Solving Poverty
Innovative Strategies from Winnipeg’s Inner City
In Solving Poverty, Jim Silver, a veteran scholar actively engaged in anti-poverty efforts in Winnipeg’s inner city for decades, offers an on-the-ground analysis of this form of poverty.
About the book
Poverty in Canada’s inner cities is deep, complex, racialized and often intergenerational. In this collection of essays published over the past decade, Jim Silver argues that urban poverty today includes not only low incomes, but in all too many cases also poor housing, poor health, low educational achievement, high levels of neighbourhood violence, racism, colonialism and social exclusion. As a result many poor people experience low levels of self-esteem and self-confidence and may blame themselves, which is reinforced by the dominant blame-the-victim discourse about poverty. Silver argues that today’s urban poverty is qualitatively different than the urban poverty of forty years ago, and that there are no quick, easy or one-dimensional solutions.
In Solving Poverty, Jim Silver, a veteran scholar actively engaged in anti-poverty efforts in Winnipeg’s inner city for decades, offers an on-the-ground analysis of this form of poverty. Silver focuses particularly on the urban Aboriginal experience, and describes a variety of creative and effective urban Aboriginal community development initiatives, as well as other anti-poverty initiatives that have been successful in Winnipeg’s inner city. In the concluding chapter Silver offers a comprehensive, pan-Canadian strategy to dramatically reduce the incidence of urban poverty in Canada.
Author
Contents
- Introduction: Complex Urban Poverty and the Case of Winnipeg’s Inner City
- Part A: Complex Poverty
- Segregated City: A Century of Poverty in Winnipeg
- Chronic! A History of Low-Income Housing in Winnipeg
- The Trouble with Normal: Situating Aboriginal Street Gangs in the Colonial Context (Elizabeth Comack, Lawrence Deane, Larry Morrissette & Jim Silver)
- Complex Poverty: More Than Low Incomes (Jim Silver)
- Part B: Poverty Solutions
- Thirty Years of Hard-Earned Lessons: Combatting Poverty in Winnipeg’s Inner City, 1960s-1990s (Jim Silver & Owen Toews)
- Practical Activism in a Complex Environment: Neighbourhood Renewal Corporations in Winnipeg’s Inner City (Jim Silver, Molly McCracken and Kate Sjoberg)
- “The Tools You Need to Discover Who You Are”: Aboriginal Learners in Adult Learning Centres in Winnipeg (Jim Silver, Darlene Klyne & Freeman Simard)
- Sharing, Community and Decolonization: Urban Aboriginal Community Development (Jim Silver, Parvin Ghorayshi, Joan Hay & Darlene Klyne)
- Unearthing Resistance: Aboriginal Women in the Lord Selkirk Park (Jim Silver)
- A Good Place to Live: Transforming Public Housing in Lord Selkirk Park (Jim Silver, Janice Goodman, Cheyenne Henry & Carolyn Young)
- Solutions that Work: How We Can Defeat Poverty (Jim Silver)
- References
