About 35 million Americans live below the poverty line. In 2024, that meant a family of four struggling to get by on roughly $32,000 a year. But that figure doesn’t capture the full extent of economic hardship. When we expand the definition to include families earning up to twice the poverty threshold, or about $64,000 for a family of four, the number of Americans struggling to afford necessities like housing, childcare, healthcare and groceries climbs past 100 million. That is almost one-third of the U.S. population.
Across the country, extraordinary nonprofits are developing solutions to challenges like these. Yet too often, a program transforming lives in one community never reaches the hundreds of others that could benefit from it. Instead, philanthropists fund new initiatives and pilots, sometimes without realizing that a proven solution already exists.
