United States

Three-year-old Saria Amaya waits with her mother after receiving shoes and school supplies during a charity event in October to help more than 4,000 underprivileged children at the Fred Jordan Mission in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles. Children from low-income families now make up a majority of public school students in the nation, according to a new report. (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty

by Lyndsey Layton Washington Post January 16, 2015

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-k...

This powerful Reddit thread reveals how the poor get by in America

by Max Ehrenfreund Washington Post January 15, 2015

The poor pay more for everything, from rolls of toilet paper to furniture. It's not because they're spendthrifts, either. If you're denied a checking account, there's no way for you to avoid paying a fee to cash a paycheck. If you need to buy a car to get to work, you'll have to accept whatever high...

Most of America’s rich think the poor have it easy

by Roberto A. Ferdman Washington Post January 8, 2015

Most of America's richest think poor people have it easy in this country, according to a new report released by the Pew Research Center. The center surveyed a nationally representative group of people this past fall, and found that the majority of the country's most financially secure citizens (54 p...

So, you have a minimum wage job. Now what? For many, moving beyond the first rung is the hard part.

by Lydia DePillis Washington Post January 1, 2015

Every few months, at a community center in Adams Morgan, about 100 people gather for a celebration. They hold hands in a circle, hear a blessing, and then listen as the good news pours forth....

A provision in the federal spending bill prohibits lowering salt limits for school lunches. Photo: Nabil K. Mark/Centre Daily Times, via Associated Press

2015: The year Republicans strike back at Obama food policies

by Jenny Hopkinson, Helena Bottemiller Evich, Bill Tomson and Chase Purdy Politico January 1, 2015

The Obama administration is becoming increasingly involved in what Americans put on their dinner plates and in their cereal bowls, from requiring school children to be served fruit to eliminating trans fats in doughnuts. But the new Republican Congress is already laying the groundwork to push back i...

(MERCED, CA) Vidal Cota is an immigrant farm worker from Los Mochis, Sinaloa. He cleans the plastic tubes used for drip irrigation from a watermelon field, after the melons have been harvested. Photo: David Bacon

Hard winter for California farm workers

by David Bacon New American Media December 22, 2014

In October in California's farmworker towns, unemployment rates begin to rise when the harvests end. In Coachella, not far from the wealth of Palm Springs, one of every eight workers has no job. In Delano, where the United Farm Workers was born in the grape strike 50 years ago, it's one of every fou...

The college trap that keeps people poor (Series)

by Jim Tankersley Washington Post December 16, 2014

FORT WORTH — Chelsey Stone had already escaped so many of the traps that keep poor children in poverty for life. She recalls begging neighbors for dinner when her mother sold their food stamps for drug money. She slept on the trampoline outside when the heroin showed up and her mom locked the door...

Ed Green clears a foggy windshield at the beginning of his shift with the North Carolina Department of Transportation in Winston-Salem. Green works several jobs but still doesn’t earn as much as he used to as a bus driver in New York. Photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/Washington Post

The devalued American worker

by Jim Tankersley Washington Post December 15, 2014

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Midway through the last game of the 2013 Carolina League season, after he’d swept peanut shells and mopped soda off the concourse, Ed Green lumbered upstairs to the box seats to dump the garbage. ...

Congress to nutritionists: Don’t talk about the environment

by Dan Charles National Public Radio December 15, 2014

A government-appointed group of top nutrition experts, assigned to lay the scientific groundwork for a new version of the nation's dietary guidelines, decided earlier this year to collect data on the environmental implication of different food choices....

Why America’s middle class is lost

by Jim Tankersley Washington Post December 14, 2014

DOWNEY, CALIF. — One day in 1967, Bob Thompson sprayed foam on a hunk of metal in a cavernous factory south of Los Angeles. And then another day, not too long after, he sat at a long wood bar with a black-and-white television hanging over it, and he watched that hunk of metal land a man on the moo...

  • World Hunger Education
    Service
    P.O. Box 29015
    Washington, D.C. 20017
  • For the past 50 years, since its founding in 1976, the mission of World Hunger Education Service is to undertake programs, including Hunger Notes, that
    • Educate the general public and target groups about the extent and causes of hunger and malnutrition in the United States and the world
    • Advance comprehension which integrates ethical, religious, social, economic, political, and scientific perspectives on the world food problem
    • Facilitate communication and networking among those who are working for solutions
    • Promote individual and collective commitments to sustainable hunger solutions.