Heather Larkin is an assistant professor in the school of social welfare at the State University of New York in Albany. She has done research on the impact that childhood neglect and abuse has had on homeless people in Albany and Petaluma, Calif.

Stephen Wizner is William O. Douglas Clinical Professor of Law and Supervising Attorney at Yale Law School in New Haven, Conn. One of his areas of expertise is poverty law, and he has participated in conferences on law and religion.

Aviva Luz Argote is executive director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

Project ORE serves emergency kosher meals and provides counseling, case management and other supportive services to isolated, poor, homeless, mentally ill, elderly Jews (including Holocaust survivors) in New York City. It is a program of the Educational Alliance.

David K. Shipler is the author of The Working Poor: Invisible in America. A journalist, he has been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has taught at Princeton University, American University in Washington, D.C., and Dartmouth College. He lives in Chevy Chase, Md. Contact through […]

Paul Polak is founder of Colorado-based nonprofit International Development Enterprises and author of Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail (2008). Contact through Carrie Barnes at ELISE Communications.

Operation Safety Net is a health care outreach program operated through the Pittsburgh Mercy Hospital System and Catholic Health East. It provides medical care to homeless people living on the streets of Pittsburgh and recognized as one of nation’s first, targeted, full-time street medicine programs. Dr. Jim Withers started the program in 1992.

Jason DeParle is a senior writer at The New York Times and the author of American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare.

Jeffrey Sachs is one of the foremost experts on the economics of poverty. He is director of the Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and professor of health policy and management at Columbia University. He is also special adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002-06, Sachs was director of the U.N. Millennium Project and special […]