The Calgary Catholic School District (CCSD) has opened St. Gemma Outreach School for students in vital need of extra support.

There is an adage that to get off the streets you need a home, a job and a friend. The reality is that there are not enough affordable homes, few jobs open to those who are homeless and even fewer friends who are willing to walk the harsh streets to sustain hope in the darkness. 

These are dangerously murky times. Passionate voices ring out all over; few listen to each other. We risk losing one another as forces pull and push us apart, like the sudden crush in a crowd, when people going different directions create forces by which some get suffocated and trampled. How can we find our way together amidst such forces?  

The aroma of caramelized onions, cumin and baked fish still lingers as volunteers busily fill hundreds of containers of meals for the poor.

In far off places, I’ve seen children under armed guard, fenced in, sitting in the dust, holding themselves up on the edges of human existence — exiled to places where any notion of the rights of children seems fanciful, even sadly comical.

War produces tremendous poverty, and its violence strikes those who are defenseless and vulnerable, Pope Francis said.

Calgary’s Feed the Hungry program will make its return to sit-down meals for those in need beginning Thanksgiving weekend, more than two years after it was turned on its head by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Seeing video footage of hungry families in agony breaks one’s heart,” Argaw Fantu writes in an e-mail from his home base in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

Ethiopians, especially poor families in the war-devastated parts of the northern Tigray region, have been experiencing immense suffering from a conflict that remains largely unknown to Canadians. War started in the Tigray region in November 2020 between the Ethiopian National Defence Forces and the Tigray Defence Forces, and the conflict continues to this day.

It’s a hungry world and COVID has only sharpened those hunger pangs.

Campaign 2000’s annual in-depth look at poverty reveals that being poor in Canada is perfectly predictable. Canada’s poor are overwhelmingly Indigenous or they are disabled.

It’s full throttle on the Christmas shopping season now and even a pandemic isn’t about to put the brakes on people rushing to line up outside stores by buy gifts.

Fifty years is a long time for a good idea to sit on a shelf.

Jonathan Castillo is a cartonero in Argentina — a collector of discarded recyclables.

ASSISI, Italy -- With a pilgrim's staff and mantle, Pope Francis entered Assisi's Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels with 500 economically or socially disadvantaged people and the volunteers who walk alongside them.