I’ve seen a lot of hardship. It’s written on the faces of the nearly 1 million people we serve every year — the hardship of living without a roof, in poor health or hungry. They’re the faces of poverty, and they’re at the center of what seems like an endless debate over how, when — and if — we can offer them the opportunity to lead safe, stable and healthy lives.
Answering the question of “how” is perhaps the thorniest part. We’re a nation divided, with one side advocating for government intervention to resolve the poverty crisis, and the other demanding the poor stabilize their lives on their own. It’s a question of personal responsibility, the latter side says. I couldn’t agree more.
The dedication to fighting poverty is indeed a matter of personal responsibility for every one of us. We have the responsibility to remember that fulfilling basic needs like housing, safety, health and food isn’t a privilege; it’s a right. We have the responsibility to remember that we’re all in this together and that nobody makes it alone. It takes all of us to end poverty, including the government.
Our representatives are the ones we trust to work in our best interests and help us build the kind of country where the American Dream can thrive. It’s also their job to listen to their constituents and create policies that meet the needs of everyone, including those who live in poverty.
That doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Legislators reach out to organizations like Heartland Alliance, relying on our wealth of experience to guide their decisions. We need to work together to build programs, policies and communities that support people as they reach for a way out of poverty.
As we work to identify routes out of poverty, though, I often see us as a nation thinking in terms of transactions, specifically those between the government and those in poverty. We feed people. We give them a home. We give them financial means. Job done. It’s much more complex than that.
Poverty isn’t a set of symptoms. It’s a complicated and interwoven fabric that traps people. Handing people things that meet their needs isn’t enough. We need to offer real opportunities for people to build their own path out of poverty and connect them to the building blocks of a safe, stable, healthy life: housing, health care, jobs and justice. Each person needs to make a plan unique to his or her needs. That’s why government intervention alone isn’t enough to end poverty. It simply cannot work on such a granular level.
Social service agencies can, though. We know what our communities need to escape poverty, and that’s what we offer. The partnership involving government, social services, individuals and communities isn’t one of charity. It’s one of the long-term solutions to long-term problems. It takes us all to create them.
