Books on the topic 'Social housing organizations'

This book renews the tradition of inquiry into collective, social problem-solving. The book follows grassroots activists, nonprofit organization staff, and community service volunteers in three coalitions and twelve organizations in Los Angeles as they campaign for affordable housing, develop new housing, or address homelessness. The book shows that to understand how social advocates build their campaigns, craft claims, and choose goals, we need to move beyond well-established thinking about what is strategic. The book presents a pragmatist-inspired sociological framework that illuminates core tasks of social problem-solving by grassroots and professional advocates alike. It reveals that advocates' distinct styles of collective action produce different understandings of what is strategic, and generate different dilemmas for advocates because each style accommodates varying social and institutional pressures. We see, too, how patterns of interaction create a cultural filter that welcomes some claims about housing problems while subordinating or delegitimating others. These cultural patterns help solve conceptual and practical puzzles, such as why coalitions fragment when members agree on many things, and what makes advocacy campaigns separate housing from homelessness or affordability from environmental sustainability. The book concludes by turning this action-centered framework toward improving dialogue between social advocates and researchers.

This book examines absolute poverty in Europe, which is at the moment fairly neglected in academic and policy discourse. It opens with conceptual and methodological considerations that prepare the ground for an application of the concept of absolute poverty in the context of affluent societies and analyses shortcomings of social statistics as well as possibilities to include highly vulnerable groups. This includes thoughts on ethics of research in this particular field where people live under severe circumstances and research can make a difference. The book sheds light on crucial dimensions of deprivation and social exclusion of people in absolute poverty in affluent societies: access to health care, housing and nutrition, poverty related shame and violence. After conceptual and practical issues, the book investigates into different policy responses to absolute poverty in affluent societies from social policy concerns to civic organizations, e. g. food donations, and penalisation and “social cleansing” of highly visible poor. The book finally frames this discussion by profound ethical considerations and normative reasoning about absolute poverty and its alleviation, how it is related to concerns of justice/injustice as well as human dignity. Furthermore, it questions the power and importance of human rights and their judicial protection in regard of persons in absolute poverty.

During the Great Migration, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became a mecca for African Americans seeking better job opportunities, wages, and living conditions. The city's thriving economy and vibrant social and cultural scenes inspired dreams of prosperity and a new start, but this urban haven was not free of discrimination and despair. In the face of injustice, activists formed the Urban League of Pittsburgh (ULP) in 1918 to combat prejudice and support the city's growing African American population. In this broad-ranging history, Joe William Trotter Jr. uses this noteworthy branch of the National Urban League to provide new insights into an organization that has often faced criticism for its social programs' deep class and gender limitations. Surveying issues including housing, healthcare, and occupational mobility, Trotter underscores how the ULP -- often in concert with the Urban League's national headquarters -- bridged social divisions to improve the lives of black citizens of every class. He also sheds new light on the branch's nonviolent direct-action campaigns and places these powerful grassroots operations within the context of the modern Black Freedom Movement. The impact of the National Urban League is a hotly debated topic in African American social and political history. Trotter's study provides valuable new insights that demonstrate how the organization has relieved massive suffering and racial inequality in US cities for more than a century.

The book “Arca Project: Solidarity strengthening dreams and hopes in Altaneira-Ceará” describes the history of two Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), known as Associação Raízes Culturais de Altaneira (ARCA) and Fundação Educativa e Cultural Arca (Fundação Arca), linked especially by the spirit of solidarity. While the Association, formed mainly by family farmers, works with income generation and solidarity economy projects, the Arca Foundation develops projects in line with local and regional education and culture. The work begins by portraying the path of Carlos Alberto Tolovi in a social project of struggle for housing in an old favela that was located near the center of São Paulo, when he served as a seminarian and also as a priest, trying to show how much this his path contributed to the formation of the Arca Project. After describing how ARCA has established, the author continues to present the evolution of the work carried out by the Association and the context that subsequently led to the creation of the Arca Foundation. The narrative of the history of these two non-profit entities, known together as Projeto Arca, refers to the discussion of key concepts that inspire collective work, the questioning of the reality of social injustices and inequalities that characterize capitalist society and represents the hope of a culture, where the dignity of human life and social relations are more important than the economic one, aimed mainly at maximizing individual profit.

Framed in debates about the crisis of democracy, the book analyzes one of the most influential social movements of recent times: Spain’s “Indignados” or “15-M” movement. In the wake of the global financial crisis and harsh austerity policies, 15-M movement activists occupied public squares across the country, mobilized millions of Spanish citizens, gave rise to new hybrid parties such as Podemos, and inspired pro-democracy movements around the world. Based on access to key participants in the 15-M movement and Podemos, and extensive participant observation, the book tells the story of this remarkable movement, its emergence, evolution, and impact. In so doing, it challenges some of the core arguments in social movement scholarship about the factors likely to lead to movement success. Instead, the book argues that movements organized around autonomous network logics can build and sustain strong movements in the absence of formal organizations, strong professionalized leadership, and the ability to attract external resources. The key to understanding its power lies in the shared political culture and collective identity that emerged following the occupation of Spain’s central squares. These protest camps sustained the movement by forging reciprocal ties of solidarity between diverse actors, and generating a shared set of critical master frames across a diverse set of actors and issues (e.g., housing, education, pensions, privatization of public services, corruption) that enabled the movement to effectively contest hegemonic narratives about the crisis, austerity, and democracy, influencing public debate and the political agenda.

This book is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, the book explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, the author rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, the book considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regime to transform them into a rationally organized, disciplined, and easily controllable community. The book argues that late Soviet materiality had an immense impact on the organization of the Soviet historical and spatial imagination. The book's approach also makes clear the ways in which the Soviet self was an integral part of the global experience of modernity rather than simply an outcome of Communist propaganda. Through its focus on materiality and personhood, the book expands our understanding of what made Soviet people and society “Soviet.”

Latin America and the Caribbean, unlike other regions, is still quite young demographically: people over age 60 make up around 11% of the total population. However, the region is expected to experience the fastest rate of population aging in the world over the coming decades. This projected growth of the elderly population raises challenges related to pensions, health, and long-term care. At the same time, it opens up numerous business opportunities in different sectorshousing, tourism, care, and transportation, for examplethat could generate millions of new jobs. These opportunities are termed the “silver economy,” which has the potential to be one of the drivers of post-pandemic economic recovery. Importantly, women play key roles in many areas of this market, as noted in the first report published by the IDB on this subject (Okumura et al., 2020). This report maps the actors whose products or services are intended for older people and examines silver economy trends in the region by sector: health, long-term care, finance, housing, transportation, job market, education, entertainment, and digitization. The mapping identified 245 actors whose products or services are intended for older people, and it yielded three main findings. The first is that the majority of the actors (40%) operate in the health and care sectors. The prevalence of these sectors could be due to the fact that they are made up of many small players, and it could also suggest a still limited role of older people in active consumption, investment, and the job market in the region. The second finding is that 90% of the silver economy actors identified by the study operate exclusively in their countries of origin, and that Mexico has the most actors (47), followed by the Southern Cone countriesBrazil, Chile, and Argentinawhich have the regions highest rates of population aging. The third finding is that private investment dominates the silver economy ecosystem, as nearly 3 out of every 4 actors offering services to the elderly population are for-profit enterprises. The sectors and markets of the silver economy differ in size and degree of maturity. For example, the long-term care sector, which includes residential care settings, is the oldest and has the largest number of actors, while sectors like digital, home automation, and cohousing are still emerging. Across all sectors, however, there are innovative initiatives that hold great potential for growth. This report examines the main development trends of the silver economy in the region and presents examples of initiatives that are already underway. The health sector has a wealth of initiatives designed to make managing chronic diseases easier and to prevent and reduce the impact of functional limitations through practices that encourage active aging. In the area of long term careone of the most powerful drivers of job creationinitiatives to train human resources and offer home care services are flourishing. The financial sector is beginning to meet a wide range of demands from older people by offering unique services such as remittances or property management, in addition to more traditional pensions, savings, and investment services. The housing sector is adapting rapidly to the changes resulting from population aging. This shift can be seen, for example, in developments in the area of cohousing or collaborative housing, and in the rise of smart homes, which are emerging as potential solutions. In the area of transportation, specific solutions are being developed to meet the unique mobility needs of older people, whose economic and social participation is on the rise. The job market offers older people opportunities to continue contributing to society, either by sharing their experience or by earning income. The education sector is developing solutions that promote active aging and the ongoing participation of older people in the regions economic and social life. Entertainment services for older people are expanding, with the emergence of multiple online services. Lastly, digitization is a cross-cutting and fundamental challenge for the silver economy, and various initiatives in the region that directly address this issue were identified. Additionally, in several sectors we identified actors with a clear focus on gender, and these primarily provide support to women. Of a total of 245 actors identified by the mapping exercise, we take a closer look at 11 different stories of the development of the silver economy in the region. The featured organizations are RAFAM Internacional (Argentina), TeleDx (Chile), Bonanza Asistencia (Costa Rica), NudaProp (Uruguay), Contraticos (Costa Rica), Maturi (Brazil), Someone Somewhere (Mexico), CONAPE (Dominican Republic), Fundación Saldarriaga Concha (Colombia), Plan Ibirapitá (Uruguay), and Canitas (Mexico). These organizations were chosen based on criteria such as how innovative their business models are, the current size and growth potential of their initiatives, and their impact on society. This study is a first step towards mapping the silver economy in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the hope is to broaden the scope of this mapping exercise through future research and through the creation of a community of actors to promote the regional integration of initiatives in this field.