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The highest rates of multidimensional poverty are found in Southern and Western metro areas like Memphis, Birmingham, and Miami, where more than 1 in 5 low-income adults live with multiple disadvantages. The McAllen region exhibits the highest rate of multidimensional poverty overall (41 percent), followed by metropolitan Fresno, where one-third of adults are at least doubly disadvantaged. In each of the regions mentioned, living in a poor area is the most likely additional disadvantage experienced by low-income residents. But in other metro areas with above-average multidimensional poverty rates, different disadvantages come to the fore, like limited education in Stockton, lack of health insurance in Deltona, and lack of employment in Lakeland (see the interactive bar charts below, or the full appendix tables).

At IDEO.org, we believe that the most potent weapon against global poverty is design. The solutions, systems, and social innovation that arise from truly understanding and designing alongside the poor are the most likely to offer hope and improve lives. And for us, if we can't see real impact, we haven't done our jobs.   Born in 2011 out of the global design and innovation firm IDEO, IDEO.org is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to applying human-centered design to alleviate poverty. We partner with nonprofit organizations, social enterprises, and foundations, to directly address the needs of the poor in sectors like health, water and sanitation, financial inclusion, agriculture, and gender equity. We employ top-notch designers, an elite class of businesspeople, and development experts, making IDEO.org a flexible and creative organization uniquely situated to tackle poverty through design.   A key pillar of our mission is to spread human-centered design. Though we believe that our design process is crucial to arriving at innovative solutions, we don't think that we're the only ones who should be using it. We want everyone on board. By sharing, teaching, and empowering social-sector workers to practice human-centered design, we're elevating design as a poverty-fighting tool.   We work at home and abroad, on our own projects and promoting and supporting the work of others, spreading the practice and promise of human-centered design. IDEO.org is dedicated innovation, great design, and changing lives

The problem of poverty More than 46 million Americans live below the official poverty line-which is now approximately $22,314 for a family of four-and 16.4 million children are poor in this country. Inequality of wealth has reached record highs-it is greater than at any time since 1929. Growing portions of the nation's wealth are concentrated in the possession of a small fraction of households, while more than one third of the U.S. population is trying to get by on incomes less than 200 percent of the federal poverty line-or about $44,000 for a family of four. Well before the current economic crisis, 6 million low-income households were paying more than half their income on rent and utilities, or lived in severely substandard housing. And the most recent data for 2010 revealed that 48.8 million people, including 16.2 million children, lived in a household struggling against hunger.

Poverty is about a lack of money, but it's not only about that. As a lived experience, poverty is also characterized by ill health, insecurity, discomfort, isolation, and more. To put it another way: Poverty is multidimensional, and its dimensions often cluster together to intensify the negative effects of being poor.

"I cannot overemphasize the importance of this fundamental flaw in poverty policy, i.e., the assumption that there is an ample supply of perfectly good jobs out there that poor people could tap if they just wanted to do so. To this day, this misguided notion underlies the conservative policy agenda that views anti-poverty policy as a narcotic that weans people away from the jobs awaiting them. Kill the programs, and they'll get out of their hammocks (Rep. Paul Ryan's term for the safety net) and get to work."

"The classic example of that backward intuition was my own introduction to systems analysis, the world model. Asked by the Club of Rome to show how major global problems - poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment - are related and how they might be solved, Forrester made a computer model and came out with a clear leverage point1: Growth. Not only population growth, but economic growth. Growth has costs as well as benefits, and we typically don't count the costs - among which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, etc. - the whole list of problems we are trying to solve with growth! What is needed is much slower growth, much different kinds of growth, and in some cases no growth or negative growth."

"We need to ratchet up from targeted innovation and apply design-thinking principles to one of the biggest social issues of our time: global poverty itself. "

In 2011, the suburban poor outnumbered the urban poor by three million; from 2000 to 2011, the number of poor people soared by 64 percent in the suburbs, compared with 29 percent in cities. Today nearly one-third of all Americans are poor or nearly poor. One in three poor Americans live in the suburbs. If you're poor in the Seattle, Atlanta or Chicago regions, you're more likely than not living outside the city limits.

"Rio+20" is the short name for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development to take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 2012 - twenty years after the landmark 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. Rio+20 is also an opportunity to look ahead to the world we want in 20 years. At the Rio+20 Conference, world leaders, along with thousands of participants from the private sector, NGOs and other groups, will come together to shape how we can reduce poverty, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection on an ever more crowded planet.

Founded in 2001, Tamarack is a charity that develops and supports learning communities to help people collaborate and to co-generate knowledge that solves complex community challenges. Our deep hope is to end poverty in Canada.

Appropedia is the site to develop and share collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development through the use of sound principles and appropriate technology, original research and project information.

Everyone knows about the big global challenges like economic instability, loss of nature, poverty, waste, conflict and climate disruption. Even after decades of efforts these monstrous problems are not being tackled so much as tickled! Many of these problems are getting out of hand yet even now the possibility of rapidly reversing all of them is within our grasp. This goal looks unrealistic to many people, given the struggle for meaningful change so far. Yet this is the key; the scale of our ambitions must match the scale of the problems as a whole. This is society's blindspot - see this and civilisation gets the chance to go on. This article is the introduction to an 'advanced research workshop' paper, Seven Policy Switches for Global Security, for the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme

There are shocking statistics aplenty. Here is one: in 1995, the average house in London cost around four times the average salary. Today, it costs 12 times the average salary. In Europe, there are only two major cities-Athens and Manchester-where more than half the residents think housing is affordable. Expensive housing means less money in your pocket, a longer commute from further away, a constant pressure pushing the standard of living down towards mere subsistence. And for cities, it means the emergence of financially defined ghettos, where previously diverse neighborhoods become inhabited solely by the rich. At its worst, this becomes the Paris problem: a rich but sterile center encircled by a ring of poverty and disadvantage that nurtures terrorism and can explode into appalling violence.

We unite entrepreneurs with the potential to address major problems at scale. Problems like poverty, lack of education, and access to clean water. We then swarm them with hand-picked mentors, funders, and a global network to help grow their impact. Our goal? For each venture to impact 1,000,000 people.

We are a nonpartisan research and policy institute. We pursue federal and state policies designed both to reduce poverty and inequality and to restore fiscal responsibility in equitable and effective ways. We apply our deep expertise in budget and tax issues and in programs and policies that help low-income people, in order to help inform debates and achieve better policy outcomes.

Using everything from modern technologies like the web and social media to traditional grassroots communication we intend to reach people on a worldwide scale. We will ask everyone, at every level of society, to submit their visions for a positive future. From solutions addressing poverty and injustice to strategies for creating sustainable and environmentally responsible communities, we will gather ideas internationally. But we won't stop here.

The California Endowment was established in 1996 as a result of Blue Cross of California's creation of its for-profit subsidiary, WellPoint Health Networks. Since then, we've invested in health broadly, from strengthening the safety net for families struggling with poverty to diversifying the health care workforce. The lessons learned from early investments were the genesis for Health Happens Here and the 10-year, $1 billion Building Healthy Communities plan, in which residents in 14 places are working to transform their neighborhoods

Systemic change needs more than data and information; it needs real intelligence and wisdom. Jay Forrester, the founder of the system dynamics method that has shaped our approach to systems thinking, pointed out that complex non-linear systems exhibit "counterintuitive behavior." He illustrated this by citing the large number of government interventions that go awry through aiming at short-term improvement in measurable problem symptoms but ultimately worsening the underlying problems-like increased urban policing that leads to short-term reductions in crime rates but does nothing to alter the sources of embedded poverty and worsens long-term incarceration rates.

This Hamilton Project policy paper provides a dozen facts on struggling lower-middle-class families focusing on two key challenges: food insecurity, and the low return to work for struggling lower-middle-class families who lose tax and transfer benefits as their earnings increase. These facts highlight the critical role of federal tax and transfer programs in providing income support to families struggling to remain out of poverty.

he charity's purpose is to relieve poverty by encouraging accountable leadership and entrepreneurism in communities. Regenerate listens, promotes and reflects on activities that invigorate any community. New businesses and innovative social projects have already resulted from the charity's work. Regenerate encourages politicians and organisations to trust, respect, and lead with the people.