With extra federal stimulus funds available, Tennessee is exploring new approaches to try to break the cycle of poverty, and two Chattanooga initiatives are each vying for potential $25 million grants to help create easier paths for hundreds of Chattanooga families.

More than half of children in Tennessee, and 76% of children in south and central Chattanooga, live in households that cannot afford the local cost of living, according to a new report from the United Ways of Tennessee.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a series of enforcement actions Wednesday to address air pollution, unsafe drinking water and other problems afflicting minority communities in three Gulf Coast states, following a "Journey to Justice" tour by Administrator Michael Regan last fall.

The Chattanooga City Council unanimously approved Tuesday an updated ordinance to crack down on vandalism, an action that one organization said will result in the criminalization of the city's homeless population.

Mitch Crist picks up trash downtown several mornings a week, trading up to five full trash bags for $4 each once he wraps up his rounds.

Food insecurity remains at high levels across the Southeast as the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue. In response, some Chattanooga area churches and community groups are stepping up to provide staples for local families.

Nonprofit advocates have hailed Congress' passage of a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief measure that has the potential to lift millions of people out of poverty at a scale not seen since the New Deal.

This is not a feel-good story.

The Chattanooga Regional Homeless Coalition is conducting its annual count this week with leaders expecting to see an increase in the number of area residents who are homeless.

Unemployment in Chattanooga fell last month to 4.3%, just 1% above the level it reached in the economic recovery before the coronavirus pandemic shut down many businesses in mid-March.

The Chattanooga Community Kitchen hosted its annual Christmas Lunch and Toy Giveaway on Dec. 25, 2020.

We all need help sometimes. Especially when life throws us a curve ball.

The irony of complaints about the possibility of low-income residents moving onto the Main Street corridor is, at the very least, interesting.

A bill sponsored by Tennessee state Sen. Todd Gardenhire, R-Chattanooga, aiming to promote grocery store development in "food deserts" - primarily low-income, urban areas without supermarkets - passed in a Senate subcommittee meeting this week.

Back in the 1800s, the expression "pull oneself up by the bootstraps" meant the opposite of what it does now. Then it was used mockingly to describe an impossible act.

The Tennessee Department of Human Services is encouraging smaller nonprofit organizations with experience helping low-income families break "cycles of poverty" to apply for up to $50 million in program grant funding from the department's Two-Generation program.

When my wife and I wrote about my old schoolmates who had died from "deaths of despair," the reaction was sometimes ugly.

"I have been very, very blessed," Ron, who declined to share his last name, said while eating at the Community Kitchen. "Better than I deserve."

In the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1975, my mother made a hard choice: Her marriage was dead and it was time to leave it.

Bryant Ellis can wake up in the bedroom of his Hixson home, flip on the light switch and walk to the kitchen to make himself a pot of coffee. He can sit on the couch in his living room and watch television with his service dog, Whiskey, with insulated walls surrounding him and newly installed flooring beneath his feet.

Just by purchasing a few cookies and cupcakes over Halloween week, employees of BenchMark Physical Therapy in Soddy-Daisy were able to raise enough money to feed three children for a year.

The percentage of Tennessee and Georgia children living in areas of concentrated poverty and low opportunity fell 7% from 2013 to 2017, according to a new national study being released today.

Dr. Saundra Williams likes for her patients to be as informed as possible about what they are going through, whether it's a sprained ankle or a sinus infection.

When the national, anti-Trump media is fixed on convincing Americans a recession is just around the corner, positive economic news doesn't get much exposure.

With "Pomp and Circumstance" playing over the loudspeaker Thursday evening, the four graduates of a nationwide program addressing poverty walked down the center aisle of Orchard Park Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Stevie and Lisa, a middle-aged couple, dealt with complex, chronic illnesses, lack of health insurance and no access to professional care.

Researchers from Southern Adventist University are working with the Chattanooga Police Department to help provide cadets with a better understanding of the economic and societal barriers experienced by those living at or below the poverty line.

After straightening out a misunderstanding with local street musicians, it took Chattanooga City Council members only moments Tuesday to approve new rules regulating panhandling citywide.

As Chattanooga officials work to inform about 100 homeless people who have set up tents on a downtown lot they'll need to relocate, city council members said Monday they're looking at several options to address homelessness, including additional temporary or emergency housing.

Behind a city-owned wellness center in the 600 block of East 11th Street sits a once-vacant lot. But now about 100 homeless men and women have taken up residence there, setting up dozens of tents on the property, just down the road from the Chattanooga Community Kitchen.

Tucked away from the street, at the far end of a field and behind some tall, dry bushes, a homeless tent city lies.

Your neighborhood might make your sick, according to a study by Vanderbilt University School of Medicine researchers that was published this January.

A collective of local churches, unions and community groups hoping to reshape local politics and draw attention to the needs of working-class Chattanoogans is growing.

If ever we have needed a bit of good news, it is now.

The share of Chattanoogans living in poverty fell last year to the lowest level in a decade as the improving economy boosted employment to record highs, according to new estimates.

Four U.S. senators and the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center have proposed 19 measures to boost the economy in Appalachia, including expanded broadband and telemedicine and tapping the region's "vast" natural gas reserves for chemical and advanced manufacturing facilities.

Tennessee children have experienced an overall improvement of their well-being, according to a report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

A local coalition is hoping to unite the public around solving Chattanooga's rising inequality problems.

Local poverty, jails and public schools were the topics of conversation on Main Street Wednesday night, sparked by the work of a Chattanooga-born filmmaker who has been working to stir civil engagement around some of the community's most intractable problems.

Almost 25 percent of Tennesseans went through three or more stressful or traumatic experiences during their childhoods, according to a recent study.

Advocates for equal justice vowed to step up services Tuesday in Chattanooga as President Donald Trump's proposed budget threatens to cut federal programs for low-income people.

For good Samaritans looking to help out neighbors in need, there's a new tool that might make it easier to be a philanthropist.

Thousands of families with young children in Chattanooga face insurmountable odds.

Local churches will gather this weekend to discuss how members of Chattanooga's faith community can work together to address the economic desperation some residents in the city are facing.

A recent report from the city's Office of Internal Audit shows Chattanoogans have become more concerned about public safety and raising children in town, but local researchers say the report has fundamental design flaws.

It's a process the police tout as classic community policing — a way to solve a problem and rid a neighborhood of a troublesome house or tenant without necessarily slapping someone in cuffs.

When Tonya Rooks was elected to head the residents council of Chattanooga's most troubled public housing project in 2012, she thought she knew what her neighbors needed.

Chattanooga will face serious challenges if the rising share of young children living in poverty continues to go without the care and education other local children have access to, warns a study funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, a nationally known, philanthropic heavyweight.

As temperatures continue to climb in the Tennessee Valley, more and more people need help beating the heat.

The state has awarded nearly $152,000 to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and another $90,700 grant to Cleveland State for programs aimed at enabling more students to move through their courses and graduate.

After overcoming a period of homelessness in his teenage years, Brainerd High School Salutatorian Isaiah Smith graduated at the top of his class and is heading in July to Colorado Springs for four years at the U.S.

Tiffany Anderson was the fourth participant in the Chattanooga 2.0 speaker series. Chattanooga 2.0 is a local initiative launched in January aimed at improving the county's public schools and increasing work force development.

Shannon Fleming was sure she knew everything about birth control.

The Jennings, Mo., school district does not look like it did five years ago before Tiffany Anderson arrived.

No one thought Chattanooga would be a tourism magnet after Walter Cronkite told the entire country on the nightly news that Chattanooga was the dirtiest city in the nation.

THIS SERIES WAS reported for more than a year. To have a foundation of knowledge on the issues of poverty, income inequality and economic mobility, reporters Joan Garrett McClane and Joy Lukachick Smith read more than 250 peer-reviewed studies published by major research institutions and nonprofit organizations and read a dozen books written by social scientists.

A hard-hit coal mining community has a lesson to teach Chattanooga about the power of community bonds, the impact of humble leadership and the healing effect of restored trust.

How searching for the solution to American poverty changed a reporter's life.

A nascent movement coming out of Chattanooga is challenging American evangelicals and their long-held stance on poverty. Jesus came to restore the weak, a local disruptor with a growing celebrity status among Protestant churches, warns. At stake, he says, is the heart of the local church.

In Chattanooga, we ask schools to teach children, not raise them. But one local educator, who fears struggling schools have long been misunderstood, is crossing the line and proving that when disadvantaged children are truly supported, the impossible comes into view.

Communities shape families and families shape children, but in the fight to bring economic mobility to poor and middle-class children in Chattanooga, the first step is the hardest.

A model that unites middle class families with their struggling neighbors is proving poverty can be beat.

Young men from working class families have few lifelines as the dirty jobs their fathers and grandfathers worked slowly evaporate or evolve. But local approaches that connect those lost boys, many now lost men, to pride and purpose, are proving a rebound is possible.