March 2009

return to contents

Peace and Poverty
by Denise Weldon-Siviy

This talk was given at the 2008 Annual Meeting and Banquet of the ICPJ. Denise Weldon-Siviy, a former ICPJ Board Chair and Peace Camp Director, is Community Outreach Liaison for the Gettysburg Community Soup Kitchen.

In October 2005, Antonio Maria Costa, Director-General of the United Nations Office in Vienna, said that “Crime is both the cause and consequence of poverty.” This isn’t really current news, from 2005. But it also isn’t really news at all. We all know the undeniable connection between poverty and violence. Too often, poverty inspires not determination but frustration, anger, and hopelessness–all of which lead too often to violence. There is no doubt that poverty IS a peace issue.

To prove that, unfortunately, I also don’t need to take you to Vienna, or even the UN building in New York. As many of you know, for several years now I’ve worked part-time at the Gettysburg Community Soup Kitchen. This is one of several wonderful groups working hard to eradicate hunger and alleviate poverty in our community. One of the most satisfying albeit sometimes really sad aspects of this work has been getting to know some of the people in town who struggle with issues of poverty.

I’d like to tell you about two of them. Mindy is a 32 year old woman with a huge heart but a lot of obstacles. A high school dropout, she’s determined to finish her GED. Last spring she proudly showed me new books she’d checked out of the library. She was especially proud of improving her reading skills, moving her reading level up to about 3rd grade.

Mindy’s “fiancé” was a 31-year-old with serious emotional issues, unemployed and with a temperament that would make employment nearly unobtainable. The two of them were actually living in a car that they sometimes shared with John’s father, also homeless. It was honestly a disaster waiting to happen. That occurred on June 11th this past year when John stabbed Mindy 14 times just beyond the parking lot of our local Wal-Mart. (Actually one report said only 9 times, but you definitely get the point that this was a seriously violent attack.)

Thankfully, Mindy survived and John is now incarcerated. As you probably guessed, Mindy and John aren’t their real names. It’s Soup Kitchen policy to always protect the real identities of our guests. I suspect that may be a moot point, given that stabbing or being stabbed in the Wal-Mart parking lot makes your life awfully public. I’d like to say that this is the only violent crime in our town related to poverty. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be true. People living on the edge financially are often set on edge emotionally as well. Each additional stress increases the likelihood of criminal behavior. In recent years, we’ve seen mothers and children abandoned by homeless fathers who just can’t handle the stress of temporary motel or shelter living. We’ve seen children abandoned physically (if not emotionally) by incarcerated fathers. More and more often we see kids brought in by custodial grandparents.

Obviously there are a lot of issues that play into these events beyond just poverty. In cases of violence, there are always a lot of issues beyond just poverty.

Getting rid of poverty won’t keep people from being mentally ill or mentally challenged. It won’t eliminate domestic violence or dysfunctional families. It also won’t rid people of addictions or cure physical ailments like diabetes or heart disease. But it will go a long way to alleviating all of these social issues.

So–I think it would be a great idea to eliminate poverty. It should be pretty straightforward, and we’re all nice and relaxed after a good meal, so we might as well start now. This probably sounds like a tall order, but it really isn’t. Amazingly, most experts are in pretty close agreement on what we need to do to eliminate poverty in the United States. Basically, there are 5 things that we need to provide:

1) A Living Wage
2) Support for those unable to work
3) A quality education
4) Access to good health
5) Hope.

1) Promoting A Living Wage

A living wage is really critical to eliminating poverty. People who work full-time should be able to support themselves, and that’s not happening in quite a number of industries and occupations. Luckily, this is a one of the easier of the five problems to fix.

This means that we need to be willing to pay a rational price for the items we buy. My mom is a serious quilter. Many of you have seen the gorgeous wall hanging in my dining room and the flower garden quilt in our master bedroom. These are two of the really stunning quilts my mom’s made over the years. One of my mom’s pet peeves is seeing department stores carrying “hand stitched” quilts for $40 or $50. Knowing that it takes around 100 hours to hand stitch a queen size quilt, she figures the women who make those can’t make more than 30 or 40 cents an hour. The last time we saw an ad for one, she quipped that “I don’t need to sleep warm under someone else’s slave labor.”

Part of providing a living wage has to include recognizing that we really are promoting the use of slave labor when we opt for imports made so cheaply that they virtually have to involve sweatshops.

As most of you know, I have long made it a policy to avoid buying what I call “Cheap crap made in China.” This has not always been easy–as some of you know, I didn’t own an umbrella for 5 years because it wasn’t possible to buy one that wasn’t made in China. I’ve bought a number of items second hand or picked them up on Freecycle because I couldn’t find one that was made in a way that would provide anyone but the factory owner a living wage.

I’ve also occasionally given up because there really wasn’t an alternative. Eventually, we all get tired of getting wet. Still, if we each make an effort whenever possible to support products made in ways that protect the dignity of the people that make them, altogether we could actually have an impact.

2) Providing Support for Those Unable to Work

A living wage is obviously the first step to wiping out poverty. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that there will always be a small percentage of people who simply won’t be able to completely support themselves. They might be able to hold sheltered jobs, but they’re never going to compete on the open market.

My friend Bob, a good friend of mine going back 30 years, has a son with serious Asperger’s soon to graduate from high school. While this is very cute and trendy on Boston Legal, in real life people with serious Autism are more likely to be unemployed or bagging groceries than to be working as attorneys. That same friend has a 58 year old sister with Down’s syndrome living with parents in their early 80s. In his early 50s himself, he has genuine questions about when–if ever–he’ll get to retire.

This is an area that’s going to be harder to address as individuals. But perhaps, if our tax dollars weren’t going to provide social services for people whose employers don’t provide a living wage, we might have enough funds to care properly for those people who genuinely can’t help themselves. Personally, I would much rather subsidize group homes for the mentally challenged than find my tax dollars paying for social services for employees of multi‑million dollar companies that place a higher importance on rewarding stockholders than providing a living wage to their employees.

This is also where it’s important to support those local groups who try to pick up the pieces when people fall through the cracks. You’ve probably not thought about this directly, but one of the reasons we need groups like the Soup Kitchen is that there needs to be someone to take care of those people who aren’t mentally stable or mentally competent enough to navigate the rules and procedures for getting government assistance.

3) A Quality Education

A quality education is essential to moving people out of poverty–and to increasing peace. There’s little doubt that ignorance and violence are a matched set. Providing education allows people to move from subsistence living (or subsidized living) into the mainstream of our society.

This especially needs to include those people on the edge in terms of mental illness or capability. They usually need extra help to find suitable employment and opportunities and unfortunately are often ill-served by our educational system. My friend Bob will tell you this. It’s why he pays more for his son’s private special needs high school than you would pay to send a child to the University of Pittsburgh for a year. Locally, I can tell you there are kids with similar problems whose parents don’t have Bob’s resources. One of these kids (now in his 20s) recently asked me whether it was true that you couldn’t get PHEAA grants for remedial classes at HACC. A Gettysburg high school graduate, he explained that because he was special needs (in his case mildly autistic), “I got a degree but I didn’t get an education.”

I’d also like to point out that while a quality education obviously goes in tandem with 1) A living wage, it doesn’t completely replace it. Even if we were to provide a free college education to every person in Adams County, we’re still going to need Day Care workers and Lawn Care workers, and Store clerks. All of these jobs–and quite a lot more related to the tourist industry–do NOT currently pay anywhere near a living wage, no matter how well educated the job holder is.

4) Access to Good Health

One of the biggest reasons that people file for bankruptcy is uncovered medical bills. The lack of coverage for mental illness and substance abuse treatment are also major problems in poverty. We see quite a lot of people in the Soup Kitchen who are dealing with one or more of these issues.

Contrary to popular mythology, a lot of these people are people WITH jobs. I used to meet one woman at the Soup Kitchen every Saturday who had not one but SEVERAL jobs cleaning rooms at local motels. Unfortunately, NONE of her employers provided health insurance, and once she finished paying for medications she was out of money for the month.

Surprisingly what’s almost more of a problem is a lack of access to healthy food that could prevent many diseases to begin with. There’s a huge link between poverty, low educational level, and diseases like diabetes and heart disease. We find that nearly 20% of the “regular” guests at the Soup Kitchen self-identify as diabetic.

We’re very lucky in Adams County that we do have access to affordable supermarkets. That’s not the case for many urban poor whose neighborhoods are overrun with liquor stores and fried chicken stands but abandoned by the major supermarket chains. In many inner city neighborhoods, it’s easier to buy a Russian vodka than a Florida orange.

In Adams County, accessibility is more a case of income. Highly nutritional fresh fruit is MUCH more expensive than bleached white bread and starchy pasta. Food pantries, of necessity, stock foods filled with chemicals that have a good shelf-life. Now in fairness, our food pantry is trying to address this issue. They’ve actually had college students picking up left-over fruit at the farmers’ market for distribution at the pantry. Similarly, the Soup Kitchen is working on a new program called Share the Bounty to encourage home gardeners and local growers to share their excess with low-income residents through the Gettysburg Community Soup Kitchen.

This still leaves us with a problem of scale. Megan Shreve, the Executive Director of SCCAP, tells me that last month their food pantry served 700 families. That’s just an astounding number and likely to get worse as the economic recession deepens and–more immediately–as home heating bills arrive.

5) Hope

The last factor that’s really incredibly necessary to lift people out of poverty is the belief that things really can get better. The difference between the kid who works hard and studies harder to escape poverty and his neighborhood playmate who doesn’t is often just the belief that it really is possible to succeed.

Summary

So there you have it. The five things we most need to do to eliminate poverty in this country are to provide:

1) A Living Wage
2) Support for those unable to work
3) A quality education
4) Access to good health
5) Hope.

Just in case you’re looking to start working on these tomorrow, I’ve made a short list of things that YOU personally could do to help provide one or more of these items. I’d also love to hear back from you on things that I can do that I haven’t thought of. And most of all, keep in your thoughts and in your hearts the absolute knowledge that SUCCESS really, really is possible.

Thank you.

Things you can do to help eliminate poverty

1) Try to make purchases that support the provision of a living wage.

2) Free up money in your personal budget to help others by limiting purchases of new items (particularly items clearly made without regard to a living wage). Consider thrift stores and second hand shops for “nearly new” purchases.

3) Try using a recycling board like Freecycle.org to give away items you no longer need so someone else can reduce their spending and free up money in their budget to share.

4) If it’s financially possible, donate to a local group (like the Soup Kitchen) that provides help to those unable to help themselves.

5) Clean out your closets and turn your old unwanted clothing into healthcare. Take those unwanted clothes to the Hospital Thrift Store where sales help to benefit the indigent care fund.

6) Do your part for education by offering to tutor a local student.

7) Go through your cupboards and select five healthy food items (like brown rice, canned fruit in natural juice, or whole wheat pasta) and donate those items to a local food pantry.

8) VOTE! Take the time to investigate candidates’ views on all of the issues that relate to poverty. Then, let your ballot speak for you.

9) Follow up on the people you elect. Regular post cards or emails are a great way to let your representatives know where you stand. (Also don’t forget to say Thank You when he or she takes the right stand! It’s important that our representatives get positive feedback as well as negative.)

back to top | return to contents

Last updated June 15, 2009

Interfaith Center for Peace and Justice
©2007 All Rights Reserved
Contact the webmaster.