War on Poverty Community Profiles: Northeastern States
The most ambitious and controversial part of the President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society was its initiative to end poverty. The centerpiece of the War on Poverty was the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which was established to oversee a variety of community-based anti-poverty programs. Central to OEO’s mission was the idea of "community action," the participation of the poor in framing and administering the programs designed to help them. To assess the scale of poverty in America, the OEO developed the Community Profile Project, designed to increase the scope, accessibility, accuracy, and utility of information supporting the planning and evaluation of programs for community improvement. The Project compiled data for 3,135 U.S. counties and county equivalents that subdivided each state into independently-administered localities. Each profile, composed as a narrative with statistical indices, contains information showing general poverty indicators, size and composition of the poor population, and selected aspects of geography, demography, economy, and social resources.
The Community Profiles provide an in-depth analysis of poverty in America with an extensive inventory of historical data of the United States at a local level.
Northeastern states in this collection include Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.