana, where the United Nations estimates the adult infection rate at more than 35 percent, it also estimated that in 2000 the number of households living below the poverty line would rise by up to 8 percent over the next 10 years due to AIDS.
—United Nations Development Programme
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 Poverty crosses all geographic, ethnic, national, linguistic, gender and religious boundaries.
According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development, nearly half the world’s poorest people—44 percent —live in south Asia, with 24 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, 24 percent in east Asia, and 6.5 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. |
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 Poverty degrades the spirit.
The slow, difficult transition from socialism to market economies in former Soviet countries has created a social crisis for many people. Eastern European countries have a strongly held social norm of hospitality, and many people, recently impoverished by economic factors beyond their control, refuse to visit friends or receive visitors because they can’t afford to offer their guests anything to drink or provide a small gift for the people they visit.
—World Bank PovertyNet |
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 Poverty kills dreams.
“I had come to accept that the best God wanted me to have was a broken-down trailer.”
—Habitat homeowner, on her life before her Habitat house
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 You can do something about it.
“We have the know-how in the world to house everyone. We have the resources in the world to house everyone. All that’s missing is the will to do it.”
—Millard Fuller, Habitat for Humanity founder and president
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| —Rebekah Graydon is assistant editor of Habitat World. |
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