“The facts of poverty are clear. Poverty exists in every town and city, on Indian reservations and in rural areas of every state in the Nation. It afflicts white and non-white, north, south, east and west, Republicans and Democrats, young and old. It hits hardest at those least able to defend themselves, the ill, the uneducated, the unemployed, the broken family, the dependent child, the minority group member.”
Our Quote of the Week reminds us of some stark facts: that poverty can be found everywhere in the United States, and that it is particularly pervasive among our society’s most vulnerable populations.
On August 18, 1964, two days before President Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act into law, Sargent Shriver spoke these words before the Democratic Platform Committee. As the appointed Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), he and his team had worked for months to design a series of programs that could address the causes and effects of poverty for people at all stages of life. As part of this effort Shriver and his team set out to fully define poverty. They determined that:
- Poverty afflicts people all over America.
- People living in poverty are not responsible for the conditions in which they find themselves.
- Poverty affects some populations -- people of color, women, children, people with disabilities -- more acutely than others.
- Poverty is extremely difficult to escape, and is therefore often generational.
- Poverty is defined by a lack of financial means, but it’s defined by much more than that. It is also a lack of opportunity, a lack of self-determination, a lack of equity, and a lack of justice.
These facts allowed Shriver and his team to define poverty in a more expansive way than had been done in the past. They understood, for example, that to alleviate poverty one must provide a variety of services: for education, health care, employment, personal and professional development, legal services, and community support. And they then attempted to design programs that would deliver such services on a large scale.
During the speech, Shriver said: “The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, just passed by Congress, is [...] a practical and economic effort, carefully focused to get at the root causes of poverty in the United States. It is not a program of handouts. It seeks to eliminate poverty by providing opportunities for work and education and training.”
Central to the design of the programs was the concept of “community action,” i.e., the notion that self-determination could be nurtured in community members if they had the resources and opportunities to solve local challenges on their own terms. Over the following four years, the OEO, under Sargent Shriver, would bring these programs to life. And, although the OEO would be diminished over the following years and then disbanded in 1981, most of its programs, including Head Start, Community Action, Job Corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA, now known Americorps Vista), Legal Services, Upward Bound, and Foster Grandparents, continue to exist today, supporting and empowering Americans who are living in poverty.
The approach of the War on Poverty, and the overall strategy behind President Johnson’s Great Society, indicate that we can alleviate poverty if we address its causes as well as its effects. But we must once again find the will to tackle it as we did in 1964, with ambition and with the intent to bring opportunity, equity, and justice to each and every member of our society.
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