Bringing Poverty Home

The poverty numbers released this week by the Census Bureau have gotten a fair amount of attention, but it’s hard to argue that enough due has been paid to these startling numbers.

One of the ways that I think make a lot of sense to drive interest in this type of information is to break it down at the local level. People are usually much more interested in this type of thing in their own backyard than at a national level. To that end, the folks over at the Half in Ten campaign have created a tool that allows you to examine poverty numbers by congressional district.

If folks are interested in using this, it seems like a simple, powerful tool to judge conditions where you live, and maybe to ask whether more should be done to try address the problem of poverty.