No Price Tags: These Neighbors Built Their Own Economy Without Money

Neighborhood Centers, a Houston anti-poverty program has a simple philosophy: “The people are the asset, the source of potential solutions, not the problem.” The non-profit has scaled nationally, employing its bottom-up approach to disburse funds in poor communities.

If you've got a life-threatening medical condition, your first call might not be to an economist. But Alvin Roth used a theory about matching markets to help connect kidney patients and donors.

At least 25 percent of female veterans were sexually abused in childhood, making it more difficult to reenter civilian life. Volunteers of America runs a holistic housing program for homeless veterans in the U.S.

The H.I.V. infection rate in San Francisco dropped drastically after the city increased testing and created programs like Rapid, which immediately offer public health insurance, antiretroviral drugs, and personal counselors for people with AIDS.

For decades, AIDS has taken the lives of millions of people and infected millions more worldwide. The key to reducing the effect of AIDS, and even potentially curing it, involves treating patients as early as possible after being diagnosed with HIV, before the disease damages organs. San Francisco General Hospital developed the RAPID program for this purpose, with the goal of “Getting to Zero” the number of new infections and deaths.

A prosthetist from Texas visiting Jaipur Limb workshops in Honduras saw problems with their low-cost prosthetics - the issue wasn't the design of the leg, but the technicians at the Honduras workshops were people completely new to prosthetics who were given just eight weeks of training. Thanks to his research, Jaipur established a research and development unit to improve the limb.

Studying the outcomes of public health delivery can lack a scientific methodology. MIT economists have applied the methodology of randomized controlled trial (RCT) to study the effect of the Medicaid expansion plan in Oregon. These researchers look into how the new healthcare coverage affects clinical outcomes, emergency-room use, and employment.

In Honduras, tens of thousands of people have hearing disabilities. The National Autonomous University of Honduras has developed software that converts spoken language into an avatar on the computer who signs for the hearing impaired. Teachers in classrooms can teach hearing impaired students with this new software.

Native American student graduation rates are much lower than that of any other demographic. The Red Cloud school teaches students on a reservation in South Dakota about the Lakota history to empower the kids and encourage resilience.

The Aboriginal community in Australia is 31 times more likely than other Australians to die of alcohol-related causes. Could a "tough love" approach stressing accountability and making rehab mandatory work? Or is further restricting access to alcohol for everyone a better approach?