McMaster Community Poverty Initiative works to enhance understanding of the meaning and consequences of poverty, and its intersection with differences related to race, gender, class, immigration status, and ability - in order to inform and advocate for the systemic changes needed to eliminate it.
Particular attention is given to pressing policy questions and to gaining commitments for action and change. We recognize that we cannot address local experience without also considering the provincial, national and global processes that create and perpetuate the conditions for income insecurity.
Our Social Justice Framework
By committing to use a social justice framework, we agree that:
- Everyone has a right to live in dignity, health, and wellbeing.
- Poverty is the result of economic, political, and social inequalities. Poverty always means having inadequate income, but it does not only relate to a lack of economic resources.
- We understand poverty as based in structures rather than individual choices.
- Interlocking systems of oppression mean that there is not one single experience of poverty. We are attentive in our work and strategies to the ways different types of oppression change both how poverty is experienced and the work needed to address poverty in its different forms.