This book brings together sources of material on poverty and family health and makes it accessible to health and welfare teams working with families with young children. It draws on a wide range of disciplines and uses both "hard" and "soft" data to provide facts and figures and first-hand accounts of how poverty affects family health and family life. While the data are specific to the United Kingdom, program descriptions and recommendations apply equally to helping poor families in the United States. The book, referred to as a "team training handbook," follows an informal textbook designed to enable teams of individuals to work through it in several sessions. Each section of the handbook examines one of several key stages of learning and planning around poverty and family health. Section 1 is designed to facilitate user or team agreement about how to organize the learning and planning process. Section 2 provides a framework for examining how poverty is defined and explained. Section 3 helps to build knowledge of family poverty. Section 4 examines how poverty and its impact on families can be assessed. Section 5 covers the process of planning for change. Section 6 discusses the process of engaging with families in poverty. Section 7 looks at how to evaluate work with families in poverty. Section 8 provides a 69-item list of references and resources of family poverty grouped to refer to sections of the book. (JB)