Putting poverty on the agenda - advocacy and grassroots
“There are always a lot of headlines about poverty the day that the data comes out, but then those headlines fade, and the problem hasn’t gone away. What we need is a sustained focus by the media and our elected officials, and we need advocacy groups and grassroots activists to keep making that push.”
“There is definitely a story going untold,” says Melissa Boteach, manager of Half in Ten, a national campaign to reduce poverty by 50 percent over the next ten years. “When you have 1 in 7 Americans living in poverty. 1 in 5 children living in poverty-including 1 in 3 African-American children and Latino children-and it’s not on America’s radar, something’s very wrong.”
But growing the antipoverty movement will require the media and elected officials to start paying more attention to those who are struggling, fighting and organizing. When the US Census published record poverty numbers for 2009 our warp-speed news cycle ran the headlines and then just as quickly moved on. The 2010 data which will be released in September will likely be even worse due to the sustained unemployment over 9 percent. Half in Ten and other advocates will be ready to speak to this moral, economic, and political crisis. But it remains to be seen who will listen, and for how long.
“There are always a lot of headlines about poverty the day that the data comes out,” says Boteach. “But then those headlines fade, and the problem hasn’t gone away. What we need is a sustained focus by the media and our elected officials, and we need advocacy groups and grassroots activists to keep making that push.”
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Do you believe poverty can  be cut in half in ten years? What dots need to be connected? How can Vincentians change the system? Speak out by clicking on the “Comment button near the title of this post.
Tags: Advocacy, Anti-poverty strategies, poverty, strategies, Systemic change