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This article describes an empowerment approach for working with diverse women who experience poverty, trauma, and multiple structural oppressions. The approach is the result of 20 years of experience developing, implementing, and evaluating this practice in a metropolitan community, and is grounded in women's empowerment theory and relationalcultural theory. The interventions combine social work's clinical interventions with community organizing strategies to promote personal and collective empowerment, supporting the personal is political tenet of feminist practice. The interventions, including nonclinical interviews, story circles, and leadership and advocacy education and training, can guide practitioners in providing services and programs that create a space for women to make changes in their personal lives and in their community. Program outcomes report successful changes for women in improving symptoms, increasing self-efficacy, and engaging in community advocacy. Women who participated also reported an increased sense of power, balancing commonality and difference among women, and a sense of hope for their future.

Poverty simulations are a promising approach to engaging college students in learning about poverty because they provide direct experience with this critical social issue. Much of the extant scholarship on simulations describe them as experiential learning; however, it appears that educators do not examine biases, assumptions, and traditions of power inherent in some traditional approaches. This is particularly problematic with poverty simulations because they are tools designed to specifically address systems of inequality and oppression. This case study describes an attempt to implement a poverty simulation and measure its longitudinal effectiveness and uses findings from this study to examine poverty simulations as contexts for experiential learning. It is argued that, when implemented without critical consideration, simulations might actually perpetuate inequality rather than empower students to address poverty through civic action.

Cities large and small are increasingly using public safety policies to address local concerns about homelessness. In 2013, Chico, California, followed suit by passing several ordinances, most notably, a “sit‐lie” ordinance that prohibits individuals from sitting or lying in commercial districts and other public spaces. Broadly, this article explores the implications of this punitive approach to homelessness. Specifically, relying primarily upon arrest data extending over six and a half years, we explore how enforcement of the sit‐lie ordinance affected arrest rates of homeless individuals, as well as the geographic location of those arrests. Our expectations are supported—arrests of homeless individuals increased significantly in the “post sit‐lie” period, and the location of arrests clearly shifted away from the downtown area. Finally, given economic motivations of the ordinances, we estimate the costs to city law enforcement of policing the homeless population and find that costs are nearly twice as large as police department estimates.