NCW Libraries

Effective citizens--engaged, knowledgeable, and persistent, and united in common cause--are the most powerful force that ever was, or ever will be. I hope this book will help citizens to be more effective. In his uniquely straightforward and accessible style, Political insider Graham Steele pulls back the curtain on our political system and gives readers a look inside. A lawyer, analyst, former Nova Scotia cabinet minister, and author of the Globe...

Welfare experiments conducted at the state level during the 1990s radically restructured the American welfare state and have played a critical-and unexpected-role in the broader policymaking process. Through these experiments, previously unpopular reform ideas, such as welfare time limits, gained wide and enthusiastic support. Ultimately, the institutional legacy of the old welfare system was broken, new ideas took hold, and the welfare experiments...

The welfare state rests on the assumption that people have rights to food, shelter, health care, retirement income, and other goods provided by the government. David Kelley examines the historical origins of that assumption, and the rationale used to support it today.

Finding Home, Hope, and a Future: Achieving Integrated Social Services at Harbor Care tells the story of a trail blazing nonprofit in Nashua, New Hampshire. Originally named Harbor Homes, in July 1982 the newly incorporated organization began work in its remodeled group home supporting nine clients with persistent mental illnesses. Forty years later, the nonprofit, now named Harbor Care, owns twenty-eight facilities and is supporting over five thousand...

Small Canadian cities confront serious social issues as a result of the neoliberal economic restructuring practiced by both federal and provincial governments since the 1980s. Drastic spending reductions and ongoing restraint in social assistance, income supports, and the provision of affordable housing, combined with the offloading of social responsibilities onto municipalities, has contributed to the generalization of social issues once chiefly...

The political and economic landscape of UK social security provision has changed significantly since the 2008 financial crisis. This fully revised, restructured and updated 3rd edition of a go-to text book covers all the key policy changes and their implications since the elections of 2010 and 2015. With contributions from leading academics in the field this book critically examines the design, entitlement, delivery and impact of current welfare provision....

In Philanthropy Under Fire, author Howard Husock defends the American tradition of independent philanthropy from significant political and intellectual challenges which threaten it today. Although the U.S. continues to be the most charitable nation in the world, serious efforts seek to discourage traditional, personal charitable giving by changing the tax code, and directing philanthropy toward causes chosen by government. Some voices seek to narrow...

Has the modern Conservative Party developed a distinctive approach to the post-war welfare state? In exploring this question, this accessible book takes an authoritative look at Conservative Party policy and practice in the modern era. The book takes as its main starting point the progressive One Nation Conservative (1950-64) perspective, which endeavoured to embrace those features of the welfare state deemed compatible with the party's underlying...

Social justice is a contested term, incorporated into the language of widely differing political positions. Those on the left argue that it requires intervention from the state to ensure equality, at least of opportunity; those on the right believe that it can be underpinned by the economics of the market place with little or no state intervention. To date, political philosophers have made relatively few serious attempts to explain how a theory of...

Each year, the United States spends $65,000 per poor family to fight poverty" in a country in which the average family income is just under $50,000. Meanwhile, most of that money goes to middle-class and upper-middle-class families, and the current U.S. poverty rate is higher than it was before the government began spending trillions of dollars on anti-poverty programs. In this eye-opening Broadside, Kevin D. Williamson uncovers the hidden politics...