Labor/Employment

Rather than harping on the fact that Boston ranks fifth best city to do business and the state of Massachusetts ranks first in student achievement, health care coverage, veteran’s services and clean energy policies, Governor Deval Patrick noted that there is plenty of room for improvement.

Patrick addressed the fact that homelessness remains a significant problem in the commonwealth, “Our strategy is about ending homelessness, not just treating it,” he said

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Robert Sondak

The Cambridge Savings Bank is a financial institution whose history spans 176 years. This Harvard Square headquartered bank has grown despite weathering three periods of economic hardship over the past 110 years.

During the depression of the late 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA employed a total of 3.8 million people, with total expenditures through 1941 at 11.5 billion dollars. At the time this federally subsidized program provided a significant boost to the national economy.

Four decades prior to the millennium, faith-based community groups organized to become a very powerful force to confront the Pentagon and two U.S. Presidents—Johnson and Nixon—to stop the Vietnam War. These faith-based agencies facilitated anti-war protests nationally and offered draft resistance counseling to young men facing conscription. As these groups organized anti-war marches on our nation’s capital, people from other walks of life joined their ranks.

“The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.”

When William James, ostensible father of American Psychology, penned this line over a century ago, he had embedded the idea in a discussion on religious experience, in which he also extolled the virtues of voluntary poverty.