Book ~ "Dispatches From The Poverty Line" - Pat Capponi (1997)

From Chapters.ca ~ Pat Capponi’s life has been spent moving between two very different worlds. As a survivor of child abuse, psychiatric illness, and periods of unemployment, she has become intimately familiar with the marginalized world of the sick, the powerless, and the poor. As a social activist, counseller, Crown employee, and author of the highly praised memoir, Upstairs in the Crazy House, she has moved through the world of the affluent and powerful. Now, in the era of downsizing, she, like so many others, has become a victim of budget cuts. Unemployed, long past the end of her benefits, she finds herself once again not just working with the poor but joining their ranks. In the winter of 1996, she began a journal of the effect that conservative fiscal and social policy was having on people like herself.

I'd read this book and Upstairs in the Crazy House in the spring of 1998 when I was volunteering at a distress centre that she was on the board of at that time.