More than 250 Organizations Urge the House to Prioritize Children’s Safety in FY26 DHS Appropriations Vote
March 5, 2026
Rental Assistance Shortage Leaves 700,000 Veterans Homeless or Struggling to Afford Housing
CHN Staff,
November 8, 2019
As Veterans Day approaches, hundreds of thousands of veterans struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Some 38,000 veterans were homeless on a single night in January 2018, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates. Moreover, 666,000 veterans lived in low-income households that paid more than half of their income for rent and utilities in 2017, Census data show. Low-income people with such high housing costs — what HUD calls “severe cost burdens” — often must skimp on items like food or clothing to pay for rent and utilities. They also face a growing risk of utility cutoffs, eviction, and homelessness as bills pile up.
When fighting poverty, listen to the impoverished
James Abro,
November 7, 2019
Last month the United Nations invited Ashana Bullet and Eduardo Simas to speak at a conference entitled “Perspectives on Poverty.” Bullet and Simsas are both members of ATD Fourth World, an international non-profit organization dedicated to finding and eradicating the root causes of poverty. Bullet is a lifelong resident of New Orleans; Simas owns and manages a farm in rural Brazil. Their message: when fighting poverty, listen to the impoverished.
Moving Backward: Efforts to Strike Down the Affordable Care Act Put Millions of Women and Girls at Risk
CHN Staff,
November 5, 2019
The fate of the Affordable Care Act is once again at stake, pending a decision from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the health care repeal lawsuit known as Texas v. United States. Texas and 17 other states—with support from the Trump administration—are challenging the ACA’s constitutionality. If the court rules to strike down the entire ACA, there will be devastating consequences for everyone; but these negative outcomes will be most pronounced for the millions of women with preexisting conditions and, in particular, for women of color and women with low incomes, whose health and economic security would be most at risk.
Homelessness in Caricature: How Empathy Can Help Us to Understand Homelessness as both the Result and Cause of Crisis
Thomas Leonetti,
October 31, 2019
In America, when we think of homeless people, we think of a man in tattered clothes, maybe with a sign, standing on a street corner or slumped beside a building. We think of shopping carts and dirty faces, people who sleep under overpasses. The reality is, there isn’t one stock image of a homeless person, one template that they all follow. These caricatures allow the general American public to feel that homelessness is not their problem, or not a worry they might ever face.
Coming to America: The Story of Rosalie
Lear Burton,
October 30, 2019
Rosalie was born and raised in a shantytown in the Philippines. From a young age she had her eyes set on attending nursing school, something that would equip her with the skills to escape poverty. Beating the odds, she struggled through nursing school, working her way through jobs in the Middle East. Eventually a Texas hospital would fulfill her dreams with a job offer in the United States. Rosalie’s story is documented in the recently published book A Good Provider is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century, written by Jason DeParle.
