Children
Poverty Movement Loses a Champion
Published August 28, 2009 @ 05:03AM PT
While the death of Senator Edward Kennedy will give media types something to do in the waning days of August, one topic will probably get little coverage--poverty.
Despite his silver spoon, Ted Kennedy championed poverty issues. Perhaps he took his older brother seriously when Jack challenged,
"For of those to whom much is given, much is required."
Despite his many foibles, Teddy seemed to reach for this scriptural mandate. And he astutely observed,
No one who works for a living should live in poverty.
Is the end of this Kennedy era the end of compassion? Will someone, perhaps another Kennedy, grab the end poverty flag and charge up the Hill?
1 in 5 Americans are Poor
Published August 22, 2009 @ 11:34AM PT
As summer melts away and non-profit organizations gear up for a difficult fall, anti-poverty activists need an accurate picture of just how tough it is out there. Following up on Greg's great post from Thursday that captured the growth of hunger nationwide, we offer now a quick summary of the latest recessionary figures:
- 37.3M people were living below the official poverty line in 2007; 2008 should see another 1.5M added, for a statistically significant growth to 12.7% of the population. Experts anticipate an even worse result by the end of '09, and estimate we could hover around 15% of the population officially considered living in poverty. Even acknowledging how outdated this poverty measure is, we have not counted 1 in 7 people living in poverty since the recession of the early 1990s. And if historical census figures that include the "near poor" are anything to go by, we can expect 1 in 5 people, or 20% of Americans, to be living in or near poverty by the end of this year.
Empower Women, End Poverty
Published August 21, 2009 @ 11:00AM PT
If you haven't yet read the series on women and poverty at The New York Times, I highly recommend adding it to your weekend reading list. The paternalistic on-line title notwithstanding, the collection of articles details the collective economic improvements in poor communities and households resulting from investing in women's and girl's education, health, bodily safety and autonomy, and work opportunities. The focus of the issue is mainly on the developing world, where the majority of the world's poor - and poor women - live. This is always somewhat frustrating for domestic anti-poverty activists, as if our nation is a haven of gender equity and parity. Nonetheless, there's some important lessons on education, policy and power for those of us fighting for equality and an end to poverty stateside.
Incarceration Hurts Kids Most
Published August 21, 2009 @ 05:12AM PT
NYT columnist Nicholas D. Kristof strikes a resounding note of common sense in his "Priority Test: Health Care or Prisons" column,
It’s time for a fundamental re-evaluation of the criminal justice system...so that we’re no longer squandering money that would be far better spent on education or health.
Kristof makes a strong case for education over incarceration, something that resonates common sense, especially considering the devastating effects of poverty, homelessness, incarceration and the like on both parents and the kids of incarcerated parents.
First Create the Poor
Published August 14, 2009 @ 05:00AM PT
Of all the good poverty articles and blogs I've followed, nothing unleashed a flurry of comments like Barbara Ehrenreich's recent NYT op-ed, Is It Now a Crime to be Homeless? On my Facebook page, Arise for Social Justice founder Michaelann Bewsee posted a reflection that she gave me permission to re-post. I realize some, especially service providers (kind and not), will take offense. Don't. Many thanks to Michaelann for sharing her thoughts - and her poetry - with us here.
MICHAELANN: Twenty-five years ago, at the end of a very bad day, my mother called to tell me she'd been denied fuel assistance-- $8 over the annual allowed income. She was a recent widow, dying from a chronic disease, whose children still at home worked low-wage jobs, and I knew she struggled every day to pay rent and meet other basic necessities. When we hung up, words came to me that became a line of poetry, and then the next line, and the structure of a poem quickly took shape. When I finished writing that poem, I was ready to go something, ready to fight against the systems and prejudices that oppressed people, although my knowledge about these things at the time was perhaps more intuitive than intellectual. A few months later, I found the other women with whom we would form Arise for Social Justice.
Survey on Classroom Hunger
Published August 13, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
(Hello everyone, Greg here. This week I'd like to feature a guest post by Stephanie Keller from the nonprofit group Share Our Strength. The organization is asking teachers who have experienced child hunger in their classrooms to fill out a short survey to help Share Our Strength document and raise awareness about hunger in the classroom. If you're a teacher, please fill out the survey (link below). If you have teacher friends or colleagues, please forward this to them. Thanks in advance for all that you do!)
Every day, in classrooms across America, teachers witness the devastating impacts of hunger on the children they serve - problems that we might see as behavioral, teachers know are often the result of children not eating breakfast that morning or dinner the night before. We hear from teachers across the country that more children come to school hungry on Monday morning than any other day of the week, because they didn't eat enough over the weekend.
This summer, Share Our Strength is talking with teachers across the country about child hunger in their classrooms, and we need your help. Through a project called Hunger in America's Classrooms: Share Our Strength's Teacher Report, we hope to raise awareness about child hunger in America and build a movement of Americans dedicated to ending it.
Prison the New Public Housing
Published August 10, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Affordable housing advocates, esp. pro-public housing folks like myself, spend a lot of time comparing the various subsidized housing options out there: public housing, Section 8 vouchers for renting in the private market, tax-credit funded housing built by non-profit developers. Turns out, we've been miscalculating by half the 4-6M or so units these different options provide, because we've been leaving out a major new source of publicly subsidized housing for the poor: Prison!
Yep, according to Ehrenreich's latest missive in the NYT (see our previous coverage of her series here and here), "the same number of Americans — 2.3 million — reside in prison as in public housing."
Ehrenreich wonders if the collision of rising extreme poverty and excess criminalization and incarceration policies will lead us to descalate both - resorting instead to humane treatment of the poor and a move away from criminalizing low-income people as, she fears, disgustedly, a revenue source in this extreme recession. I'd add the masses find it morally uplifting to torment the poor during tough economic times, as it reassures us with a strong "us" vs. "them" dichotomy and gives us a sense of control of the more chaotic zones of life, given we can't seem to stop the corporate pillaging going on above us.
I too wonder if sheer economic necessity will work in our favor differently, by leading to de-crowding of prisons and cessation of expensive housing demolition and development programs. Of course, our desire to clamp down on "concentrated poverty" and its alleged ills bodes differently for prisons versus public housing. Dispersal strategies suddenly seem a lot more worrisome when we're casting offenders into the winds.
Most importantly, reversing these punitive, cruel, expensive cycles really requires to see the poor as human beings like us, our brethren, locked in a similar struggle for economic stability and justice. It requires a framework that focuses less on poverty alleviation and more on poverty eradication. It requires a common framework that embraces all of us. Gee, I wonder what that could be...
(Photo of Fremantle Prison, a decommissioned prison in Australia, by amandabhslater)
