Ruby Payne's Framework for Understanding Poverty is a good resource for building a working mental framework around common characteristics you see displayed by people, particularly students, living in generational poverty.
Amazon Book Description:
When viewed through an economic lens, poverty can be defined as an absence of resources. Since 1995, Framework's basic premise is that the middle-class understandings of those who work with children and adults in poverty are often ill-suited for connecting with and helping people build up resources and rise out of poverty. Now, 18 years and 1.5 million copies later, Framework: A Cognitive Approach has been revised, updated and expanded. The 5th edition features an enhanced chapter on instruction and achievement; greater emphasis on the thinking, community, and learning patterns involved in breaking out of poverty; plentiful citations, new case studies, and data: more details findings about interventions, resources, and causes of poverty, and a review of the outlook for people in poverty and those who work with them.
Buy it Here: https://amzn.to/2InfUiT
When Helping Hurts is a great read and one of the most informative books on the topic of poverty alleviation from a Christian perspective.
Amazon Book Description:
With more than 300,000 copies in print, When Helping Hurts is a paradigm-forming contemporary classic on the subject of poverty alleviation.
Poverty is much more than simply a lack of material resources, and it takes much more than donations and handouts to solve it. When Helping Hurts shows how some alleviation efforts, failing to consider the complexities of poverty, have actually (and unintentionally) done more harm than good.
But it looks ahead. It encourages us to see the dignity in everyone, to empower the materially poor, and to know that we are all uniquely needy—and that God in the gospel is reconciling all things to himself.
Focusing on both North American and Majority World contexts, When Helping Hurts provides proven strategies for effective poverty alleviation, catalyzing the idea that sustainable change comes not from the outside in, but from the inside out.
Buy it Here: https://amzn.to/2GojJm3
Toxic Charity is a book that will make you rethink the processes and procedures of your non-profit and every non-profit that you work with.
Amazon Book Description:
Veteran urban activist Robert Lupton reveals the shockingly toxic effects that modern charity has upon the very people meant to benefit from it. Toxic Charity provides proven new models for charitable groups who want to help—not sabotage—those whom they desire to serve. Lupton, the founder of FCS Urban Ministries (Focused Community Strategies) in Atlanta, the voice of the Urban Perspectives newsletter, and the author of Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life, has been at the forefront of urban ministry activism for forty years. Now, in the vein of Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty, Richard Stearns’s The Hole in Our Gospel, and Gregory Boyle’s Tattoos on the Heart, his groundbreaking Toxic Charity shows us how to start serving needy and impoverished members of our communities in a way that will lead to lasting, real-world change.
Buy it Here: https://amzn.to/2InPQnW
The End of Poverty is a massive book that looks at global poverty from a marcro-economic perspective and was written to influence World Leaders, particularly the World Bank, to enact new strategies to end poverty in developing countries.
Amazon Book Description:
The landmark exploration of economic prosperity and how the world can escape from extreme poverty for the world's poorest citizens, from one of the world's most renowned economists
Hailed by Time as one of the world's hundred most influential people, Jeffrey D. Sachs is renowned for his work around the globe advising economies in crisis. Now a classic of its genre, The End of Poverty distills more than thirty years of experience to offer a uniquely informed vision of the steps that can transform impoverished countries into prosperous ones. Marrying vivid storytelling with rigorous analysis, Sachs lays out a clear conceptual map of the world economy. Explaining his own work in Bolivia, Russia, India, China, and Africa, he offers an integrated set of solutions to the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that challenge the world's poorest countries.
Ten years after its initial publication, The End of Poverty remains an indispensible and influential work. In this 10th anniversary edition, Sachs presents an extensive new foreword assessing the progress of the past decade, the work that remains to be done, and how each of us can help. He also looks ahead across the next fifteen years to 2030, the United Nations' target date for ending extreme poverty, offering new insights and recommendations.
Buy it Here: https://amzn.to/2Ilfrls
Building a People of Power is a book that focuses on empowering those you are engaging and serving. The chapter on the Iron Rule is often referenced in our trainings and materials.
Amazon Book Description:
Jesus never intended the church to become an institution; he intended it to be a people of power, seeking to transform the world. Building A People of Power explores how God's people can exercise power in Godly ways so that God's kingdom can be built in their neighborhoods and cities. Built around a biblical exploration of shalom, Building a People of Power deals with how local churches can use power to transform their cities. Power is the capacity, ability, and willingness to act. Most people and systems use that power to dominate and control. But others have used it relationally in order to liberate, transform, and even save. How Jesus used power relationally is carefully explored. This book presents detailed power strategies that enable the church to build productive relationships, address the primary issues of the people, and develop strong leaders, faithful organizations, and redeemed neighborhoods that live out shalom.
Buy it Here: https://amzn.to/2In9MqW