Bookstores now display literary efforts with titles like A History of the World in 6 Glasses—and I’m up to a challenge. Here, in honor of the splendid 2018 major league season, is a history of helping the poor in America in terms of three ballparks.

James Whitford, 48, founder and director of the Watered Gardens Gospel Rescue Mission in Joplin, tells stories of rescues from poverty. He tells of Jon, once a homeless addict, who via the help of a mentor gained and keeps a full-time job. Whitford and his volunteers help each lodger at the mission set goals: “He has to be working toward those goals. The end goal is to eliminate homelessness in that individual’s life.”

I’ve written books on poverty-fighting history based on library research, but Peter Cove has lived that history: His introduction to Poor No More: Rethinking Dependency and the War on Poverty—WORLD’s 2017 Book of the Year in the Understanding America category—begins, “Nearly half a century ago, I dropped out of graduate school and enlisted as a foot soldier in America’s War on Poverty.” Cove once embraced conventional government-centric solutions, but he realized their inadequacy and founded

Twitter lit up on Friday with inspiring stories about immigrants from the nations President Trump apparently derided during a meeting about immigration in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon.

Bandal Luk, a project manager at Arizona State University’s Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research, tweeted about coming from one of the African nations Trump reportedly slammed.

I met anti-gentrification activist Angel Luna, a subject of WORLD Magazine’s recent article on gentrification, at a local doughnut shop chain in Boyle Heights. A white man founded the doughnut empire, now the largest doughnut shop chain on the West Coast. But in the sugar-dusted store in Boyle Heights, the servers dishing out apple fritters and Boston creams were Latino, the customers were Latino, and the soap opera playing on a corner television set was from Mexico.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to spend $1.4 billion of his state’s resources to solve the persistent problem of poverty in central Brooklyn. The money would go to programs aimed at providing affordable housing, job training, anti-violence programs, recreational space, even obesity.

We have seen this play before, not only in Brooklyn, where the Bedford-Stuyvesant area defied virtually all anti-poverty programs and was an eyesore for decades before gentrification, not government, began its improvement at the beginning of 2000.

Moments before the wedding, Grant Funk turned to his bride and said, “I don’t know if I love you, but I know God wants us to get married.”

It was a rocky start to a marriage that after 35 years is going strong—and a reflection of Funk’s growing pains from a traumatized kid who didn’t know love to a pastor who loves on the traumatized Alaska Native youth. Once a broken-spirited Southern boy, Funk now stands on the shoulders of many individuals who took a chance on him—most of all his wife Lenna, a lifelong optimist who married him despite the red flags.