White Courtesy Telephone

Rethinking Poverty

A doff of the hat to my colleague Barry Knight for his recent book, Rethinking Poverty: What Makes a Good Society? In the US, we live in a society where few public officials are ever elected for being champions for the poor* (hence all the coded references to “working families”), and in which the art of blaming the poor for their low estate, while widely practiced, is still ugly and unrefined. Nowadays it takes a special kind of person to bring up the subject at all.

Mr. Knight is special in that way. He’s also writing about the UK.

It turns out that the UK had its own “Great Society” experiment in the post-war era and that, like ours, it foundered. The limited success of anti-poverty programs; the ascendancy of free market economics; the stirrings of the “me society”—these and other factors created fresh openings for attacks on Britain’s welfare state, attacks that continue to this day. Mr. Knight uses data from surveys and focus groups to provide a sketch of “the society we want”—a society, not surprisingly, free of poverty—and to suggest a way forward that does not rely heavily on state or philanthropic actors.

Putting differences of context aside, we can draw at least four lessons from his book:

What was achieved can be easily undone.   In the UK, as in the US, hard-won protections for children and others in poverty can evaporate in a single election. How do we shore up gains while we still have them?

Fairness resonates.  In a 2015 YouGov survey of 10,112 adults in England, Scotland, and Wales, “fairness” rated above “freedom,” “equality,” and even “prosperity” as a desired quality of a good society. Ape experiments also suggest that a sense of fairness might be “hard-wired” and thus provide a basis for uniting people across class, gender, race, and other differences.

Good societies—at least better ones—are in plain sight.  Other countries have done and are doing a better job of providing a social safety net, welcoming immigrants, reducing gun violence, conducting fairer elections, reducing health care costs, etc. How do we build the political will to follow their example?

Philanthropy is largely beside the point.   It was refreshing to read a book supported by a philanthropic trust in which so little weight is given to the role philanthropy might play in imagining and ushering in the good society. The next $10 million philanthropic initiative to end poverty will not save us.

In classic Liberalism, the role of the state was to provide a framework of laws under which individuals could prosper by pursuing their own vision of the good. Neoliberals subsequently tilted the playing field in favor of “free market” actors, however significant the damage they might do to social cohesion and other values. In the US, the neoliberal line has now metastasized into a kind of balls-out, post-truth plutocracy that deals with poverty by gleefully shredding the social safety net and jailing its victims. It’s comforting to know that in the UK a book like Mr. Knight’s still has a prayer of a fair hearing.

----

* Close to a word-for-word quote from a former DC Councilmember. Things gets worse as you move from local to state and national politics.

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Class Struggle in the Third Sector: Still Messing With the Poor

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This post is the second in a series dedicated to raising questions about the role of class in the Third Sector. It was originally published in July of 2009 but feels especially appropriate now in light of Trump’s and the GOP’s savage attacks on working families and the poor. You can find the first article in this series by clicking here.

1.

In an essay titled “Paper Mills,” Heather J. Hicks invites readers to witness her transformation from “rural class” ingénue to career academic.  She writes:

I escaped from the working class not when I first read Shakespeare or Foucault but when I first found others to discuss them with, when I took shelter with a class that insulates its financial vulnerability with a rich fabric of shared ideas.*

Her words moved me to reflect on my own experience of class mobility.  My mother, a Cuban immigrant, began her life in this country as a member of a class that it’s currently fashionable to call “the working poor.”  By the time I was twelve, we were unambiguously in poverty.

Forty years have passsed and now my memory of that time functions less as a mirror than as a lens.  Looking at my work in the nonprofit sector through that lens I see reasons for hope and caution—but mostly caution.

2.

I met recently with a group of funders interested in supporting community organizing in the South, and we started discussing the development of a strategy for our work.  One very wise woman agreed with the idea of developing a strategy but insisted that it come from the communities we aimed to serve.

I understood her caution.  My entire career I’ve struggled with grantmakers who thought they knew better but didn’t—myself included.  I confess to having frequently practiced sociology without a license.

On the other hand, let me assure anybody reading this post that the poor do not know how to change their basic condition any better than we do.  As I was growing up, no one in my immediate family, no one in our circle of friends, discussed systemic change around the dinner table.  I knew my mother was struggling to make ends meet in something between a meritocracy and a bare-knuckled plutocracy, but that’s as far as my analysis went.  Then, as now, it was generally well educated, middle class people earning salaries well above the federal poverty level who had a clearer idea of the ways in which power and privilege were brokered and maintained in this country.

Well educated, middle class people like me know how the system works (or at least we should).  We participate in it; and some of us, for reasons that are not always self-serving, are invested in its preservation.

3.

Moving from poverty to the middle class was like moving through a series of doorways, each leading to a new room with a new vista.  I remember clearly the first time I ordered a meal at a restaurant without feeling a pang of anxiety about its cost.  Further along, there was the time my partner and I lit a fire in our first home together.  I remember how uneasy I felt as I luxuriated in the warmth of that fireplace, watching the flames reflected in the beautiful oak floor of a house decadent enough to have a spare room.

The greater my net worth, the more insulated I became from the tragedies that visited the people I grew up with.  I was not one but many paychecks away from living on the streets.  A bad turn of health would set me back, but it wouldn’t force me to choose between buying my medications and paying my rent.

The more I had, the easier it became for me to accumulate even more.  This seemed to me the most perverse lesson of my movement from poverty to the middle class.

Money bought me confidence.  It bought me good dentition and clearer skin.  It bought me eloquence.  I was more likely to speak up because I knew the right words to use and in the right order.  It bought me an audience that would listen to whatever preposterous thing I had to say.

We tend to focus on the physical condition of the poor.  This is not insignificant.  But poverty is as much an internal prison as an external one.  Those who experience it may sit in their cells long after the doors have been thrown open and the inmates declared free.

4.

I know of a foundation that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to go on a “listening tour” of the communities it served.   After this significant investment of time and money, it concluded that “the poor were just like us”—that they wanted a good education for their children; decent, affordable housing; quality health care; and meaningful, well-paying jobs.  This foundation drew one additional conclusion: the poor, it appears, also wanted to participate actively in the decisions that affected their lives.  That is, they wanted to join neighborhood councils, serve on commissions, have more time to petition the mayor, and the like.

I never saw the transcripts that supported this last conclusion, but I found it suspect for many reasons.

Thus characterized, these low-income people didn’t seem real to me; they weren’t exhausted after 8, 10, or 12 hours of work.  They were instead super-beings able to work two shifts, go home to cook a meal for four hungry people, give quality time to their children, and then lead the charge at their town council meeting.

Like the “noble savages” of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, they had become screens upon which we projected ideal versions of ourselves.  Under the influence of our most darling theory of social change, the working poor lost their corporeality altogether.

5.

Who speaks for the poor?  We know the poor don’t always speak for themselves.  Recently in my city we hosted a conference titled Stepping Up: Creating a New Social Compact.  A compact, as we all know, is an agreement between two or more parties.  But it will not surprise the reader to learn that the poor, those who most often get the raw deal in these negotiated “agreements,” were nowhere in sight.  Ironically they were being represented by people like me who had struggled all their lives to forget what it was like to go without.

6.

I wish there were more people in the nonprofit and foundation sectors who would speak out about their experiences of having grown up in poverty.  It would be a good tonic.  I and others might be more likely to discard some of our questionable experiments in social engineering.  If I were able to see the poor neither as super-beings nor as eternal victims, I might gain a truer picture of how they sometimes participate in perpetuating their own misery.  I might spend less time feeding my sentimentalism and my self-righteousness, and more time feeding the hungry.

The next step for us is even harder.  It’s to admit that even with our privilege and our education, in spite of all the learned men and women at our beck and call, we typically haven’t the slightest clue about how to transform a system that not only keeps people in poverty but continues to create them in prodigious numbers.

_____

*Appearing in This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics From the Working Class, edited by C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law.

Unaccompanied Minors in Detention

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Given the current national debate on immigration, and given how little things have changed for unaccompanied minors in the past seven years, the WCT editors are republishing this October 2007 post written by WCT contributor Albert Ruesga shortly after his  visit to a detention center in Phoenix.

The mood in House 5 is somber.  Eight children ranging in age from 14 to 17, three of them girls, sit patiently as a young lawyer reviews their rights.  Several days or weeks earlier, the children, unaccompanied by family members, had been arrested along different parts of the U.S.–Mexico border attempting the dangerous crossing.  They were fleeing the poverty of their home countries.  They had come for work or to be reunited with their parents.

“How many of you are from El Salvador?” the lawyer asks them in Spanish.  Four children raise their hands.  “How many from Guatemala?”  Three more hands go up.

One young boy who looks a little taller and fairer than the others explains as best he can that he’s Romani—a Gypsy—but also speaks a little Romanian.  The advocate assures him he’ll be briefed later that day in his own language.  The boy neither smiles nor frowns, but folds his arms and looks past the pink and blue curtains into the brightly lit courtyard outside the window.  His eyes focus on a distant point as he struggles to piece together the meanings of the few words of Spanish he can recognize.

*                    *                    *

The children’s detention center in Phoenix is a series of squat, cinder block buildings with an adjoining soccer field and a small swimming pool, surrounded by a large metal fence.  The facility is managed by Southwest Key Programs, an Austin-based nonprofit.  Staff members, most of them women, do their best to care for the 130 children in their charge.

One of the most striking aspects of this facility is the complete absence of any Mexican children.  According to Aryah Somers, a staff attorney with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, there’s an agreement between Mexico and the United States that all Mexican nationals apprehended at the border will be immediately returned.  According to some reports, after being handed over to Mexican authorities, unaccompanied children have been dropped off in border towns in the middle of the night and left to fend for themselves.* Before coming to this facility, non-Mexican children might have spent days or even weeks in border jails.

Only two countries—the United States and Somalia—have failed to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

*                    *                    * 

The walls of House 5 are painted a dark blue and decorated with colorful maps and children’s drawings: a brown vase filled with shimmering red tulips; a bay of impossibly blue water surrounded by mountains; a young vagabond in a bright green sweater carrying a bundle on a stick.  In one corner, there’s a cardboard model of a steamboat painted pink and white, with orange trim.  A sign on the wall explains the etiquette of Reporting to the Teacher: look at the teacher, stay cool, tell what you saw, answer the teacher’s questions, say “thank you.”

A brightly painted phoenix hovers above the common area where the eight children sit quietly, listening to the advocate describe their rights.  Two of the young girls sit together, supporting one another; a third sits apart.  Five boys are spread evenly across two long sofas.

“How many of you know what human trafficking is?” asks the advocate.  The children stare at her blankly, so she explains the concept by telling the story of a young girl who asks a coyote to help her cross the border.  The coyote charges five thousand pesos, an impossible sum, but the young girl is able to scrape together a thousand pesos, promising to pay the rest later.  Unfortunately, the border crossing is botched and the young girl is arrested.  After some time spent in detention, she’s released into the custody of an aunt who’s a naturalized U.S. citizen.  The coyote telephones the young girl, demanding his four thousand pesos.  “But I was arrested!” she protests.  He’s unmoved and threatens to kill her family unless she pays.  He gives her a way out: he has a job for her, he says.  So she gratefully accepts the offer—after all, she had come to the United States to find work.  Things go well at first.  But soon she finds that no matter how hard she works, it’s impossible to reduce her debt to the coyote.  She thought she’d be working for a family, but instead finds herself in a house filled with strange men who abuse her.

The children’s eyes are glued to the sweet-faced advocate, their hands at their sides or folded on their laps.  None of them volunteers his or her story—this isn’t the time, and it’s always better not to say too much.

*                    *                    * 

I’m moved by what I see at the detention center, but even more by what I imagine these children suffered before they attempted their journey to el Norte.  I think of the struggles of children in my own country who grow up in extreme poverty, in surroundings that slowly wear away at their sense of self-worth.  I wonder how the young children in the detention center—some of whom never received a formal education—understand anything as abstract as a “right.”

What goes through their minds when the advocate shows them laminated photographs of the courtroom in which they’ll have their first hearing? of the kindly judge who speaks no Spanish? of the other judge who “has no hair and is a little more serious”?

I wonder about the national boundaries that none of us had a role in creating.  Can it be possible for our moral responsibility to extend as far as Brownsville, but no further south?

-----

* I have not been able to confirm these reports.

Image source: The Medical Journal of Australia

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Central American Minors Pushed North by Poverty, Violence, Hopes for Refuge

Lessons From The Undeserving Poor

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The motivation for distinguishing between the deserving and the undeserving poor is familiar to many who’ve been approached by a homeless person for a handout.  Will we give without condition? Will we draw a line at those who are visibly intoxicated, reasoning that these supplicants are inviting their own ruin? Will we brush off the request and opt instead to make a contribution to the local shelter? Even after we’ve responded in some way, will we feel we’ve done the right thing? Perhaps our rationalizations will seem a little cold, a little too far removed from what might otherwise have been a simple human response to a simple human need.

The distinctions we sometimes make between the deserving and the undeserving poor have a revealing history.  The first American colonies modeled their poor laws on Elizabethan systems of relief for the needy, where the primary division was between neighbors and strangers.  Your responsibility to those who fell on hard times extended to family members and neighbors.  If evil befell a sojourner, he was sent to his community of origin where, it was assumed, he would receive assistance.  Another distinction divided your struggling neighbors into two classes: the truly impotent and the poor who were able-bodied, believed capable of at least some kind of work.

This latter category was problematic for early policymakers.  Just as an acorn could, by slow degrees, transform into an oak, so could the category of the truly impotent shift through multiple shades of difference into the category of rogues attempting to game the system.  The imperative for drawing clear lines increased as we moved from helping the poor to managing them.

Other challenges were afoot.  In the early days of our republic, there were many poor who struggled privately with their need as a kind of unavoidable evil.  The community’s “paupers,” by contrast, received some kind of public assistance, and it wasn’t long before pauperism became associated in the public mind with moral degradation.  According to Michael Katz:

The redefinition of poverty as a moral condition accompanied the transition to capitalism and democracy in early nineteenth-century America.  It served to justify mean-spirited treatment of the poor, which in turn checked expenses for poor relief and provided a powerful incentive to work.  In this way the moral definition of poverty helped ensure the supply of cheap labor in a market economy increasingly based on unbound wage labor.  The moral redefinition of poverty followed also from the identification of market success with divine favor and personal worth. …

Persistent and increasing misery did not soften the moral definition of poverty.  Neither did the evidence available through early surveys or the records of institutions and administrative agencies, which showed poverty and dependence as complex products of social and economic circumstances usually beyond individual control.*

Over time the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor became deeply embedded in American culture, supported by Calvinist arguments in the antebellum period, by Darwinist arguments after the Civil War, and by the proponents of eugenics in the early twentieth century.  Within the very short span of my own memory, the undeserving poor have broken into the public consciousness as the “underclass,” as “welfare queens,” and, most recently, as Mitt Romney’s “47 percent.”

The labels have changed.  What have remained remarkably constant are the myths that cloud our understanding of poverty.  In an age when information is so freely available, when we stand to benefit from decades of excellent scholarship, we continue to misapprehend the structural and cultural causes of poverty.  We conflate structural arguments with radical denials of human agency.

There are other lessons for us in the story of the undeserving poor.  Some of these have to do with the question of who defines what constitutes an appropriate locus of philanthropic intervention.

In the same manner that elites reserve for themselves the privilege of drawing lines between the deserving and the undeserving poor, so too do their judgments determine what constitutes a “social problem” worthy of charitable investment.  It will be a rare community that wrestles with the distinction between the deserving and undeserving wealthy, or that launches a five-year philanthropic program to increase the elite’s feelings of solidarity with their less fortunate neighbors.  More often than not, philanthropy will be directed at fixing the poor, deserving or otherwise.

The homeless person asking for spare change intrudes on more than our physical space.  He brings before our eyes the dictates of our faith traditions, our responsibility to model good behavior for our children, our desire to act with decency.  At the same time, he surfaces our doubts about his bona fides, and here we are left without a clear script, reproducing on an intimate scale the ongoing, sometimes shrill, American debate about persistent poverty.

Experiences such as these can throw light on the gulf between our personal and our institutional responses to poverty.  Understanding these differences can, I believe, help make us better citizens, better champions of civil society, more fully aware of the frames we impose on our acts of giving, professional and otherwise.

-----

* The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare; Pantheon Books, 1989; p. 14.

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"Who Cares How 'Deserving' the Poor Are?"

How To Manage The Poor: The Bourbon Doctrine of Preemption

In this scene from Monsieur Vincent, the French chancellor summons Vincent de Paul to his well-appointed office to receive a valuable lesson in the management of the underclass.  Challenging the social and political structures that give rise to yawning disparities is out of the question.  But effective managers have many options.  For example, Bottom of Pyramid (BoP) consumers with “severely limited resources” can have their product awareness and demand appropriately “stimulated,” generating market rate returns for Impact Investors. In times of fiscal belt-tighetning, the poor can be persuaded to allow their unused organs to be harvested for the benefit of the more productive classes.  The bracing effect of the market will ultimately separate the winners from the losers, driving the latter to an early demise and thus relieving the strain on public coffers.  If we’re impatient, we can simply “disappear” the poor, putting out of sight a demographic that undermines our faith in the benevolence of market forces.  The goal is an uninterrupted flow of capital and goods, a sustained growth in the GDP.  And for this we need good order.  How to achieve it?  Best not to ask too many questions.

Chancellor:  The poor are multiplying and they’ve become a real threat.  Beggars everywhere!  And nowadays, if you don’t give them anything they threaten you.

 

Vincent de Paul:  They’re hungry.

 

Chancellor:  With my job, I have other kinds of hunger to appease! France is hungry, for safety, for order ... I’ve requested your presence here because I have some good news.  After your life-long dedication to them, you’ll be happy to hear that, in two days, there will be no more poor people!

 

Vincent de Paul:  How?

 

Chancellor:  It’s very simple.  They’re under arrest.

 

Vincent de Paul:  But poverty is not a crime.

Chancellor:  I’m afraid it very surely leads to it.  My job is to anticipate, and that’s what I’m doing.

 

 

The Other Persistent Myth About Hurricane Katrina

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As we approach the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I’m struck by two enduring misconceptions about the storm that I frequently encounter when I travel outside the Gulf South.

One of these is very familiar to my fellow New Orleanians: It’s the idea that what happened to the city during the time of Katrina was a “natural disaster.” As any schoolchild in the Lower Ninth Ward can tell you, fifty-three breaches in the federally constructed system of levees is anything but natural, especially when we consider that the storm failed to score a direct hit on the city, skirting it rather to the east.

The second misconception is equally troubling.  To understand it, we need to review some uncomfortable facts:

• 69 percent of black children can’t read at grade level in the 4th grade, compared with 29 percent of white children.  (That 29 percent of white children can’t read at grade level in the 4th grade is itself barbarous.)
• 1.46 million black men out of a total voting population of 10.4 million have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions.
• One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 is under correctional supervision or control.
• 45 percent of black children live below the federal poverty line (a bar that’s set embarrassingly low).
• The net worth of black families is $6,100; the net worth of white families is $67,000.
• Of black males born this year, 29 percent can expect to spend some time behind bars.  One in 14 black children has a parent in jail or in prison.  One in 20 black men is incarcerated, compared with one in 155 white men.  For every three black men in college, there are four in prison.*

Matched pair testing and other studies continue to demonstrate the pervasiveness of racism in hiring practices, in housing, in educational settings, and in other domains.

These are national statistics, not statistics for New Orleans proper.  Which brings me to the second great misconception about Katrina.

Outside of Louisiana I frequently encounter the notion that the inequities surfaced by Katrina were endemic to the South and that it took a disaster like Katrina to expose them.  This is wrong on both counts.

What happened was that a category 5 hurricane blew ashore and laid bare what was already in plain sight not only in New Orleans, but in many cities across the United States and indeed across the world. All we had to do was look and see.

Despite all the investments in the Gulf South since Katrina, despite all our hand-wringing and breast-beating, these inequities persist to this day.

Many New Orleanians are rightly committed to rebuilding “better than before.”  But what will this mean when it comes to our commitment to our most vulnerable neighbors?  Will a little bit of progress here and there lull us, as it’s done before, into accepting overwhelming inequities?

-----

* These statistics and others may be found at morehousemaleinitiave.com.

Messing With The Poor

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1.

In an essay titled “Paper Mills,” Heather J. Hicks invites readers to witness her transformation from “rural class” ingénue to career academic.  She writes:

I escaped from the working class not when I first read Shakespeare or Foucault but when I first found others to discuss them with, when I took shelter with a class that insulates its financial vulnerability with a rich fabric of shared ideas.*

Her words moved me to reflect on my own experience of class mobility.  My mother, a Cuban immigrant, began her life in this country as a member of a class that it’s currently fashionable to call “the working poor.”  By the time I was twelve, we were unambiguously in poverty.

Forty years have passsed and now my memory of that time functions less as a mirror than as a lens.  Looking at my work in the nonprofit sector through that lens I see reasons for hope and caution—but mostly caution.

2.

I met recently with a group of funders interested in supporting community organizing in the South, and we started discussing the development of a strategy for our work.  One very wise woman agreed with the idea of developing a strategy but insisted that it come from the communities we aimed to serve.

I understood her caution.  My entire career I’ve struggled with grantmakers who thought they knew better but didn’t—myself included.  I confess to having frequently practiced sociology without a license.

On the other hand, let me assure anybody reading this post that the poor do not know how to change their basic condition any better than we do.  As I was growing up, no one in my immediate family, no one in our circle of friends, discussed systemic change around the dinner table.  I knew my mother was struggling to make ends meet in something between a meritocracy and a bare-knuckled plutocracy, but that’s as far as my analysis went.  Then, as now, it was generally well educated, middle class people earning salaries well above the federal poverty level who had a clearer idea of the ways in which power and privilege were brokered and maintained in this country.

Well educated, middle class people like me know how the system works (or at least we should).  We participate in it; and some of us, for reasons that are not always self-serving, are invested in its preservation.

3.

Moving from poverty to the middle class was like moving through a series of doorways, each leading to a new room with a new vista.  I remember clearly the first time I ordered a meal at a restaurant without feeling a pang of anxiety about its cost.  Further along, there was the time my partner and I lit a fire in our first home together.  I remember how uneasy I felt as I luxuriated in the warmth of that fireplace, watching the flames reflected in the beautiful oak floor of a house decadent enough to have a spare room.

The greater my net worth, the more insulated I became from the tragedies that visited the people I grew up with.  I was not one but many paychecks away from living on the streets.  A bad turn of health would set me back, but it wouldn’t force me to choose between buying my medications and paying my rent.

The more I had, the easier it became for me to accumulate even more.  This seemed to me the most perverse lesson of my movement from poverty to the middle class.

Money bought me confidence.  It bought me good dentition and clearer skin.  It bought me eloquence.  I was more likely to speak up because I knew the right words to use and in the right order.  It bought me an audience that would listen to whatever preposterous thing I had to say.

We tend to focus on the physical condition of the poor.  This is not insignificant.  But poverty is as much an internal prison as an external one.  Those who experience it may sit in their cells long after the doors have been thrown open and the inmates declared free.

4.

I know of a foundation that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to go on a “listening tour” of the communities it served.   After this significant investment of time and money, it concluded that “the poor were just like us”—that they wanted a good education for their children; decent, affordable housing; quality health care; and meaningful, well-paying jobs.  This foundation drew one additional conclusion: the poor, it appears, also wanted to participate actively in the decisions that affected their lives.  That is, they wanted to join neighborhood councils, serve on commissions, have more time to petition the mayor, and the like.

I never saw the transcripts that supported this last conclusion, but I found it suspect for many reasons.

Thus characterized, these low-income people didn’t seem real to me; they weren’t exhausted after 8, 10, or 12 hours of work.  They were instead super-beings able to work two shifts, go home to cook a meal for four hungry people, give quality time to their children, and then lead the charge at their town council meeting.

Like the “noble savages” of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, they had become screens upon which we projected ideal versions of ourselves.  Under the influence of our most darling theory of social change, the working poor lost their corporeality altogether.

5.

Who speaks for the poor?  We know the poor don’t always speak for themselves.  Recently in my city we hosted a conference titled Stepping Up: Creating a New Social Compact.  A compact, as we all know, is an agreement between two or more parties.  But it will not surprise the reader to learn that the poor, those who most often get the raw deal in these negotiated “agreements,” were nowhere in sight.  Ironically they were being represented by people like me who had struggled all their lives to forget what it was like to go without.

6.

I wish there were more people in the nonprofit and foundation sectors who would speak out about their experiences of having grown up in poverty.  It would be a good tonic.  I and others might be more likely to discard some of our questionable experiments in social engineering.  If I were able to see the poor neither as super-beings nor as eternal victims, I might gain a truer picture of how they sometimes participate in perpetuating their own misery.  I might spend less time feeding my sentimentalism and my self-righteousness, and more time feeding the hungry.

The next step for us is even harder.  It’s to admit that even with our privilege and our education, in spite of all the learned men and women at our beck and call, we typically haven’t the slightest clue about how to change a system that not only keeps people in poverty but continues to create them in prodigious numbers.

_____

*Appearing in This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics From the Working Class, edited by C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law.

Social Entrepreneurship in the Time of the Tsars

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The Countess Apraxina recently directed me to this passage from Dostoevsky’s Demons (more commonly known as The Possessed).*  Clearly, bold, Third Sector visionaries encountered resistance even then!

[A]lthough Varvara Petrovna had in recent years become exceedingly economical, as they said, and even a bit stingy, still she could on occasion be unsparing of money for charity proper.  She was a member of a charitable society in the capital.  In a recent famine year she had sent 500 roubles to Petersburg, to the main committee for the receipt of aid for the victims, and this was talked about in town.  Finally, quite recently, before the appointment of the new governor, she had all but established a local ladies’ committee to aid the poorest new mothers in our town and in the province.  She was severely reproached among us for being ambitious; but the notorious impetuousness of Varvara Petrovna’s character, together with her persistence, nearly triumphed over the obstacles; the society was almost set up, and the initial idea broadened more and more in the delighted mind of the foundress: she was already dreaming of establishing a similar committee in Moscow, of gradually expanding its activities through all the provinces.  And then, with a sudden change of governors, everything came to a halt; and the new governor’s wife, it was said, had already managed to utter in society a few pointed and, above all, apt and sensible objections regarding the supposed impracticability of the basic idea of such a committee, which—with embellishments, of course—had already been passed on to Varvara Petrovna.

Did the governor’s wife object to her logic model? her plans for project sustainability?  Dostoevsky never says.  As Arthur Chapman once remarked, envy is like a fly that passes all the body’s sounder parts and dwells upon the sores.  The passage continues:

God alone knows what’s hidden in men’s hearts, but I suppose it was even with a certain pleasure that Varvara Petrovna now paused at the very gates of the cathedral, knowing that the governor’s wife would pass by presently, and then everyone else, and “let her see for herself how it makes no difference to me what she thinks or what further witticisms she may produce concerning the vanity of my charitable works.  Take that, all of you!”

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* Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, copyright 1994, and published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

Image source: University of Kansas

Labor Day 2007: A Rising Tide Lifts All Yachts

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Dear Fellow Workers:

Happy Labor Day!  It’s dry and sunny in my east coast village with just enough of a breeze to give my American flag a satisfying snap.

I’m writing because I heard money was a little tight for you.  I’m going to assume you’re making the current minimum wage ($5.85 an hour) and your tax rate is about 15 percent; your housing expenses, including utilities, are $832 per month; your food costs on the “Thrifty Plan” are about $34 per week; you take public transportation to and from work (about $12.50 each week, say); and you pay about $40 per month for the cheapest phone plan.  When I do the math I discover you’re already overspent by $2,631 for the year, leaving you imaginary dollars to buy clothes, do your laundry, and catch the occasional movie, never mind save for your retirement or visit that niece in Columbus.

You might consider ordering a copy of Preparing for a Financial Setback, a handy guide distributed by Northwest Airlines to its employees.  The four-page booklet contains suggestions such as shopping in thrift stores, taking “a date for a walk along the beach or in the woods,” and not being “shy about pulling something you like out of the trash.”

Fortunately, the news isn’t all bad.  Thanks in large part to your efforts, the richest one percent of Americans now earn 15 percent of all income and own 38 percent of all wealth.  There’s also been a boom in the building of mega-yachts, some as long as a football field, creating new labor markets for folks like us.  Low- and moderate-income people by the thousands are now able to start military careers in Iraq while helping to preserve our American way of life.

So suck it up.  And God bless America!

In Case Anybody Asks: Notes on the Report of the CAP Taskforce on Poverty

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This past April, and without much fanfare, the Center for American Progress released the final report of its Taskforce on Poverty.  The report, titled From Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half, lays out twelve recommendations the authors believe could cut poverty* in half over the next ten years.  Taskforce recommendations range from raising and indexing the minimum wage to promoting unionization to helping former prisoners reintegrate with their communities.  Omitted from the list of recommendations is any mention of universal health care, but who’s going to quibble with a plan that promises to reduce the ranks of the poor so dramatically?

You can download a copy of the report here.   The Poverty and Race Research Action Council invited a range of policy experts and activists to comment on the plan in its July/August 2007 newsletter, available here.

If the body of the Taskforce report provides food for thought, its “Next Steps” section makes for an unsatisfying end to the meal:

In 2009, we will have a new president and a new Congress. Across the nation, there is a yearning for a shared national commitment to build a better, fairer, more prosperous country, with opportunity for all.

There can, and should, be active debate about the best ways to reach a national goal of cutting poverty in half. We hope and believe there is a potential for people of differing parties, ideologies, and stations in life to come together in shared commitment to the goal.

At the same time, we need not and should not wait for the federal government to act. In communities across the nation, policymakers, business leaders, people of faith, and concerned citizens can come together to ask what they can do within their community and how they can join with others to seek a national commitment to cut poverty in half in 10 years …

Yes, I suppose they can. 

In his comments on the report, Herbert Gans, professor of sociology emeritus at Columbia University, calls this a bit of “consensual rhetoric,” pointing out, if I may paraphrase, that the American public doesn’t generally give a pig’s freckle about the poor.

If and when we hear that joyful tintinnabulation of the bells in 2009, will this report be remembered, I wonder?  Will it resonate with a polity that was all too quick to forget the more immediate and powerful promptings of Hurricane Katrina?

_____

* A family of four is considered poor if the family’s income is below $19,971.  By this standard, roughly one in eight Americans were poor in 2005; one in three had incomes below 200 npercent of the federal poverty threshold.

Image source: phillyringers.com

Class-Talk in the Third Sector

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Via Gift Hub : The American Ruling Class, a new documentary from Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham, will air July 30 and 31 on the Sundance Channel.  What follows is a reworking of an earlier post on the subject.

Discussions of socioeconomic class are rare and fleeting in the nonprofit sector.*  This is a great shame.  Thirty years ago, the powerful images and texts of American Pictures taught me the meaning of the word “underclass.”  I didn’t hear the word used again with any frequency until Hurricane Katrina blew ashore.

Nobody talks about the underclass anymore.

Foundations are fortunate to do their work largely independent of government and corporations (including the media).  They have a good chance of introducing the topic of class and sustaining the conversation.  Yet despite continuing reminders about the myth of class mobility in this country, and an oft-stated concern for low-income communities, there are significant barriers to engaging the topic:

1.  Race, not class, structures the primary American narrative of oppression   In their book Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s,  Omi and Winant write that

Historically speaking, the call for “class” unity across racial lines has amounted in practice to an argument that non-whites give up their racially based demands in favor of “class” unity on white terms.  This will not be achieved by appeals to “class unity” or by reliance on “bargaining power theory,” which merely offer an abstraction to minorities confronted by racial inequities in the workplace.

Likewise in the nonprofit world, class-talk is sometimes seen as a distraction from issues that are more clearly rooted in racial antipathy.

2.  Class-talk produces in some a mental cramp   Paul Kingston and his intellectual heirs have argued that American society is essentially classless.  These authors don’t deny that sociologists, political scientists, and others can usefully divide the American public into various income categories.  What they deny is the notion that the members of these categories share “life-defining experiences” that license our referring to them as members of a distinct, coherent class.  Make of this kind of argument what you will.  It reminds me of Bill Clinton’s narrow definition of “sexual relations.”

3.  Class-talk is impolite   Few topics will more quickly cast a pall over middle class dinner parties than the history of class struggle in the United States.  In 2003, the President effectively silenced the critics of his tax cuts by accusing them of fomenting “class warfare.”

How do we incorporate class-talk into nonprofit work in a way that doesn’t elide hundreds of years of racial oppression?  How do we bring the lived experience of the poor and working poor into institutions governed by middle class values and norms?  How do we dispel the myth that America is essentially a classless society?

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* Based on recent data from the White Courtesy Telephone Department of Armchair Sociology that conducted a mental survey on this subject approximately 45 minutes ago.

New Solutions to Old Problems

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Responding to MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton’s call to create a network of people committed to “building more just virtual and real worlds,” Chicago homeless advocates are planning to open two new hypothermia shelters in Second Life and move their administrative offices to There.com.

I think it’s about time direct service providers started being more forward-thinking.  They haven’t improved on the meal-and-a-bed paradigm in years.

Black and Brown on the Immigration Debate

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As we move closer to the 2008 presidential election, an increasing number of politicians and political operatives will attempt to use the immigration issue to drive a wedge between the Black and Brown communities.

Some will blame the hiring of low-skilled immigrants for the decline in employment among Black American men.  (A very thoughtful article by Bill Fletcher, Jr. at the Black Commentator addresses this issue.)  Others will point to longstanding tensions between African Americans and Latinos. 

But those of us inside and outside these communities need to resist the claim that it’s a zero-sum game.  We need to acknowledge the legacy of hundreds of years of slavery, colonialism, and other forms of oppression.  We also need to begin shifting our focus from the competition for low-paying jobs to guaranteeing a living wage and strong safety net for all Americans.  One immigration advocacy organization puts it this way:

As long as the “ladder” that allows different race and ethnic groups to, over time, climb into other employment opportunities (through training, employment, etc.) is broken, multiple groups will get stuck at and compete along the same rung – for the unskilled, non-stable and, for the most part, non-union jobs in the secondary sector.

According to a new study by the Economic Mobility Project, American men have less earning power today than their fathers did (when adjusted for inflation).  Workers are losing ground.  And we have yet to fully appreciate the links between the dynamics of labor markets in the United States and increasing globalization.

The more our Black and Brown communities are divided and conquered, the less likely they’ll be able to counter the larger forces eroding their earning and savings power.

Flu Shots: Blogging the Approaching Pandemic

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The Department of Health and Human Services is sponsoring a blog summit on preparing for the coming flu pandemic.  I agreed to participate after being assured that bloggers would not be censored and that all comments adhering to reasonable standards would be posted.  You can find influenza and bird flu resources here.  I cross-post my first submission below ...

As with most natural disasters, a flu pandemic will not be an equal opportunity killer.

The winds and rains of Hurricane Katrina buffeted the just and the unjust, the black and the white.  The storm wasn’t selective about the structures it destroyed.

But it didn’t affect all populations equally.  The poor, the elderly, and the infirm were hardest hit, populations least able to shelter properly, or flee, or recover from the storm’s devastating effects.

Likewise, while a flu pandemic can affect anyone, at any income level, those of us who are not already weakened by food insecurity, who have access to quality health care, who can afford to stay home from work to avoid infection—have a much better chance of surviving.

In 2004 there were 46 million uninsured people in the United States, most of them poor or low-income.  Eleven percent of U.S. households in 2005 were food insecure.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 6.4 million working poor in 2000; by 2003 that number had grown to 7.4 million.

I applaud the efforts of the Department of Health and Human Services to help Americans prepare for an influenza pandemic.  But as I see it, the most effective way to help those in the lowest income brackets prepare for this tragedy is to urge this and all Administrations to bolster—rather than dismantle—the safety net for the poor.

The President’s 2008 budget proposed deep reductions in domestic discretionary spending to continue financing tax cuts for those of us who are well-off.  According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

The discretionary programs in the budget subfunction known as “health care services” include community health centers, HIV/AIDS programs (for U.S. residents), maternal and child health programs, the Indian Health Service, substance abuse and mental health treatment ...  This subfunction is slated for $2.5 billion in cuts over the next five years, relative to the expected fiscal year 2007 funding level adjusted for inflation.  The cuts would reach $861 million, or 4.1 percent, in 2012.

The President’s budget also included a provision that would cut the Food Stamp Program by $740 million over the next five years, taking more than 300,000 low-income people off the program in an average month.

If we want to help all Americans prepare for the inevitable flu pandemic, what’s the sense in decreasing, rather than increasing, the resiliency of our most vulnerable neighbors?  What, if anything, did we learn from the experience of Hurricane Katrina?

Bill Schambra Replies

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Bill Schambra replies to my earlier post about his remarks at a recent meeting of foundation staffers and trustees on the subject of combatting poverty:

“Thanks for … including in your posting the picture of Mrs. Taylor and the link to Family House.  That’s one way she supports herself, along the lines of Ms. Wilde’s helpful suggestion that she rely on ‘development of local support for their work.’  So is committing every spare moment to pitching Family House to congregations and voluntary groups in the suburbs of Milwaukee, picking up a couple hundred dollars here and there, painstakingly putting together her annual budget in amounts that the average foundation spends every week on plant rental.

“Of course, she is in fact funded directly and indirectly by government in all sorts of ways—some of her residents are on SS or SSI, Family House itself receives some money through the state’s community-based senior facilities program.  Government should take care of seniors … government should take care of educating kids … government should do a lot of stuff.  The problem is it does a lousy job.  That’s why even the city police drop off homeless seniors at Family House in the middle of the night—they know she’ll take them without the incredible bureaucratic hassle that they get at the ‘official’ facilities. 

“Of course, she then has to fight like hell to complete the paperwork to get what the government owes her, and she’s been known to show up at the county offices where her reimbursements are backed up and threaten to camp out until she’s paid.  But hey, that’s just how government ‘guarantees the health and well-being of seniors by underwriting services for the elderly.’  Foundations can’t concern themselves with that.  With just one more comprehensive collaborative consortium, they’ll figure out the root causes of poverty among the elderly, and eliminate it once and for all.”

Bill Schambra is director of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal.

Schambra on Pointy-Headed Foundation Executives

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Sally Wilde, a retired philosophy professor and frequent contributor to White Courtesy Telephone, lives in Colorado where she blogs, tends to her six beautiful grandchildren, and earns beer money by waitressing at the Naughty Bits Internet Café.

I finally had the opportunity to read a transcript of Bill Schambra’s prepared remarks for a recent meeting of foundation staffers and trustees titled “Combatting Poverty.”  What a dear, funny little man—and I mean this only in the nicest way!  Mr. Schambra, as many of you know, was once senior advisor and speechwriter for U.S. Attorney General Edwin “Miranda rights only help guilty defendants” Meese.  He’s currently the director of the conservative Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal.

In his remarks, he waxes lyrical about Cordelia Taylor, founder and director of Family House, a small charity serving low-income seniors in Milwaukee.  Despite the fact that Ms. Taylor clearly does the Lord’s work, she’s been unable to attract the support of large foundations.  Why?  Because, according to Schambra,

Mrs. Taylor’s Family House, no matter how wonderful or inspiring, is a mere charity. And large, modern, sophisticated foundations don’t do charity. They do root causes philanthropy …

[T]his means that philanthropy becomes the province of the university-educated professional and the trained expert who have mastered [the social sciences]. Only they can design and execute programs of sufficient mass and complexity as to tackle all the intricately interrelated causal factors at the same time. In this view, nonprofit grantees are useful only insofar as they carry out the program as designed at foundation headquarters.

It’s a typical rhetorical move to strawman your opponent.  In this case the opponent is the faceless foundation executive who, in his entire pointy-headed career, will never achieve more than Ms. Taylor is able to accomplish simply by laying her hands on the fevered brow of one needy senior.  Schambra claims that nonprofit leaders like Ms. Taylor get the shaft because “[t]hey often foolishly rely on religious faith or other kinds of folk wisdom to sustain their energies and guide their work, because they haven’t taken those university classes on the causes and consequences of poverty.”

I’m surprised his prepared remarks didn’t spontaneously burst into flames.

Of course I commend him for championing community-based work.  Yet while I know of at least one Bradley Center publication written under his watch that recommends specific charities to donors (think tanks mostly), I would bet a large ring of baloney that none extols the virtues of Ms. Taylor’s Family House or anything like it.

Is it possible that this sweet-natured, God-fearing man* has turned Ms. Taylor into just another rhetorical device, the way politicians do at conventions when they point to a Mrs. Agnes Trout in the audience and describe how she overcame an enlargement of the thyroid?

Mr. Schambra knows that national foundations don’t generally fund the kind of direct service work that Family House does because many foundation leaders believe—rightly, in my view—that it’s the role of government, not the role of private philanthropy, to guarantee the health and well-being of seniors by underwriting services for the elderly.  These leaders also believe you can best help community-based organizations survive by encouraging the development of local support for their work.

The great irony, given all of Mr. Schambra’s rhetorical excesses, is that large foundations do in fact invest in the work of community-based organizations like Family House, sometimes directly and sometimes through regranting or capacity-building initiatives.  It would take only five minutes on the Internet for any suitably inclined think-tanker to do the necessary research—assuming, of course, that the truth of the matter were at all relevant to the issue, which I strongly suspect it is not.

Here’s an experiment you can try at home. Suggest to Mr. Schambra that because Ms. Taylor’s work is such a great public good, it should be supported by public dollars collected through taxes.  You can define a nanosecond as the interval between the moment you make this suggestion and the instant he cools noticeably to the idea of further championing her work.

_____

* According to a description given me by my colleague Albert who informs me that Mr. Schambra is rather tall and speaks with the authority of one who understands the importance of subordinating fact to principle.

Department of New Lows: Reality TV Goes Slumming

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Two new British reality shows transform the lived experience of poverty into a spectacle we can all enjoy in prime time:

On ITV’s “Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway,” needy—and sometimes not-so-needy—supplicants have 60 seconds to persuade a panel of five wealthy panelists to give them money. The other show, “The Secret Millionaire” … features self-made millionaires who go undercover and spend 10 days in a poor neighborhood looking for people who could use their charity.  At the end of the show, the millionaire reveals him- or herself and writes checks to the winners.*

Neither of these shows would, I believe, require much adjustment for American television audiences already fed on a steady diet of loutishness and self-abasement.  An American version of “The Secret Millionaire” would be especially appealing to some, leaving unchallenged the larger forces that drive people into poverty, and celebrating the playful beneficence of the more fortunate among us.

So grab a bowl of popcorn.  There are valuable lessons for the whole family in the humiliation of the poor.

_____

*“Philanthropy TV” by Robert Frank in the April 13, 2007, issue of the Wall Street Journal Online.