The keynote speakers at the North American Vincentian Family Gathering April 16-19, Allison Boisvert and Eddie Friel present insights into different but deeply inter-related dimensions of “systemic change” – the personal and structural.
This week we will feature Allison Boisvert who grew up on an Indian reservation, had children, got married, and developed a heroin habit. So she had extensive first hand experience as a “consumer” of social services. Then the welfare agent gave her a choice: she could kick the habit and get her G.E.D. or risk losing her children. She got her diploma.
What made it possible for her to break out of the mental systems of poverty?
“Like so many recovering types, I went into the business that cured me and I worked with the generationally impoverished in many forms,” Boisvert said
“To be impoverished in the richest country in the world is to be an internal alien, another culture that is radically different from the one that dominates society,” … The generationally poor are usually as confined by their poverty as if they lived in a maximum security prison.” She points out that ‘It may be easier to write a check, but just imagine the loneliness of being given a handout, of not being considered human.”
” I’ve also watched the development and the final institutionalization of a permanent underclass in the richest country in the world.
What made it possible for her to break out of poverty? A popular speaker, she has addressed issues such as.
- Changing the psychology or mental systems that keep people in poverty.
- How those who are poor, the middle class and the upper class use them same words but understand and value them quite differently.
- Forming relationship with people as a powerful tool in personal systemic change? “The prime motivator for people in poverty to get out is relationships. “
- What do Vincentians need to know about the differences between Situational poverty and Generational poverty and their underlying psychologies?
Next week we will feature the other speaker, Eddie Friel who was the lynch-pin in the revitalization of a major European city from a cultural under-belly to a model of economic development.
Tags: Boisvert, Featured, Friel, poverty, Poverty Analysis, VFG, Vincentian Family
Is it possible to get a copy of this lady’s presentation, think it would be very useful, even to use parts of it as a spiritual reflection.
Thank you
SVP Oriel Region, Ireland
Contact information
Please direct any questions regarding Vincentian Family Gathering to:
Sr. Catherine Mary Norris, DC
Mater Dei Provincialate, 9400 New Harmony Road, Evansville, IN 47720-8939
Phone: 812-963-7537
Fax: 812-963-7589
E-mail: cmnorris(at)doc-ecp.org
♦ Assistant (Linda Tieken): ltieken(at)doc-ecp.org
EARLY Registration Fee THRU 3/16/09: $145 ♦ Day Rate Friday & Saturday: $65 Per Day
Registration Fee AFTER 3/16/09: $160 ♦ Day Rate Friday & Saturday: $70 Per Day
REGISTRATION CLOSES: APRIL 6, 2009
Please return by March 31, 2009; send check payable to Daughters of Charity.