There are over a billion people living on less than $1 a day -- mothers, fathers, children, grandparents and vast numbers of young people -- all rendered powerless by destitution.

The World Bank identifies three degrees of poverty:

1. Relative Poverty
2. Moderate Poverty
3. Extreme Poverty
   
   
1. Relative poverty is defined as a family income that is below a given proportion of the national average, and that those impoverished lack some of the goods, services and buying power that the middle class in that society take for granted.  This poverty is experienced primarily in Europe and North America.
   
   
2. Moderate poverty, found throughout much of Latin America, is an income barely sufficient to meet a family’s minimum needs for food, clothing, shelter and health care.
   
   
3. Extreme poverty is a technical term used by the World Bank to define a family living on an income of less than $1 a day.  These families suffer chronic hunger and lack of safe drinking water and sanitation, health care, children’s education and  rudimentary shelter. There are 1.1 billion living in extreme poverty today in Asia and Africa, with a small number in Latin America. Asia has the largest number -- 750 million and Africa has the largest proportion -- nearly half its population.

Community organizing methodologies represent a set of critical tools for crafting holistic solutions to extreme poverty; particularly when the poor themselves are able to hold these tools in their own hands.

“Building the extremely poor into people of power is what Millennium Tools is all about.”