About a year ago, I began following Poverty News Blog that covers issues ranging from Indonesian women migrating to other countries for work to monitoring progress on the Millennium Development Goals and grandmothers organizing in Swaziland.

The volunteer behind this effort is Kale Seagraves, a voice over specialist in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who describes himself as a Christian and dissident. Kale scans for articles from dozens of sources like The Guardian, Reuters, The New York Times and CNN, as well as lesser known media, and picks articles he feels are important to those of us following both U.S. and global poverty issues. I asked Kale a couple of questions:

Q: What are you trying to accomplish with it?

Seagraves: We simply hope to shed more light on a dark topic, to lend our voice to the many advocates for the poor…we are trying to give more exposure to the good, worthy stories that the media does on the subject of poverty.

Q: How did you get the idea to do this?

Seagraves: I saw other blogs that collected news stories on other topics. We were especially fans of the site called the Religion News Blog. We also came across similar news blogs on maternal health and humanitarian aid.