One of our plenary speakers from the 2011 conference was Isabel Sawhill from the Brookings Institution. In this piece she covers the cumulative disadvantages that children living in poverty must surmount. Quoting from her article, "A growing body of evidence suggests that the United States, far from being the land of opportunity celebrated in our history and our literature, is instead a country where class matters after all, where upward mobility is constrained, especially among those born into the bottom ranks."