Spotlights
Nichol on WUNC with Frank Stasio!
On June 4, Gene Nichol
spoke with Frank Stasio at WUNC about poverty in North Carolina along
with Tazra Mitchell of the NC Budget and Tax Center at the NC Justice
Center and Carl Rist of the Durham Peoples Alliance. The podcast highlighted that evening's screening of American Winter, a documentary which follows eight impoverished
families struggling with unemployment, hunger, the inability to meet their basic needs including paying for water and electricity, foreclosure, a lack of medical insurance and mounting medical bills. Listen to the podcast on WUNC.
Seeing the Invisible: Yearlong News & Observer
Series Published
This year, Director Gene Nichol of the UNC Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity will write a monthly column, Seeing the Invisible, about poverty in North Carolina to be published in the News & Observer on the last Sunday of each month.
We hope you will join us in this examination of the faces and issues of poverty in our state.
- Introduction: In NC, poverty pervades as we evade, January 27.
- Second article: What are we doing for the least of these?, February 24.
- Third article: Shocking burden of $800 light bills, March 30.
- Subsequent article and opinion piece by the N&O on high electrical bills.
- State Senators Buck Newton and Angela Bryant are co-sponsors of Senate Bill 720, introduced April 2, that would require the agency that provides electricity to many towns in eastern NC to negotiate with Duke Energy to transfer or sell its ownership interest in five electricity-generating plants. The debt incurred in purchasing this interest is one of the reasons that some residents of eastern NC face outrageously large electricity bills.
- Fourth article: Full of courage, smarts, yet facing empty future, April 27.
- Fifth article: Digging into NC districts, desperation easy to find, May 25.
Truth and Hope Poverty Tour in North Carolina
The Truth and Hope Poverty Tour will be a continuing project of the Poverty Center. For more information, please visit the Poverty Tour section of our website.
View the Poverty Tour documentary, "Truth and Hope: The Challenge to Address Poverty in Our Communities," produced by Cash Michaels, to learn more about the Poverty Tour's travels - over 2,000 miles and to 27 communities in North Carolina since it began in January.
Mission
The UNC Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity is a non-partisan, interdisciplinary institute designed to study, examine, document, and advocate for proposals, policies and services to mitigate poverty in North Carolina and the nation.
The Center has four goals:
- To address the pressing needs of those currently living at or below the poverty level in North Carolina
- To provide an interdisciplinary forum to examine innovative and practical ideas to move more men, women and children out of poverty
- To raise public awareness of issues related to work and poverty
- To train a new generation to combat the causes and effects of poverty and to improve the circumstances of working people