International Movement ATD Fourth World is an international non-governmental organization dedicated to overcoming extreme poverty. Its goal is to foster partnership with families in persistent poverty and other citizens and has been working in partnership with parents and children living in extreme poverty for 50 years. Our priority is to ensure that the poorest members of society - in the Global North and South - are able to participate fully in society at every level. ATD Fourth World also established the Tapori children’s network to develop friendship among children from different social backgrounds as a way of fighting chronic poverty.

To participate in the United Nations stamp competition “We Can End Poverty” ATD Fourth World and the Tapori network mobilized children from diverse backgrounds. In New York, local members participated through a weekly ‘Street Library’ program, which has grown out of ATD’s conviction that the most effective way to support children to break out of the cycle of poverty is to nurture their desire to learn and to assist in the development of their creativity, maintaining a focus on those children who are the most excluded. The children of Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, decided to collaborate on an entry for the stamp competition as a means of showing that poverty can only be ended when all people work together. The children explained their entry by stating: “We made this together out of words and pictures. We want to show what is important to us to live.”