Fighting for kids has been my lifelong mission. Right out of high school, I went to work at a camp that served disadvantaged adolescents. When I became a recreation therapist, I worked with children battling severe mental illness.

Providing great schooling is the single most important thing we can do to help any child from a disadvantaged background succeed. It's also the single most important thing we can do to boost the long-term productivity of our economy.

In financial affairs and dealings with the state, those in the precariat are disadvantaged since they are usually less well-informed and have to do much more to satisfy demands made on them if they want to gain meagre state benefits.

I feel Dress for Success is basically about empowering women who were in a disadvantaged situation. The act of wearing a suit when she's walking in the door, it's so powerful - it's about gaining control of their lives and situations.

Originally created to serve the poorest and sickest among us, the Medicaid program has grown dramatically but still doesn't include the kind of flexibility that states need to provide better health care for the poor and disadvantaged.

The whole idea behind the EB-5 visa was to help create jobs in economically disadvantaged areas. But where big bucks are involved, corruption soon follows, and with Chuck Schumer and the EB-5 visa program, you need to follow the money.

There are so many people and organisations that work quietly and diligently for the poor and the disadvantaged. We should also work with unity and purpose to ensure that the benefits of government policies reach all sections of society.

Students from disadvantaged backgrounds will have the most debt, and then, being less likely than their affluent peers to go straight into high paying jobs, they will spend most of their working lives trying but failing to pay off that debt.

The Time to Succeed Coalition brings together an unprecedented group of leaders from education and business, communities and academia to say that it is time to strike the shackles of an outdated school calendar from our disadvantaged schools.

While at Harvard, I was struck by the palpable sense of noblesse oblige that surrounds their sophisticated outreach and bursary programmes. It is almost as if they view extending opportunity to disadvantaged individuals as their highest mission.

You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.

People with advantages don't tend to want to give them up. If you see it as a zero-sum game, then it will never change. If only the people who are disadvantaged speak out, then it's not enough. I don't want to overshadow their voices, but I want to support.

When I was in high school, I felt totally alienated from the world, but I loved movies. They were my escape, but coming from a disadvantaged community, I never knew that filmmaking was an option for me. A program like School of Doc would have been a game-changer.

In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.

During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.

I write a lot about disadvantaged people, particularly vulnerable children, because I feel that that's who I was. That is familiar terrain for me. And I try to write about things that are very close to me because I want people to feel the passion that I have for the subject.

The world's urban poor and the illiterate are going to be increasingly disadvantaged and are in danger of being left behind. The web has added a new dimension to the gap between the first world and the developing world. We have to start talking about a human right to connect.

Groups like AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, and other service organizations have a huge impact in the United States and around the world. They support communities, help people improve their lives, and provide additional 'human capital' to organizations that serve disadvantaged people.

We need to find ways to elevate the expectations, particularly of those individuals who may start off on a lower socioeconomic rung, who might be seen as disadvantaged. But, you know, the reason I say be seen as disadvantaged, it's because life is so short, and there's so much that can change.

Some kids win the lottery at birth; far too many don't - and most people have a hard time catching up over the rest of their lives. Children raised in disadvantaged environments are not only much less likely to succeed in school or in society, but they are also much less likely to be healthy adults.

While the most disadvantaged students - most often poor students of color - receive the most considerable academic benefits from attending diverse schools, research demonstrates that young people in general, regardless of their background, experience profound benefits from attending integrated schools.

I think the most difficult thing that has had to happen in South Africa for the previously disadvantaged communities is they had to reconcile that the oppressor has been enriched and the establishment is now making five or 10 times more profit than they were during the time the economic embargo was on them.

I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.

The Medicaid money that right-wingers want to snatch away from Planned Parenthood actually goes toward critical preventative care and treatments for the disadvantaged. So if pro-life activists are genuine in wanting to preserve human lives, waging a war against clinics that help low-income men and women isn't the way to go.

When a company is not being guided by the products they make and what the customers need, but by how they can manipulate the system - get regulations on their competitors, or mandates on using their products, or eliminating foreign competition - it just lowers the overall standard of living and hurts the disadvantaged the most.

As a former high school teacher and a student in a class of 60 urchins at St. Brigid's grammar school, I know that education is all about discipline and motivation. Disadvantaged students need extra attention, a stable school environment, and enough teacher creativity to stimulate their imaginations. Those things are not expensive.

Under normal circumstances, if the centerpiece of a president's campaign is helping the disadvantaged and we are our brother's keeper, the idea that this same guy has an actual brother living in third-world poverty without any help from Obama, this would have been on the cover of 'The New York Times.' But none of them are touching it.

Share This Page