Fifty years after President Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty, the soldiers in the trenches are still grappling with the immensity of the challenge he laid out.
Poverty has proven to be a stubborn foe, seemingly resistant to decades of government and private attacks. Nonprofit leaders and others keep redrawing the battle plans, attempting to draw lessons from the last five decades to find the elusive formula that will put far more Americans on a path to economic security.
But many are resigned to fighting a long, drawn-out campaign, especially now that the public has lost its appetite for big-government intervention.
“It’s so big, it’s so huge, you can get very dejected,” says Hallie Cohen, who coordinates a workshop that offers tips on “getting ahead” to low-income people at the Exchange Club Family Center of Memphis, in one of the country’s poorest cities. “The reality is major changes are going to happen at much higher levels than I sit at.”
“We have a tendency of, if you can’t do it with a silver bullet overnight, something has failed, it’s not working,” says Sara Schastok, president of the Evanston Community Foundation. “The gap in wealth and income has been growing so much in our country, it’s really difficult for any one organization to make a dent.”
In 2013, as the economy moved out of recession, the official poverty rate fell from 15.1 percent to 14.5 percent, but that still translated into about 45 million people below the poverty line, the same as the previous year. (The U.S. Census Bureau classifies a family of four with two children as poor if its income is less than $23,624.) Reflecting continuing racial and ethnic disparities, the rates for blacks and Hispanics were much higher, 27.2 percent and 23.5 percent, respectively.
As antipoverty warriors contemplate how to move forward, several themes have gained momentum in recent years:
Poverty is a complex problem that extends far beyond income.
Does a family have a financial cushion to avoid slipping back into poverty at the next crisis? Does it have mental, spiritual, and emotional resources? “The bottom line is, the more unstable the resources base, the greater your inability to plan,” says Ruby Payne, an author and trainer who gives workshops on fighting poverty that many nonprofits attend.
The Robin Hood Foundation, a New York City antipoverty group, has poured more than $1-billion into local nonprofits since 1988, yet about one-fifth of the city’s population remains in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But Michael Weinstein, the chief program officer, says the group’s goal is not to lower the official poverty rate, since that doesn’t offer a true measure of what it takes to survive in a high-priced city like New York.
Robin Hood is attempting to learn more about the city’s low-income families by surveying them every quarter about issues like their experience with job-training programs. “We will have a dynamic picture of urban poverty,” he says.
Programs must focus on more than one generation.
“Patterns of opportunity get set up over generations, and patterns of lost opportunity get set up the same way,” says Reilly Morse, chief executive of the Mississippi Center for Justice. “One of the issues we see is poor children become poor parents who have poor children who become poor parents who have poor children,” says Heather Reynolds, chief executive of Catholic Charities Fort Worth.
The Aspen Institute, with more than $10-million in foundation money, several years ago created a major program, Ascend, to promote “two-generation” antipoverty strategies. Anne Mosle, Ascend’s executive director, says the program aims to attack poverty in a more “integrated and holistic” way. When she worked at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which now supports Ascend, “a lot of our work was grant by grant,” she says. “That’s really important work, but we weren’t always able to connect the investment across community to community or across policy or program areas.”
Nonprofits need to know what works.
“If something we’re doing is not working, we don’t want to do it anymore,” says Ms. Reynolds. “We want to be really good stewards of the money we have.” Her group is participating in a randomized, controlled trial to test the effectiveness of its program to help low-income community-college students, designed by a new “poverty lab” at Notre Dame University, the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities.
Some antipoverty workers say measurement doesn’t tell the whole story, however. “One of the trends today is moving the needle, big data,” says Ms. Schastok of the Evanston Community Foundation. “If we can in our project, in our community, improve the lives of a group of parents and a group of children, we may not, quote unquote, be moving the big needle, but we are improving lives and futures in that way.”
Of course, President Johnson’s crusade gave the government a major role in defeating poverty, something Sheldon Danziger, president of the Russell Sage Foundation, says shouldn’t be forgotten: “Only the federal government has the resources to make sure programs are available everywhere.”
