My story begins in 2009, the ill-fated year when 30,000 California teachers were released from their positions. In most California school districts, the adage, “Last hired, first fired” is the law of the land. As a result of my transfer to a different district I forfeited my seniority, and subsequently my position as an English teacher.  → Read More

Marie Forleo is a business and life coach with a mission to help you realize your greatest potential and use your unique talents to change the world. Marie has helped a number of women push back from the brink through her online business school for modern entrepreneurs, known as B-school. Her energy is contagious, her passion is palpable, and she shared some of her time, insight and advice with us about how you can push back from the brink, along with the steps you can take right now to help you get back on your feet after the wind has been knocked out of you.  → Read More

Washington, D.C. — Putting a face on the economic inequality of working women struggling in this country, Sabrina Jenkins—an Air Force veteran and working single mother from South Carolina—will be First Lady Michelle Obama’s invited guest to hear President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address tonight. Sabrina is featured in The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink.  → Read More

GlobalGirl Reporters in Los Angeles perform an original poem about what it means to “be on the brink” as a teenage girl.  → Read More

I grew up in a suburb of Boston, the child of two immigrants who had come from India decades earlier. We lived in a house in Bedford, Massachusetts, a quintessential middle-class town. But when I was 5, my parents got divorced and my dad left. My mother was on her own. Having never held a job before, she faced the choice of going back to India or going on welfare to support her two young children. In India, we would have been stigmatized; no one got divorced there in the 1970s. She knew that the children of a divorced woman would have limited life opportunities in India.  → Read More

As we set about doing the work of building content for The Shriver Report over the past two years, we set some ambitious goals for our team. Not only would we strive to be a voice of urgency – identifying the precarious economic situation of a full third of American women as a problem worth solving – but to challenge ourselves and our partners actively to engage in solving this problem.  → Read More

Let me state the obvious: I have never lived on the brink. I’ve never been in foreclosure, never applied for food stamps, never had to choose between feeding my children or paying the rent, and never feared I’d lose my paycheck when I had to take time off to care for a sick child or parent. I’m not thrown into crisis mode if I have to pay a parking ticket, or if the rent goes up. If my car breaks down, my life doesn’t descend into chaos. But the fact is, one in three people in the U.S. do live with this kind of stress, struggle, and anxiety every day.  → Read More

A Woman’s Nation has released “The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink” in partnership with Center for American Progress. The report is a groundbreaking investigation into the millions of women who are doing it all and barely scraping by, struggling to provide and parent in a nation that hasn’t kept pace with the modern realities of their lives.  → Read More