A young activist's guide filled with real ways to make a difference Get motivated to stand against poverty and hunger in your community and the world with this introduction to non-violent activism. Young activists: follow the practical and effective methods in this book, and help mobilise others to take care of the poorest and most marginalised people now! This highly topical series informs and educates young people on key social issues in the world today. Vibrant and clearly designed content will inspire the next generation to take peaceful action now. With knowledge and passion in their corner, young people can change the world!

Poverty and hunger look different around the world. In the United States, poverty can include people living on the streets as well as those who have low-paying jobs and receive formal government assistance. In other parts of the world, those living in poverty may only have a shack and no available jobs. Poor living conditions and not having enough to eat cause deaths every day. What can young people do about it? This set not only introduces the problems associated with poverty and hunger in an age-appropriate way, but also gives readers tips to standing against poverty and hunger in their communities.

Our Day to End Poverty invites us to look at the twenty-four hours in our very ordinary days and to begin to think about poverty in new and creative ways. The authors offer scores of simple actions anyone can take to help eradicate poverty. Each chapter takes a task we undertake during a typical day and relates it to what we can do to ease the world's suffering. We begin by eating breakfast, so the first chapter focuses on alleviating world hunger. We take the kids to school--what can we do to help make education affordable to all? In the afternoon we check our email--how can we ensure the access to technology that is such an important route out of poverty? The chapters are short and pithy, full of specific facts, resources for learning more, and menus of simple, often fun, and always practical action steps. Anne Frank wrote, "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." Let's get started. It is our day to end poverty.

Over 800 million people suffer from chronic hunger, and over ten million children die each year from preventable causes. These may seem like overwhelming statistics, but as Stephen Smith shows in this call to arms, global poverty is something that we can and should solve within our lifetimes. Ending Global Poverty explores the various traps that keep people mired in poverty, traps like poor nutrition, illiteracy, lack of access to health care, and others and presents eight keys to escaping these traps. Smith gives readers the tools they need to help people overcome poverty and to determine what approaches are most effective in fighting it. For example, celebrities in commercials who encourage viewers to "adopt" a poor child really seem to care, but will sending money to these organizations do the most good? Smith explains how to make an informed decision. Grass-roots programs and organizations are helping people gain the capabilities they need to escape from poverty and this book highlights many of the most promising of these strategies in some of the poorest countries in the world, explaining what they do and what makes them effective.

When Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil's Workers' Party soared to power in 2003, he promised to end hunger in the nation. In a vivid ethnography with an innovative approach to Brazilian politics, Aaron Ansell assesses President Lula's flagship antipoverty program, Zero Hunger (Fome Zero), focusing on its rollout among agricultural workers in the poor northeastern state of Piaui. Linking the administration's fight against poverty to a more subtle effort to change the region's political culture, Ansell rethinks the nature of patronage and provides a novel perspective on the state under Workers' Party rule. Aiming to strengthen democratic processes, frontline officials attempted to dismantle the long-standing patron-client relationships--Ansell identifies them as "intimate hierarchies--that bound poor people to local elites. Illuminating the symbolic techniques by which officials attempted to influence Zero Hunger beneficiaries' attitudes toward power, class, history, and ethnic identity, Ansell shows how the assault on patronage increased political awareness but also confused and alienated the program's participants. He suggests that, instead of condemning patronage, policymakers should harness the emotional energy of intimate hierarchies to better facilitate the participation of all citizens in political and economic development.

How to focus anti-hunger efforts not on charity but on the root causes of food insecurity, improving public health, and reducing income inequality. Food banks and food pantries have proliferated in response to an economic emergency. The loss of manufacturing jobs combined with the recession of the early 1980s and Reagan administration cutbacks in federal programs led to an explosion in the growth of food charity. This was meant to be a stopgap measure, but the jobs never came back, and the “emergency food system” became an industry. In Big Hunger, Andrew Fisher takes a critical look at the business of hunger and offers a new vision for the anti-hunger movement. From one perspective, anti-hunger leaders have been extraordinarily effective. Food charity is embedded in American civil society, and federal food programs have remained intact while other anti-poverty programs have been eliminated or slashed. But anti-hunger advocates are missing an essential element of the problem: economic inequality driven by low wages. Reliant on corporate donations of food and money, anti-hunger organizations have failed to hold business accountable for offshoring jobs, cutting benefits, exploiting workers and rural communities, and resisting wage increases. They have become part of a “hunger industrial complex” that seems as self-perpetuating as the more famous military-industrial complex. Fisher lays out a vision that encompasses a broader definition of hunger characterized by a focus on public health, economic justice, and economic democracy. He points to the work of numerous grassroots organizations that are leading the way in these fields as models for the rest of the anti-hunger sector. It is only through approaches like these that we can hope to end hunger, not just manage it.