Fast Company, July 31, 2019: Amplifying the voices America’s poor to change the conversation about U.S. policy
These are the numbers: Around 40 million people live in poverty in the U.S., and at least 550,000 are homeless. An estimated one in seven people in the country will struggle with substance addiction.
A simple Google search will let you find these statistics. They’re readily available, should anyone who writes about poverty in the U.S. need to reference them. But what the numbers don’t tell you is anything about the reality of the circumstances they measure.
The conversation around inequality and hardship in the U.S. has evolved and broadened in recent years—especially since the 2016 election—and with it, so has media coverage of these issues. But what’s still lacking, says Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, are the voices that inhabit inside these statistics.
