In 1989, Ms. Byer initiated an outreach program called Lift, which brings disadvantaged children to her ballet school for a week of of classes.
America's history of bringing disadvantaged groups into the economic mainstream over time, and the progress of other nations in education, suggest that large steps forward are possible".
Service providers and employers should understand that the responsibility we all have to bring the disadvantaged back into our society is a face-to-face personal responsibility.
She believed that "if a child can read, they can think, and if a child can think they are free", and in the few days before she died she set up the Siobhan Dowd Trust, which helps to bring books to disadvantaged children and to which her book royalties and prizewinnings go.
It was a unique program, bringing together talented disadvantaged kids from all over the country for a summer of study on the campus of the Yale Divinity School.
In a continent faced with an economic crisis, soaring unemployment and bursts of nationalist populism, the elementary school here in eastern Slovakia is a microcosm of one of Europe's biggest challenges: how to keep old demons of ethnic scapegoating at bay and somehow bring its most disadvantaged and fastest growing minority into the mainstream.
El Sistema was set up almost forty years ago by José Antonio Abreu, a musician, economist and former cabinet minister, as a social programme to bring Venezuela's disadvantaged youth off the streets and into musical ensembles to enrich their lives and promote social mobility.
A wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to bring Reading Rainbow to disadvantaged students raised more than $5 million from more than 100,000 donors.
But there is at least one story that gives reason for hope for the Senate fight: The story of how an unlikely coalition successfully pushed to include key provisions in the bill - provisions that will bring economic opportunity to disadvantaged communities.
How can it be that people who went into politics to help the unfortunate and the unrepresented have ended up supporting an austerity programme that is grinding down the disadvantaged without bringing the promised recovery?
