People who are living in poverty are no different from anyone else. People living in poverty have dreams for their children, nurture hobbies, care for their friendships, take care of their loved ones, volunteer, and set goals; they just happen to be weighed down heavily by the stressors and hardships that a lack of resources brings. And “they” are not just an abstract group - they are 42 MILLION of our neighbors. We know our fellow community members who are living in poverty. Many of you reading this identify as someone living in poverty.
To be clear, the reason our neighbors are living in poverty is not because of a moral failing. People living in poverty are poor by design - a design maintained by false narratives that have been created and strengthened over time. These false narratives often lead us to think people are poor because they don’t want to work hard, because they would rather be addicted to drugs and alcohol, or because they make consistently bad choices in life. It’s a lie. The structural design of poverty is so old that many of us do not question its very existence, and we don’t even see it anymore. If any of the moral failings I mentioned to you sound familiar, there is a reason for that. That we can recall more examples of how people make poor decisions to end up poor than we can examples of how our political and societal structures fail millions and millions of people is the success of the design of poverty in action.
The goal of FRN’s Intersectionalities in Practice conversations is to provide a space for us all to learn about and question the structures that keep 42 million people from accessing the food that they deserve, and, importantly, to bring us all into action to address a structure unsuitable for all of humanity. Below is a snapshot of the important conversation that took place during our latest Intersectionalities in Practice: How Communities Thrive, and a list of the actions from our guests that we can all take today.
Please click below to watch the conversation, share this with your friends, and start a conversation with your personal network. You can also be in touch with us at Food Recovery Network if you want to be more involved in our work.
Meet our Speakers
Shailly Barnes, Policy Director with the Poor People’s Campaign, a powerful partner of FRN’s, reminded us that not only do 42 million people not have access to the food they deserve, 140 million people are poor or ONE emergency away from being poor. The work of the Poor People’s Campaign is to organize those millions upon millions of people - whom Shailly calls the visionaries of their communities - to help them gain the resources that they DO need and have asked for. At the same time, Shailly reminded us how we need to dismantle the “policy violence” that is a deep part of the design of poverty.
Niciah Mujahid, Coalition Director at Fair Budget Coalition, discussed the relationship between community disinvestment and the criminalization of poverty. Niciah showed the connections between disinvestment at the policy level and its impact on individuals in our communities in the form of corporal punishment. Through these connections we can better see the shape of the structure that keeps people in poverty despite how hard they work, that punishes them through our penal system for infractions associated with being poor, and that in turn continues to ensure those punished remain in poverty. I recommend reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow to learn more about this, especially how the penal system also punishes the relatives of those around all of the individuals originally punished.
Teanna Willis is a content creator on YouTube who engages in difficult conversations. Trusted spaces do not spring up out of the blue, and Teanna works to ensure people feel seen and connected to one another so that we can engage in such difficult conversations with love and curiosity. Importantly, Teanna underlined the hypocrisy that can befall the social justice sector when it utilizes low-wage work as it fights to dismantle the poverty structure or other structures of harm. This is a topic very critical to FRN as we center equity in our conversations and our work. During the How to Build Better Nonprofits conversation that kicked off this whole series, we discussed the topic of fighting for social justice while not, at the same time, harming those who wish to join that fight as their day job.
What Next? Action steps for all of us
Attend! June 18 2022: Please mark your calendars and plan to join the mass mobilization of poor people and low wage workers in Washington DC to celebrate this work and continue to take action.
Read! We Cry Justice to learn directly from those who are working tirelessly to obtain the resources they need. This is a new publication from the Poor People's Campaign and is available for purchase.
Write! Take 30 minutes to journal what you are learning, what you are thinking, or what you wish to see in the world. Writing is a powerful tool to help us organize our thoughts, capture our reflections and learnings, and fuel us to action.
Learn! Remember that learning is a process. Many of us are learning new concepts, or unlearning old concepts so that we can learn anew. Take your time with learning, be gentle with yourself, and to quote one of my best friends, Dr. Elizabeth Bishop, read important texts in groups.
Donate! Food Recovery Network is a respectful steward of all the donations we receive to feed more people. If you are in a position to donate financially, please consider donating to support our work.