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.