At the outset of the now-ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic, over a dozen chapters, branches, and affiliate organizations of ACORN International issued a global call for the social protection of low-income families and individuals.

Vice News talked with founder of the Ohio Voter Project and author of the Voter Purge Project’s data cleaning and analysis methodology Steve Tingley-Hock about our work to track wrongful data purges across the country.

“When I ran the initial queries, that was my first indication that there was a serious problem here,” Steve says of the initial Ohio records that showed about 40,000 voters were set to be wrongfully purged. Steve, along with the VPP, now collects and analyzes data for 16 states.

Watch the full video below, and read more about what we are doing with this data in our report.

On October 1, the Voter Purge Project released “Unnecessary Disenfranchisement: Voter Purges Across the Country.” The report details our work to monitor, report on, and organize against wrongful voter purging.

Read the full report for background on the project, our methods, and what we are doing to ensure eligible voters are informed of their voter status as November’s elections draw near.

After extensive research into nonprofit hospitals the Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, the Nonprofit Accountability Project has released our findings and recommendations in a paper, “Charity for Whom?“

Our research indicates that the non-profit tax exemption system enables hospitals to be non-profit in name only, thereby reaping the benefits of tax exemption without sharing these gains with low income families. We argue this is due to the vagueness of relevant laws and leniency of the IRS. 

This paper is the product of cooperation between Local 100 United Labor Unions, the Labor Neighbor Research & Training Center (LNRTC), and ACORN International, plus our tireless team of volunteers.

WIRED Magazine recently featured the Voter Purge Project, a project of ACORN International in partnership with the Ohio Voter Project and Labor Neighbor, in its September 2020 issue. One IT Guy’s Spreadsheet-Fueled Race to Restore Voting Rights details the work of Voter Purge Project to protect eligible voters against disenfranchisement by monitoring, reporting on, and organizing against wrongful voter purging.

Read the full story here.

Learn more about Voter Purge Project here.

Global social protection in times of global crisis

We low-income families are living in the popular areas of Douala, Toronto, Mumbai, Paris, Lima, Manchester, Tunis, New Orleans and Edinburg are victims of the health crisis. We lost our job, we lost much of our income. Yet we still have to pay our rent, our electricity bills and buy something to feed our families. As the lockdown comes to an end, we are tens of millions of people to find ourselves in rent debt in France, the UK, the United States or Canada. This is how we are reduced to misery and hunger.

Written by Seema Rajpal June 23rd, 2020 from Edex Live

Hyderabad-based Gomathi Iyer is doing some unforgettable covers on Instagram and before the lockdown, was helping girls in one of the largest slums in the world, Dharavi in Mumbai learn to sing.

Soutik Biswas June 23rd, 2020 from BBC News

In one of the world’s most congested shanty towns, social distancing is not a luxury people can afford. And density is a friend of the coronavirus.

Imagine more than 500,000 people spread over 2.5 grubby sq km, less than a square mile. That’s a population larger than Manchester living in an area smaller than Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.

by Dharmendra Kumar — June 24, 2020 from Counter Currents

It is said that COVID does not differentiate. Yet, people on the margin have been differently impacted by COVID. Street vendors are one such vulnerable group. With lockdown, streets wore a deserted look. Street livelihood vanished all of a sudden. Street vendors, generally outlawed and operating with meagre capital and various kinds of livelihood insecurities and restrictive and punitive regulatory authorities found it hard to survive through the lockdown.