Poverty, by America

Last month, Food Recovery Network had its annual Board retreat and I was privileged to be part of that esteemed gathering. Regina (Anderson) Harmon recommended that we read 'Poverty, by America' written by Matthew Desmond. After reading the book, I feel even more grateful to be involved with this amazing organization that does so much with food recovery and working with food insecurity in America. If you want to get involved, get in touch with me or read more on their site: https://www.foodrecoverynetwork.org/

If you have not read the book, I would highly recommend it! The author tries to answer a seemingly simple question: "Why is there so much hardship in this land of abundance?" In case you are wondering, poverty rates in the USA have stubbornly stayed in a narrow range of 12% - 15% of the population for the last 50 years. While it’s a heartbreaking book, it’s also a well written and researched book with hard facts and some thoughtful solutions.

Here are some facts the author has researched over decades:

-One in nine Americans and One in eight children live in poverty.

-38M people cannot afford basic necessities, more than 1M school children are homeless, and more than 2M Americans do not have running water or a flushing toilet at home.

-108M people live on <$55k per year, many stuck in that space between poverty and security.

-6M people are in prison or on parole. They are virtually invisible, and not counted in any surveys.

- The 2022 official poverty line is ~$14k/yr for a single person and ~$28k/yr for a family of four. Deep poverty is ~$6k/yr and $13k/yr for single/family and we have 18M Americans living in this bucket.

The author goes beyond the financial definition of poverty and provides a human definition. Poverty is physical pain (There are 2 amputations every week in our nation's meatpacking plants, 1 in 4 kids in poverty have untreated cavities, 30M Americans remain uninsured), it is traumatic (kids in poor neighborhoods have significantly higher rates of trauma and sexual abuse), it is instability (3.6M evictions occur annually, and most of these poor renter families spend 50% - 70% of their income on rent and utilities alone), and the list goes on and on.

He put a lot of myths about poverty into perspective and it was quite eye opening for me. We hear the 1-liners on our Welfare system, immigration, family structure & values, and education as ‘systemic’ reasons for poverty. The data on these issues was quite surprising to me.

America is a very bifurcated system with great jobs/incentives/innovation/stock options/career progression on the one hand and terrible jobs/low pay/no support structure/no career progression on the other hand. And the mix of the former versus the latter is not 50-50, its more like 20-80. Is there a quick fix? Probability not. But there is no possibility for a solution to this problem of poverty until we begin to acknowledge that we are also an essential part of the same society and we try to gain more awareness about the reasons. From that heightened awareness will arise a more tolerant view towards thoughtful solutions to the complex issue of poverty.

What has changed for me? - Personally, I realized just how blind I have been to the workers in the periphery that I took for granted - the Uber drivers, the Door Dash delivery person, the building cleaners, the gig workers with no benefits, the warehouse workers - the list is quite long. The next time I come across someone struggling, this author will have done his job of making me pause and think versus passing quick judgement.?

Final point – I always viewed poverty as an issue of “people not trying hard enough”. The author elegantly takes apart that na?ve viewpoint. I quote: “Poverty is not simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that. . . It's not a line but a tight knot of social maladies. “