James Abro
James Abro is the author of An Odyssey in the Great American Safety Net, a personal memoir of homelessness and recovery. He is the founder of Advocate for Economic Fairness and 32 Beach Productions. He works locally with faith-based Homeless Outreach groups, and nationally as an advocate for Homeless Rights. He is a regular contributor to Rebelle Society and TalkPoverty.
Articles by this author
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Views Friday, December 28, 2018 Bergen County Ended Chronic Homelessness, So Can Every Other Community When I signed up to attend a symposium on Ending Homelessness in Newark, New Jersey on November 25th of this year the best I was expecting to hear was a much needed morale boosting pep rally for those of us who have experienced homelessness and are working on the front lines of this seemingly... Read more |
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Views Friday, November 13, 2015 We Don’t Need to Wait on Congress to Fight Homelessness According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness , “On a single night in January 2014, 578,424 people were experiencing homelessness—meaning they were sleeping outside or in an emergency shelter or a transitional housing program.” It is clear from the numbers alone that in communities across... Read more |
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Views Saturday, May 23, 2015 Social Services: Listen to People Who Have Experienced Poverty In 2009, after caring for a terminally ill parent, I became homeless and destitute due to circumstances beyond my control. The Unites States Interagency Counsel on Homelessness provides funding to states for programs designed to create permanent housing situations for individuals and families in... Read more |
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Views Friday, March 13, 2015 Retaking the Moral High Ground in the Fight Against Poverty If a nation has the ways and means to solve a social problem that is devastating millions of its citizens’ lives, but it fails to act, doesn’t that mean resolving the problem depends more on moral values than on coming up with new economic policies? The social problem I am talking about is poverty... Read more |
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Views Thursday, February 12, 2015 The False Assumption: Everyone Wants to End Poverty The debate about income inequality and poverty in America is generally carried out with the underlying assumption that everyone wants to end poverty, and there are well-meaning though different approaches to doing so. But what if that’s not true? What if the assumption is false? Should we continue... Read more |
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Views Saturday, November 08, 2014 Money, Politics, and Poverty: Ready for a Paradigm Shift Give Directly has garnered a lot of attention lately for advocating and implementing a radical new approach to fighting poverty in Kenya and Uganda: unconditional cash transfers. The NGO simply targets places where there is extreme poverty and provides individuals with direct transfers of cash. In... Read more |
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Views Sunday, October 12, 2014 Poverty and Homelessness are Human and Civil Rights Issues In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolution. In it he defined and popularized the concept of “paradigm shift”. Kuhn argues that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but a “series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions”, and in those... Read more |