This article examines Israeli juvenile courts as sites where poverty is present yet systematically denied as a cause of child neglect. Drawing on focused ethnographic observations, I show how factual reports routinely document material deprivation—housing shortages, lack of food, utilities cutoffs—yet court actors reject poverty as a legitimate explanation for neglect. Instead, they insist that “good parents” should be able to cope with scarcity, thereby displacing structural conditions onto individualized parental failure. I frame this configuration as part of “criministrative law”: an administrative forum that adopts criminal-style rituals of blame and correction while deferring to welfare agencies, leaving families without the protections of either criminal or administrative law. This criministrative denial of poverty produces epistemic marginalization of parents and legitimates punitive interventions. As a normative remedy, I propose adapting the poverty-aware paradigm from social work to law, reframing protection as solidarity rather than surveillance.

This article examines whether social investment (SI) stock (education), flow (family support), and buffer (safety net) policy functions reduce poverty risk across age groups and family types. To contribute to the discussion on SI’s capability to promote the livelihoods of the vulnerable groups in society, this research focuses on the poverty risk of young adults and single mothers in the twenty-first-century Germany. Logistic regression analysis with longitudinal German Socio-Economic Panel (G-SOEP) micro data matched with various policy indicators shows that the policy functions reduce poverty risk among working age men and women more than disadvantaged young adults. The results demonstrate that flow and stock functions reinforce each other’s poverty-alleviating impact if social protection buffers are weak, more so among young women than men. Further, all SI policy functions are found to alleviate the high poverty risk of single mothers, but poverty-reducing policy complementarities take place only if family support is strong.

Drawing upon a large longitudinal qualitative study on lived experiences of food aid in England, we question contemporary academic and policy categorisations and portrayals of food aid. Contrary to ideas of a diverse food aid sector offering choice and dignity, we identify clear uniformity in the language participants use to describe different forms of food charity; any organisation which offers food for free or at very low cost to take away is predominantly described as a ‘food bank’. Simultaneously, however, we find marked inequalities in lived experiences of food charity by gender, age and race and ethnicity, and clear indications that demographically oriented exclusion is ever-present in food aid. We argue that the key fault line shaping lived experiences of the UK community food sector is not the ‘type’ of provision but demography (age, gender and parenthood, race and ethnicity) and yet inequalities remain broadly ignored in discussions of UK food aid. In doing so, we provide a critical contribution to scholarship on the changing nature of welfare pluralism and the lived experience of poverty today.

The relationship between social innovation venture and poor communities has received little attention from studies in the area of social innovation. In order to clarify this relationship, our study seeks to answer: What strategies would help to bring social innovation ventures closer to poor communities? We developed an empirical and qualitative research in a social innovation venture and two poor beneficiary communities in Brazil. The results indicate that the proximity between those agents was based on five main items: (a) reputation of the social venture; (b) appropriate prices according to the community’s reality; (c) close relations with the community; (d) structure proximity; and (e) winning the community leadership’s trust. Thus, our study contributes to the literature by exploring the beneficiary communities and their relationship with social innovation ventures. In addition, we suggest the use of the term “social innovation venture” to designate a wide range of types of organizations willing to generate social innovation in the practical field.

This lecture addresses the political impact of the Great Recession in a context of rising inequalities and retrenching welfare states. Do hard times fuel apathy or revolt, abstention or support for the extremes, and more particularly, in the European context, for thriving radical rights? To answer these questions, I shall take the case of France, in the 2012 presidential election, the first post-crisis one. I shall focus on the poor, the disadvantaged: those hardest hit by the recession.

During the year 2005 many organizations took part in Poverty Zero, a campaign that aims to reach the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals for 2015. Based on participant observation and open ended interviews, this paper describes the origins, development, and evaluation of Poverty Zero in Andalusia (Spain). It examines, by means of ethnography, how DNGOs (Development Nongovernmental Organizations) create social movement networks, and explores the limits and possibilities of their advocacy activities. The paper concludes that DNGOs tend to generate centralized social movements with reduced questioning of the global system. Nevertheless, as shown in the case of the Andalusian Alliance against Poverty, the more decentralized a movement, the deeper its transformational potential.

The groups deliberately formed by nongovernmental organizations to organize the poor for their development are often subgrouped for better performance. In this connection, the study investigates the extent subgroups contribute to group performance, the mechanisms that lead to the contribution of subgroups to group performance, and changes in the contribution of subgroups to the performance of a group. Altogether 239 Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee groups, i.e., village organizations (VOs), with and without subgroups were investigated. The VOs with subgroups performed better than those without subgroups. The performance of the VOs with subgroups, however, declined over time. One of the reasons why effectiveness of VOs with subgroups declined was the belief that pursuing subgroup responsibilities would not bring any personal gain for members.

The emergence of new types and new levels of poverty in Sweden has spurred civil society organizations to take a more active role in domestic relief work. Their work is not least directed toward groups of poor with limited access to public welfare in Sweden, in most cases because they are not Swedish citizens. The arrival of groups like the vulnerable EU citizens and undocumented refugees has created a situation where civil society provides emergency relief for groups not eligible for long-term relief from the public sector. A new division of responsibility between civil society and the public sector is therefore being formed, and this division can be explained in terms of rights; the aid organizations are guided by the principles of human rights, while the public sector functions primarily according to social citizenship rights. This article documents the work of the Swedish City Missions, a large aid organization that has become an important actor in poverty relief work in Sweden. A never before conducted survey of 137,000 interventions performed by the Swedish City Missions gives an entirely new insight into the significance of civil society organizations in combating new and old types of poverty in Sweden. Which groups receive which types of aid and what does that tell us about the roles of civil society and the public sector in a rights perspective? The findings show that civil society organizations like the City Missions play a far from marginal role in the Swedish welfare state.

In the United States, neoliberal strategies for social, economic, and state organization have been accompanied by frequent calls for volunteers to solve serious social problems. A case study of a community mobilization of middle-class volunteers to provide one-on-one support to families in poverty shows both possibilities and limitations. Volunteers provide social support to families in poverty, thus alleviating social isolation. Volunteers learn about systemic forces that cause poverty, its effects on families and communities, and about themselves and their capacities to engage in poverty work. However, social isolation is but one of many problems associated with poverty, and even a more knowledgeable amateur volunteer corps cannot take the place of substantial social, economic, and political change.

We examine the likelihood of collaboration between NGOs and business in persistent intense social contexts. Using social capital theory and the institutional void literature, we argue that an NGO’s stakeholder relations act as a valuable resource in the formation of the organization’s social capital and raise its potential value as a legitimate business partner relative to NGOs with weak or few relations. These relations, however, are moderated by the persistent intense social context in which the NGO finds itself. Using Mexican data, we find that the positive relationship between stakeholder interactions and the likelihood of NGO–business collaboration is weakened by greater poverty (ties are more difficult to establish) and strengthened by corruption (ties provide a trust signal).

As an institution that often seeks to redress global inequality and poverty, philanthropy is commonly dismissed as either masking structural causes, an insufficient response, or a contribution to the problem itself. Either way, philanthropy is increasingly labelled as philanthro-capitalism because it serves the interest of capital. But what about philanthropy that engages, seeks to transcend, and tries to provide alternatives to the status quo? Such philanthropies have been highlighted in the literature, but their radical foundations could be further clarified. In seeking to do so, this article (a) engages a radical theory of poverty, (b) teases out key principles of radical philanthropy, and (c) critically highlights the need to consider radical philanthropy as an alternative to philanthro-capitalism. Radical philanthropy is quite distinct and, while it can be unrealistic for individual foundations to embody all its principles, as a collective, they can be considered as one important and concrete contribution towards realising the aphorism, popularised by the World Social Forum, that ‘another world is possible’.