This book provides descriptive reports about people living in poverty in New York City (New York) in the period from 1964 to 1979 as a beginning to solving the problems of persistent poverty. Analyses of the problems of poverty have rarely been undertaken from the point of view of the poor themselves. It is argued that society will never be able to grapple with the contradictions of poverty until it comes to understand the poor as real people, not as statistical abstractions or faceless objects of pity or contempt. These reports are not sociological studies, but they are informal case studies that reveal the lives of residents in a poor largely Puerto Rican neighborhood in Manhattan (New York) assisted by volunteers from the Fourth World Movement. The International Fourth World Movement is a volunteer corps of people from various nationalities and walks of life who are committed to forming partnerships with the persistently poor in order to work for social justice. Education is one of the areas of concentration of the movement in its endeavors to make the poor partners for progress. A global perspective of the Fourth World Movement and the very poor is appended. (SLD)