What is Possible

On Tuesday, I was at an elementary school in DC where I met with the principal.  She is a dynamic and effective leader, and the school is improving as a result.  Presently, the school-wide percentage for reading at a proficient level is 41%.   One grade, however, has 0% of the children at proficiency.   One hundred percent of these kids are below proficiency.   This is our challenge and our calling, and, in this particular situation, we will go and work with this grade in a focused manner this coming fall.  We will set a goal of 100% proficiency for these children by the end of next year.   Our approach will be focused, purposeful, and with the commitment these kids need and deserve.   Their lives will not be lost because they could not learn.

Yesterday, we went back to southeast DC to visit a woman whose home we will be furnishing.   The inside of the building smelled like many other buildings in which we have been over the years.   That is to say, the hallway and stairwell smelled more like urine than anything else.   The woman’s apartment had just a few items, and yet she was strong, working six days per week, double shifts, and giving her all for her kids.   Her back story includes escaping to DC due to domestic violence.   As for her kids, they can not go outside because she will not let them go outside when they come home from school, it is too dangerous.  That is what poverty brings to them.   If the kids make it to adulthood, they will have had a childhood with no memories of playing outside their home.   And just making it to adulthood without crime, prison, or becoming a parent by age 16 will mean they dramatically beat the odds.

This is part of what makes us at A Wider Circle want to significantly grow this effort.   Can you help?  Can we stop tolerating urine-filled apartment hallways and stairwells?

The push is on.   We are moving with more urgency and creativity, and we will succeed quicker and before we lose too many more lives with your help.

Third graders should read at a third grade level. Every kid should be able to play outside after school.

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I am very mindful each day of who comes into the Center for help. And one thing I know is that today’s mothers of three or four were yesterday’s teen parents. Their first child came unexpectedly and far earlier than the moms (or dads) were emotionally or economically ready. That is why I read teen pregnancy articles with such interest – to see if we are focusing on those who need the most attention.

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) recently published an article to share how teenage pregnancies have been decreasing dramatically; the tone was one of great enthusiasm and positive change. The title stated that there are now historic lows for all age and ethnic groups. I searched for the word “poverty” in the article. It was not there, nor was “low-income.”

The state with the lowest percentage of teen births: New Hampshire. The state with the highest percentage of teen births: Mississippi. If you were to research the state with the lowest percentage of poverty, you would find that is New Hampshire. If you were to research the state with the highest, you would see it is Mississippi. Teen pregnancies are a huge part of the cycle of poverty, yet poverty does not make the discussion nearly enough. So we must discuss it – loudly and often. We must collaborate with groups and foundations and we must expand our Well Mother, Well Baby program. We will do so. We have great education leaders on our team right now, and we will utilize their professionalism and passion. For we spent a lot of time in the past year in low-income schools and neighborhoods and observed teen pregnancies remaining at an alarming rate. Some DC schools have dozens of pregnant and parenting teens – some have more than that. When the NCHS article noted that DC rates have gone down, there was no mention that many low-income families have simply been forced out of the city, replaced by folks with family incomes over $100,000.

If you were to look at census numbers from 2000 compared to 2010, the number of low-income residents of our nation’s capital has been decreasing significantly, while the number of upper income residents has been increasing. One thing I can assure you is that the folks in 2000 who were low-income are not today’s high-income residents. It is gentrification that has changed the statistics of our nation’s capital, not effective social change programs – not decreases in teen parents or adult education programs leading to job preparation and job obtainment.

The NCHS article I read made me think of two other articles I read in the past month. One spoke of the gap between where teen births were decreasing (middle and upper-income environments) and where teen births were still on the rise (low-income environments). The second article shared how girls who wait until their twenties to have their first child are far better off economically than those who find themselves as moms in their teens, especially their young teens, when they are still children.

We will bring more effective social change to this region. And we will speak louder – through our programs and collaborations – on behalf of the girls who are having babies far earlier than they are prepared to do so. We will seek to help our children to have a different vision for their lives.

National statistics may be improving, but the lives of our most vulnerable children are not.

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This morning, thousands of mothers in our community did not have enough food for their kids. Some kids will not eat today – at all. They will all be hungry, as families continue to live in a region with so much, yet they can not eat a meal and many will live the last two weeks of the month with no money at all. Zero dollars is how much they have for their various expenses, health, medical , food, clothing, whatever it is on which we spend money. They will do none of that.

I thought of these moms and families as I ate my breakfast this morning – as cliche as it sounds. They are the people for whom I work. They are all of our bosses, and the urgency of children living in empty homes has to be front and center – more than it has been. One quick thing we can do is get more items for our pantry – please spread the word. There are a few Wider Circle drives being held this month… let’s get more!

We do a good job in the service field (and as a society) when the people referred to above experience change in their lives. And we have had some good success at A Wider Circle. We fail when lives are not changed, and when more people fall into poverty than the year prior. We have failed a lot. And we can not be afraid to fail, for the adage is true: Fall down eight times, stand up nine.

Sometimes, people do not commit to something for fear of what it will take to truly succeed – it is usually more than folks can see themselves giving. We have to blow right past that, and I look forward to the coming week when we can create new solutions, refine current processes, and bring more people into the solution.

If you are not connected to this work, please connect! Our boss needs you.

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Nearly 20 years ago, I gave a lecture in Wisconsin about science, spirituality, and the evolution to love. It was a topic born out of the comparisons between Western science and Eastern spirituality, a topic that had been well-documented for decades prior. And it helped set the foundation for A Wider Circle.

Quantum physics, stripped of the mathematics, leaves you with many exciting revelations, including the understanding that the tool with which you look at something determines what you see. This is often exemplified by the wave-particle duality, where the tools with which folks “looked” were a double-slit experiment and an electron microscope. It is important to understand, however, that the primary tool with which each of us looks at things is our own perspectives, our minds. What we believe determines what we see. We truly create our own reality.

That is why we are so spiritually optimistic as we do this work – because we can be. And because it determines what we will ultimately do. In the work in which each of us is engaged at A Wider Circle, those in horrific poverty need us to be spiritually optimistic.

It is the start of many things now here, and no matter what it takes – how many new programs or changes we make – we will bring that spiritual optimism to the people whose stories and whose lives we change each day.

Someone asked last week at our strategic planning session if we were an organization or a movement. We are both, and we go forward as an organization with the urgency of a movement. That is how we have to move if we are to succeed. And no matter your level of involvement, if you can bring the optimism and belief that we can end poverty, we will do so. It is that simple, but it will take that urgency.

The paradox of belief is captured well in the quote, “Pray to God, but row to shore.” No matter what beliefs or personal paradigm you have, it is the inspiration and perspiration – in equal parts, I believe – that families need.

On Thursday, we met a woman named Karen. She had moved from Pittsburgh to this area after she was robbed. What was not stolen was destroyed and vandalized. She and her children left Pennsylvania with nothing but the clothes on their backs. She then had a house fire and lost everything she had been able to obtain here. Karen’s three girls are 15, 14, and 12. She is struggling and can barely pay for gas to get to work, let alone find furniture for her home.

Karen came to A Wider Circle with one of her daughters and with determination – she was lifting chairs and sofas (along with Gail and our volunteers) to make sure she got everything into her U-Haul. She did. Karen left here exhausted but so relieved to have a bed in which to sleep and a truck-full of furniture to make a proper home for her family.

That is a reality changed.

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“What is service?” someone asked me at an event today, followed by the question “what does it mean to serve?”

Service, I shared, is the manifestation of love – not romantic love, but altruistic love. And the meaning of service is simply to become more whole. We are intimately connected to one another – I as connected to a person in southeast Washington DC as I am to my left leg. That is how we truly exist – and we would see that if we were just able to see things in their true form, as microscopically as we could get, with all of our energy visible to the naked eye.

When I help someone “else,” I am surely just helping myself. And as the recently released poverty figures showed us, each of us has a lot we can do for ourselves.

Before sharing some of the Census report below, it is important to note that the poverty figures are clearly under-estimates of how many people are living in poverty in this country. The folks most needing to be counted are hard to count, giving us an idea – but just an idea – of the needs of those among us.

In the United States, 2010 real (inflation-adjusted) median income per household was $49,445. This was more than two percent below the 2009 median (2.3% to be more exact), and it was the third year in a row that the median household income level decreased. It was first time since the mid 1990s that the figure was below $50,000.

The percentage of of us living in poverty increased for the third year in a row in 2010. It is estimated to now be 15.1%. That is up from 14.3 percent in 2009, and it is based on a very silly poverty threshold of approximately $22,300 in household income per year for a family of four. The number for a family of three is about $18,000, and families of different sizes have equally silly thresholds. The reason the thresholds were set that way dates back to the mid 1960s, when President Johnson and his team used a few different formulas to set them low and give us a better chance to win the “War On Poverty” that was declared in 1964.

Given those extremely low thresholds, there are still an estimated 46.2 million of us in poverty. This is up from from 43.6 million in 2009, and it is the largest number of us in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published.

Let’s change it.

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Each year, A Wider Circle brings on young professionals with a passion to serve and a skill set to match that passion to fill our Fellowship positions.  Fellowships have become very competitive, and this year we have four truly remarkable Fellows: Korrin Bishop, Kerry Bowen, Katherine Buck, and Elizabeth Luckey.  Korrin, a recent graduate of the University of Oregon, shared some of her passion when writing about why we ought to care about poverty:

“I care about poverty because I don’t believe that we can be a strong nation until each of our communities is strong.  When people blindly turn their gaze away from the poverty that is around them or try to justify it by saying that other countries have it much worse, this weakens the foundation of our nation.   We become an oxymoron, as we tell other countries how they should be treating their people, while leaving our own to battle some of the harshest living conditions.

“One of my favorite quotes is from Martin Luther King Jr. He said, ‘It is trite, but urgently true, that if America is to remain a first-class nation, she can no longer have second-class citizens.’  Currently, our country is unintentionally telling people living in poverty and people who are homeless that they are second-class citizens.   Our country is reinforcing the beliefs people caught in poverty often come to feel every day – that they are not good enough, that something is wrong with them, and that they did this to themselves.   The reality is that we are doing this to each other, and now is the time to change that, to reach out our hands to our neighbors, to love one another unconditionally.

“I care about poverty because whenever I see someone homeless on the street or see a mother trying to scrape together just enough to get her children to school, I do not just see another face – I see a story.  I know that person is not just another person, but someone’s daughter, son, mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandmother, grandfather, and my friend.  I see the heartache, the hope, the pain, the excitement, the journey that lives behind each of their eyes.

“I care about poverty because everyone deserves a hug and deserves love.  I care about poverty because the day that we stop caring about the well-being of one another is the day that we have truly failed as a people.  I cannot and will not continue on, pretending that it doesn’t hit me to my very core every time I see a human being huddled under an old blanket, sleeping in the rain on a bench in the park.  I cannot fake that it doesn’t make me feel ill when I hear friends or family members talk down about these people.   I love these people and I believe in them and I believe in us as a people to solve the poverty crisis we are experiencing now.”

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It is another good day of service here.  We feel the storm looming and hope families can come to get their stuff before it hits.  Our three trucks are out picking up donations, and our drivers are already working in some hard rain.   Their determination makes this place go.

Our volunteers and staff here at the Center are managing the day with their usual great compassion.   It is inspiring to watch volunteers here bring so much love and understanding as they help families select their items.

One of our staff members shared a story yesterday relative to the likely power outages. For so many along the east coast, power outages are going to turn their lives upside down. As this staff member pointed out, power outages are a normal part of life for our clients. She shared how she had spoken to a woman a day ago whose phone had been disconnected when we tried to call to confirm her appointment.  The woman shared that she had to make choices – her priority was to get her kids school supplies so they could start school last Monday, so she couldn’t pay for the phone.

The families we serve have their lives turned upside down often, with phones and power cut off whenever their choices do not allow them to keep up with payments.  Our staff member shared the following from a book she was reading about a woman raised in poverty:

“Poverty has so brutalized the family that the ordinary laws and rules governing humanity have eroded, turning systems of behavior upside down.”

As we prepare to have things turned upside down by Hurricane Irene, our minds stay with those are born and raised in poverty – and who always get hit the hardest, storm or no storm.  Those we serve, including the the very young and the very old, live in fear of power outages all the time.   As our staff member shared, it is no wonder that crimes, drugs, violence, and abuse are rampant in areas where so many are mired in poverty.   If we can help lift these friends and neighbors from poverty, she wrote in an email to me, their humanity would be restored. Her email to me finished with an emphasis on the restoration of humanity, as she wrote:

“How can we not all want such a life for everyone?”

A Wider Circle’s Saturday recap:
1. We had 9 families come to get their homes furnished, despite the rain.
2. We picked up items from 19 families in the region – again, thanks to some above-and-beyond efforts from the guys.
3. We had 24 volunteers join the interns and staff to manage the day

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Today a case manager from a local social service agency brought one of her clients to A Wider Circle to get her items. This happens every day, many times over, but her experience here seems worth the tell – the short version.

Near the end of the woman’s visit here, the case manager walked up to our Deputy Director and broke down because her client was being so difficult. The vehicle the agency had was a pick-up truck and the woman wanted the case manager to help her fit three times more stuff than would fit. The woman was yelling at the case manager about how she wanted to make two trips and how her list should have been bigger. The woman also yelled at our team, so the case manager could find empathy here. Perhaps most impressive in this, however, was how understanding everyone was, for this was a woman who had been homeless for many years and who came and saw all the great items she could get. Of course she would be emotional, and for the case manager and our whole team here to get that and have such patience and be so supportive of this woman’s journey was special.

Last to break down today was the woman, herself, who cried when finally realizing she could not fit everything she wanted for her new home. We will work ever-harder to to serve these friends of ours.

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For so many in our country, the future is like an open cone.  From the first day of kindergarten, opportunities are before us, so much so that by the time we reach college age, the stressor that is front and center is simply, “What am I gonna do?   Do I want to be a journalist?  A lawyer?  Do I want to follow my father or mother and teach or sell insurance?  Go into medicine or pursue a science?”

It is stressful… but hopeful, as well.  And these questions are in the minds of so many of us, with that very first part played over and over again, “What am I gonna do?”

It is the cone opened up – wide – and so many opportunities, so many paths possible.

For those born and raised in poverty, it is the same question with a different tone, “What am I gonna do?  Minimum wage job?  Gang?  Should I get pregnant?”  Starting so far behind, sometimes 20,000 words behind by age 5, school represents nothing but failure and misunderstanding.  Each passing year removes the joy.  Each passing year snuffs the light.

Do we wonder hard enough why low-income neighborhoods, crime, drugs, drop out rates, etc., all overlap on any map that contains them?

Do we wonder hard enough?  Because that cone is upside down for these kids – their opportunities shrink as others grow.  When they reach the age where the cone is wide open for so many, theirs seems all but closed.  What are they gonna do?

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I often hear that it is crazy to believe that we can end poverty.  As I watch people around the world develop individual and community solutions – using their great talents and creativity – I believe it is crazy to think that we will NOT end poverty.

Change of this magnitude takes a critical mass believing and acting differently. We are approaching that critical mass; you can see it in communities every day. It is only our vision of what is possible that keeps us from seeing how close we are to the end of poverty in this country. The changing priorities among our youth, in our schools, and in our civic, religious, government, and corporate sectors also tells me that we have the perspective and priority to get it done.

The model for ending poverty will come from channeling all the talents, creativity, and focus on one neighborhood or group of people for whom it has been a cycle – entrenched poverty.  As we help them rise out of poverty, using all the resources a community has to offer, we will arrive at a model that is replicable.

Poverty is a social disease, and like any disease in our history, once we have a solution that is replicable, we can spread it.

This focused approach to eradicating a disease that kills so many, so young, and leads to more social ills (drugs, crime, poor health, drop-out rates, etc.) than any other issue – that is what will lead to our brothers’ and sisters’ rise out of poverty.

Unlike a medical break-through, which requires advanced technical skills and knowledge, we can all participate in a social break-through. We can eradicate this social disease, just as we eradicated polio just a half-century ago.  Believe it.

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