10th Grade Extended Research Project (ERP): 1 - No Poverty

Examines and provides real-life accounts of urban poor families living in Mumbai, India.

Annawadi is a settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are filled with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees a fortune beyond counting in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal.

Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond examines the fates of eight families struggling to pay their rent and keep a roof over their heads in the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The book discusses the human cost of America's vast inequality, while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America's most devastating problems. AVAILABLE: Kitsap Regional Library, Port Townsend Library, and Ms. Garvin's classroom

The Blue Sweater is the story of a woman who left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it. It all started back home in Virginia, with the blue sweater, a gift that quickly became her prized possession-until the day she outgrew it and gave it away to Goodwill. Eleven years later in Africa, she spotted a young boy wearing that very sweater, with her name still on the tag inside. That the sweater had made its trek all the way to Rwanda was ample evidence, she thought, of how we are all connected, how our actions-and inaction-touch people every day across the globe, people we may never know or meet. The author shows, in ways both humorous and heartbreaking, how traditional charity often fails, but how a new form of philanthropic investing called "patient capital" can help make people self-sufficient and can change millions of lives. Novogratz gives a call to action that challenges readers to grant dignity to the poor and to rethink our engagement with the world. AVAILABLE: WSA Library and Kitsap Regional Library

Polak (founder, International Development Enterprises) exposes and rejects the "Three great poverty eradication myths," namely, that donations alone, national economic growth, or Big Business (as it currently operates) will end poverty. He instead espouses a model that identifies market opportunities in high-value, labor-intensive cash crops for poor rural farmers and provides them with access to the tools they need. The first section of the book explores his own interest in eradicating poverty and describes the process he learned for finding creative solutions to major social problems. The second section describes the grass-roots approach to ending poverty in rural areas; a brief third section applies the principles to the poor in urban areas. The final section addresses the role poverty plays in environmental problems, and describes what donors, institutions, and governments can do to end poverty. As much time is devoted to one family throughout this book, the closing chapter addresses how one man in Nepal brought his family from poverty to the upper-middle class by the principles described in this book. AVAILABLE: WSA Library and Kitsap Regional Library

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life--like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition--Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.

Through Kimberly's story, author Jean Kwok, who also emigrated from Hong Kong as a young girl, brings to the page the lives of countless immigrants who are caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires, exposing a world that we rarely hear about. Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant-a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation. AVAILABLE: WSA Library, Kitsap Regional Library, and Port Townsend Library