The Moral Challenges of Poverty and Inequality

The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, in collaboration with the UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, is sponsoring a project on The Moral Challenges of Poverty and Inequality. The goals of the project are threefold:

• to raise awareness and a sense of urgency among the public about the ongoing prevalence of poverty and inequality in North Carolina;
• to analyze competing ethical principles and their resulting policy prescriptions; and
• to educate future leaders about the human and economic costs of poverty and the moral challenge it poses in a democracy.

The first year of this three-year project will feature a faculty colloquium on the moral challenges of poverty and a laboratory on poverty, ethics and policy, led by Poverty Center board member James Leloudis and Duke faculty member Robert Korstad.

Leloudis and Korstad are the co-authors of "To Right These Wrongs," a book on the short-lived but influential North Carolina Fund.

The NC Fund was a groundbreaking public-private partnership, created by far-sighted state leaders in 1963. Controversial in its decision to deploy interracial teams of male and female college students and, later, its support of grassroots anti-poverty initiatives that challenged the local status quo, the NC Fund was relatively short-lived. However, it inspired a generation of activists, trained groups across the state and created an extensive network of grassroots organizations, many of which continue to operate throughout the state today.

The book's website is a rich source of information about the NC Fund, including a marvelous collection of photographs and video, as well as poverty generally.