Check out Invisible Child, the New York Times’ incredible five-part series on the life of Dasani, an eleven-year-old living with her parents and siblings in the Auburn Family Residence, a decrepit city-run shelter for the homeless in New York. Called “gut-wrenching” and “eye-opening” by many and characterized by its emotional (and largely positive) reader response, the series offers an unflinching look at modern poverty and the challenges faced by those living in it.

• Part One – Girl in the Shadows: Dasani’s Homeless Life
• Part Two – A Future Rests on a Fragile Foundation
• Part Three – A Neighborhood’s Profound Divide
• Part Four – Finding Strength in the Bonds of Her Siblings
• Part Five – Reasons to Dream

To learn more about the creation of the series itself, check out the excerpt below:

Andrea Elliott’s moving and exhaustively reported five-part series, “Invisible Child,” was 15 months in the making. At 28,738 words, and accompanied by affecting images by Ruth Fremson, a staff photographer, this story of a homeless girl in Brooklyn is the largest investigative project that The Times has run all at once.

Ms. Elliott told me Thursday that, after writing for years about Islam, she became interested in a new subject, the human effects of the Great Recession. When she came across the statistic that one in five children in the United States is living in poverty, “I found it stunning.” She had also written about the children of those who died on Sept. 11, 2001, she said, and “I had learned a lot about grief.”

Full article on the “behind-the-scenes” of Invisible Child here.