This lesson explores the connections between poverty and unemployment. Discovering that there are not enough living-wage jobs available for everyone who wants one, students begin to see how poverty is caused by systemic factors, not individual shortcomings.

In this lesson students will identify and explore connections between poverty and natural disasters.

In this lesson students will ponder poetry that speaks about homelessness and then write their own poem.

The 2008 data surprised people because it showed much more hunger than in previous years. In this lesson, students will learn about some of the report’s findings.

This lesson challenges students to reflect on themes of fairness, perception, discrimination and legality with regard to employment and to examine their own biases and related experiences.

This lesson has students distinguish between charity (volunteering in a soup kitchen) and justice (working to end the inequalities that make soup kitchens necessary). It asks students to think about root causes (inequality) versus symptoms (poverty that leads to the need for soup kitchens).

This lesson challenges students to analyze and to reflect on messages presented in songs — and to express their own views about important issues addressed in some songs.

The United States recovered from a very deep recession that began in 2007. In the years immediately afterwards, however, unemployment continued to be a problem for many Americans. The unemployment rate varies greatly between states and different races/ethnicities. In this lesson, students will examine and interpret racial unemployment rates across different states and three racial/ethnic groups (African Americans, Hispanics, and whites) from data in 2007 and 2015.

This is the fourth lesson in the series "Using Editorial Cartoons to Teach Social Justice."People who are poor don’t have access to the kinds of resources—good jobs, high-quality education and health care, for example—that people with more money have. One thing they do have access to, unfortunately, is a disproportionate share of environmental problems. You can see why: People who can afford to, live in places far away from oil wells, factories and toxic waste dumps. People with less money more often live near those environmentally undesirable—and often dangerous—places.

The purpose of this lesson is to help students identify and recognize modern-day heroes—people who have made, and are making, a difference in their communities or in the world. Students will learn how local movements can become national, then global, movements through the activism and perseverance of upstanding individuals.