Reports 1 & 2: Issues and Recommendations

Rather than creating an audio file of the book's final two reports, I combined them into a single PDF file, retaining the formatting and page numbering as in the book. The following are the introductions to the reports. Phase 1 - The Issues We will not give you statistics. We will not say how many of us are students, retired, single mothers, living alone or living with a spouse, working or on government assistance. We will say that we have all those covered. We will not give our ages, since age is irrelevant to who we are. Because we want you to read all our stories, we will provide no references to indicate from which stories the quotations were taken. Each story is quoted at least once. This report details the issues that feature dominantly in our stories. Our second report, Phase 2 – The Recommendations, contains our suggestions for preventing and remedying those issues. Our report has three major divisions: i) Predictors are conditions which have tended to forecast our future poverty; we have identified two broad long-term and one short-term or immediate predictors. ii) Primary effects are caused by the immediate or primary conditions of poverty; iii) Secondary conditions are causing secondary effects. The latter are sometimes increases in the magnitude of the primary effects or are new effects. The diagram on the following page illustrates the relations among predictors, primary and secondary conditions and primary and secondary effects. Phase 2 - The Recommendations This document is companion to our report Phase 1 – The Issues, which details the themes that featured dominantly in our  stories. We urge everyone who has not read the Phase 1 report to do so before reading this document. The two reports were written as complements to one another and knowledge of the contents of the first is assumed. As done with the stories and the Phase 1 report, the following is written in the first person plural and the writer is one of the storytellers. All quotations are taken directly from the women’s recommendations.