Reflections on Poverty After NAA Homecoming

Most people have developed some kind of picture in their head of what poverty looks like and what it does to those who fall into its cycle. In most cases, it’s a rather simple portrait, a two-dimensional design that neatly accounts for all the risk factors of poverty as well as the typical traps into which these unfortunate individuals have fallen.

Is the person from a low-income family? Check!
Are the parents abusive, violent, criminal, negligent, and/or otherwise unfit? Check!
Member of a minority? Check!
From a community with low graduation rates and patterns of violence and drug abuse? Check!
Exposed to limited educational opportunities? Check!
And the list drags on…

This idea of poverty that we create in our heads is quite cut and dry, inspired by the statistics thrown our way from concerned citizens and knowledgeable experts. Overall, the numbers do a good job of recording the truth. But they don’t usually inspire any widespread, deep-seated discomfort and outrage. Several days after coming across these statistics, the average individual is not left quaking with indignation or yearning with compassion for those who live the reality of poverty everyday. The average person has moved on in her comfortable daily routine, head under the sand as she tries to take over first place in the rat race called life.

But for every handful of people who cling to their indifference, there is someone who remains unsettled and bothered by those numbers. That person moves beyond the numbers to their source and inspiration. Such a person possesses the will to uncover the truth and fill in the gaps between the statistics. That kind of person becomes an advocate and an activist who dedicates herself to building a three-dimensional understanding of what it means for a child’s future and that of his two siblings growing up in Albany in a single-parent household struggling to make ends meet with $19,500 per year. The numbers become messy and the picture transforms into an exhaustively complicated reality where that child, his two siblings, and his mother all have names and faces and stories that have been entrusted to you. When that happens, the numbers take on life and the reality of poverty in Albany and anywhere else is validated within its full human context.

This past Saturday, Siena’s Bonner class consciously (albeit a little apprehensively at first) removed their heads from the sand and took a look around at the people who inspired the studies of poverty. What’s more, is that they interacted with those people and started filling in the gaps left by those statistics. There’s still more work to be done—by all of us—as we mold ourselves and each other into responsible and compassionate advocates and activists. However, this past Saturday was a telling example of what is to come. And how powerful it could be…