Diagnosis: Poverty author Marcella Wilson has been busy! Last year the creator of the Transition to Success (TTS) program coauthored the paper “Child Poverty, Toxic Stress, and Social Determinants of Health: Screening and Care Coordination,” which was published in The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing.

Transition to Success forms the basis for the Driving the Dream initiative of United Way of the Mid-South. United Way of the Mid-South hosted Wilson recently in Memphis, where she spoke about her approach to urban poverty.

“Poverty is not a character flaw. It is an environmentally based, treatable, diagnosable condition,” Wilson said Thursday. “What I did was develop the first standards of care to treat it as such,” Wilson says in this article from The Daily Memphian.

The Driving the Dream program is the largest implementation of Wilson’s work in the country, and she grateful for the opportunity.

“This is a gift, and people here are just so incredible. And they get the importance of collaboration.”