Jesus Packed His Bags and Left Town!

On any given night 4,000 homeless people need a place to sleep in Tucson. Only about 1,500 beds are available. On any given day, the Community Food bank delivers enough food for over 30,000 meals in Pima County. Contrary to prevailing stereotypes, most people who need emergency food are either children of one or more working parents or seniors whose retirement no longer covers the bills.

For the past month I have been taking notes at Pima County Outside Agency (PCOA) roundtable discussions. Rather than hawking our own grant requests with the usual competition for morsels from government (reduced each year), PCOA decided to wipe the board clean and start a whole new process for determining the needs of low-income residents.

Instead of the usual begging, each agency was invited to a roundtable discussion with colleagues from the same service sector (housing, emergency food, youth development and so on). A professional facilitator leads the session during which each panel member answers one of five questions. Members are instructed not to answer in terms of their grant requests but rather in terms of their sector’s mission and work in general.

Many of us were skeptical in the beginning but most now see that the process does define the need more sharply, showing where there are missing services or links between them. This is really important considering the measly $2.1 million available for over 90 organizations applying for Outside Agency funding. And folks, it is NOT a pretty picture. If you are not depressed when you arrive, you’ll surely leave so.

Arizona ranks 40th or lower out of the 50 states in just about every indicator for poverty, homelessness, high school drop out rates, and even infant mortality. And Tucson ranks even lower in these categories with the highest poverty and homelessness in the state.

Thus we witness the Herculean efforts of shelters, food banks, counseling and juvenile justice programs; the work of churches and synagogues and the generosity of the community. But we are all on a treadmill and the belt just revolves so we never get to goal. What’s at the base of these dismal conditions?

Our economic system creates poverty because it is based on low wages for high profits. To meet stockholder expectations, companies go for the highest profit margin. Cheap labor is essential in this scenario without social values to inform it. What most people do not know or fully appreciate is the fact that we all pay in the end for the misery we create: for every dollar of prevention not spent, we pay fourteen dollars in clean up down the road. Poverty may be greatest form of violence but it also makes no sense financially.

Homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, crime, poverty and chronic illness have deep roots in low wages and the stress of limited resources. Poverty breeds poverty just as wealth breeds wealth. Whatever disadvantages you may be handed as a child in a poor family play out just like the advantages handed to a child in a wealthy family. A child gets a downward blow or a step up. It has nothing to do with either child’s worthiness or character or talent. But it may have to do with a child’s ethnicity, sex or physical abilities, even a child’s beauty, and these latter factors are socially determined by us.

All about us swirls one incongruity after another: I sit in the boardroom of foundations with my colleagues representing the unfortunate. We all earn low salaries. Many professionals in social services end up using the services themselves because they are so close to poverty. Often they work in organizations where the differential between the administrative assistant salary and the CEO salary is more than 200%.

As I sat in a Request for Proposals meeting at one of our community’s premier foundations, it occurred to me how bizarre it is that we are there to beg for the interest earned funds of wealthy people who got where they are by the profit driven strategies that create the problems we are there to get money to mitigate. Sometimes it is good not to think.

But if I do, I am driven to try to get others thinking about a world where a child is considered society’s greatest hope, and a country where we agree that no matter what a child’s family situation may be, he or she is going to get the best of everything – guaranteed – because we are smart enough to know that is the way to create a world worth living in.

Worried about terrorists? We should think about the social and economic conditions that create a terrorist out of hopelessness and poverty. Worried about crime? We should think about crime as a symptom of hopelessness and poverty.

The answers to society’s greatest woes lay in the boardrooms of our wealthy corporations and in the hands that invest in them. They lie in the hearts of people who look more deeply into social ills and do not cop out with attitudes like “there will always be poverty…Jesus said so.” I am sorry to be the one to burst your bubble, but in the face of American hubris and greed, Jesus packed his bags and left town a long time ago.

Poverty is our creation, not God’s.

To read the dismal statistics click here:
http://www.aecf.org/kidscount/sld/profile_results.jsp?d=1&r=4

To do something about them click here:
http://www.socialinvest.org/areas/sriguide/

Till next time,

Susan