I have been writing articles on LinkedIn about Poverty Informed Practice since the summer of 2018. But of course, I've been engaged with this issue of poverty for much longer than that. When I think about it, I am struck by the number of angles I have examined it from. I have my own lived experience of course, but that just reflects my own situation. In addition, I have seen poverty intersecting with education across the spectrum starting as a student, and then in my own career. In my 20's I spent time as a daycare aide and teacher, serving people at lots of levels of income, while living in poverty myself as did most of my co-workers. I also spent four years chasing a dream of being a college basketball coach, but forgot to graduate from college. I then did what a lot of former poor kids do, I became a teacher and spent time seeing what elementary schools looked like through the lens of poverty as well. I was also a coach at the high school, so I spent time with kids of all ages. After a short time in K-12, I made the move to the two year college sector, where I spent the next two decades as an instructor, grant coordinator, associate dean, dean, and finally vice president. And most recently, I transitioned to working in low-income neighborhoods for my local K-12 district as a Community Impact Coordinator where I get to be in close proximity to people living the challenges of the crisis of poverty every day. Given all that, I thought I could share a few (if you read me regularly, you know it will be three) reflections after a lifetime of wrestling with the issue of poverty.
First, we spend a lot of time working from deficit models. This is born directly from the long standing belief in our culture that if you are poor, it is your fault. Blaming the poor for their poverty isn't new, it dates back to at least the English Poor Laws of the 1500's and probably well before that. We treat poverty as a character flaw and all too often this appears in how we try to address the issue. We perform "needs and assets" surveys, but our conversation is all about the needs. Or we describe our work as "additive" rather than "deficit-minded", but this is just semantics, the solution is to add what is supposedly missing. This kind of thinking keeps our work focused on the individual, rather than the systemic barriers that create and perpetuate poverty. Think about it, if the solution to escaping poverty was just a correct set of behaviors, we would have identified and taught those behaviors long ago. So, I think we need to work from a strengths based place with individuals, and work on the deficits of the systems which prevent them moving ahead. Which leads to observation number 2...
The whole system is rigged. This point was made in a very lengthy and thoughtful article I saw today in the New York Times Magazine. You can read it here https://rb.gy/oaevoo. It is a great examination of why money alone alleviates poverty but not as well as we want. Systems are set up to exploit the poverty of individuals. This includes bank fees, payday lending, exorbitant housing costs paired with a lack of public housing and multiple other systems which conspire against moving people out of crisis and into stability. These systems are so deeply ingrained, we struggle to even see them at times. When you combine invisible systemic barriers with a history of making poverty an individual failing, you get the feelings of hopelessness I observe again and again. People are trapped in a system, but when they complain they are accused of just not working hard enough. It reminds me of my friend who talked about going to the grocery store with her EBT card. She said that if her cart was filled with treats, she ran the risk of someone accusing her of eating junk on their dime, but if she stocked up with fresh produce and other higher priced foods, she would hear comments about how it must be nice to have the government pay for food others can't afford. It is a great example of the no win situation poverty so often is. For those of us working with people trying to work their way out, it would serve us well to acknowledge this reality at least. Beating a rigged system is hard. Which, in turn leads to observation number 3...
My advice to all of us working in this sector is, get over yourself. I don't mean that we don't have good intentions but after 20 years of looking at this issue, its complicated and takes all of us working together. K-12 can't do it alone. Colleges can't do it alone. Social Services can't do it alone, and very rarely can individuals do it alone. As I grow and learn about collective impact, it is clearer to me every day that our parochial interests and sense of how "special" we are in each of our sectors does not matter to people in the crisis of poverty. It is irrelevant to them, and on occasion incomprehensible. We need to let our agencies play to their strengths and we need to make things seamless for those we serve. This may mean letting go of our pet project or of being recognized as THE reason someone else succeeds. The other way we need to get over ourselves refers back to observation number one about doing real asset work. All too often we define "success" for people in poverty by seeing how much closer they are to acting like us. There is nothing magical about middle class values, they are just the dominant values. We need to get over ourselves, see the strengths in the people we serve, and aid them in building on those strengths in ways that work for them, not necessarily what reflects us.
Early on when I was trying to move my campus to be action oriented and move beyond awareness of poverty, I was very focused on food access issues. And at the same time I was on fire about pantries and grab and go food, my hero Sara Goldrick-Rab was writing and tweeting things like "we aren't going to food pantry our way out of this problem." It made me a little frustrated and defensive at the time, but I totally get it now. In my community impact work, there is a lot of focus on food drives, coat drives, and access to other necessary services. These are all important and required, but they aren't solutions to poverty. They are mitigation. Mitigation matters, but it doesn't do very much to solve root cause issues. We can expand and grow food pantries and someone won't be hungry that day or week, but we aren't dealing with why they are hungry in the first place. So Dr. Goldrick-Rab was right. You can see again, we make poverty an individual problem, and that is corrosive. People in poverty are conditioned to believe they did something wrong, and are treated like they did as well. The system feels rigged, because in many ways it is. And because we treat poverty as an individual problem, we use fragmented solutions when we need collaborative collective impact. So, those are my reflections today, and I hope they might make you reflect as well. We have so much work to do, and I for one am far from giving up.