At Long Last, An End to Poverty?
While never one to succumb to blind optimism, I find myself heartened by a reenergized focus on ending poverty in America. The thoughtful and thorough presentations of what the nation must be willing to commit to doing if poverty is to truly become a thing of the past, is a sign of hope. From the Center on American Progress, to Sojourners · Call to Renewal, Catholic Charities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and with significant nods from several 2008 presidential candidates, analysis is flourishing and recommendations on how to deal with poverty are being offered up by important organizations and national thinkers. 
Sojourners · Call to Renewal calls its effort “From Poverty to Opportunity: A Covenant for a New America,” and declares that “poverty is the new slavery.” The Sojourners · Call to Renewal covenant urges the nation to make overcoming poverty “a nonpartisan agenda and a bipartisan cause” by addressing health care, hunger, education, housing, tax policy, immigration, violence (“violence correlates with the lack of hope and opportunity…”), and a host of other issues crying out for policy solutions to reduce poverty.
Catholic Charities “Campaign to Reduce Poverty in America” denounces poverty as “a moral and social wound on the soul of our country.” Catholic Charities is advocating a multiyear, multifaceted campaign that would engage the nation and its policymakers in efforts “to reduce poverty in the United States by 50 percent by the year 2020.”
The U.S. Conference of Mayors has issued a document called “Repairing the Economic Ladder: A Transformative Investment Strategy to Reduce Poverty and Expand America’s Middle Class,” that presents a series of recommendations that can lead to opportunities for people to move out of poverty and toward access to wealth. These recommendations include investing in high quality pre-K through college education, skills development for workers, and economic investment opportunities.
A book edited by Senator John Edwards, Ending Poverty In America (The New Press, 2007), draws on the wisdom and experience of academics and advocates whose essays offer recommendations for alleviating the scourge of poverty plaguing one of the world’s richest, most advanced countries. Some of the nation’s most prominent scholars, businesspeople, and community activists explain why poverty is growing and outline steps to weed it out.
I am most familiar with the comprehensive approach from the Center on American Progress, From Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half, having served as co-chair of the Center’s Task Force on Poverty along with Peter Edelman. The center’s recommendations would cut poverty in half over the next 10 years, the report says, if we adhere to four principles:
1) Promote decent work. If they can, people should work and work should pay enough so that workers and their families can avoid poverty, meet basic needs, and save for the future.
2) Provide opportunity for all. Children should grow up in conditions that maximize their opportunities for success; adults should have opportunities throughout their lives to connect to work, get more education, live in a good neighborhood, and move up in the workforce.
3) Ensure economic security. Americans should not fall into poverty when they cannot work or work is unavailable, unstable, or pays so little that they cannot make ends meet.
4) Help people build wealth. All Americans should have the opportunity to build assets that allow them to weather periods of flux and volatility, and to have the resources that may be essential to advancement and upward mobility.
These four principles are followed by 12 key steps to cut poverty in half:
As a long time proponent of the importance of integrating strategies focused on people with those focused on improving the environments where people live (place), I was pleased that equitable development was recognized as an essential part of a comprehensive approach aimed at eliminating poverty. This analysis was also included in the book by John Edwards—for which I authored a chapter called “Fighting Poverty with Equitable Development.
Next year, PolicyLink will host a national event for policymakers, community leaders, foundations, the business community, and all of us who believe that we can do better. The event, Regional Equity ’08: The Third National Summit on Equitable Development, Social Justice, and Smart Growth, will be a time to hear about successful efforts, learn lessons about what works and what doesn’t, and chart a course to the future that leaves poverty behind and secures opportunity, participation, and prosperity for everyone. The dates are March 5-7, 2008, and the location is New Orleans, Louisiana.
There could be no better place to hold such a gathering than New Orleans, whose cataclysmic demolition by storm and flooding was the prelude to the current conversation about poverty. New Orleans is also a place ripe for what equitable development can achieve, in abolishing the scourge of poverty and in ushering in a new day that promises equity to everyone, especially those living in low-income communities and communities of color.
I hope you’ll join me in New Orleans next year.
For more information about Regional Equity ’08: The Third National Summit on Equitable Development, Social Justice, and Smart Growth, go to http://www.policylink.org/Events/RegionalEquitySummits.html