Cuts in social services, the elimination of government programs and departments — along with the addition of new processes to qualify or requalify for the programs and services that are still intact — on top of ever-increasing inflation have made life even more difficult for people experiencing poverty in the United States over the last year.
To advocate for economic justice, particularly across the Deep South, the Southern Poverty Law Center this week launched its Poverty Is Not a Line campaign.
The purpose of the campaign is to reshape the public and personal narratives about poverty. Two of the key goals of the campaign are to expose misinformation about how people experience poverty in our country and help communities identify and address systemic issues that cause poverty.
Eradicating poverty is one of the core impact areas for the SPLC’s work. In recent years, SPLC attorneys have fought in courtrooms across the South, challenging issues that range from municipalities that put people in jail for unpaid trash fees and fines to arresting people for experiencing homelessness. SPLC attorneys have also challenged the raising of property taxes and the changing of zoning restrictions to intentionally dislocate Black communities.
At the grassroots level, organizers with the SPLC’s state offices in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi have worked to empower community members to better understand the root causes of poverty and advocate for their human right to an adequate standard of living.
Bryan Fair, the SPLC’s interim president and CEO, remembers his own personal struggle to escape poverty.
In this video: Poverty is “the result of many failed systems,” says SPLC interim President and CEO Bryan Fair. “Failed systems, discrimination, exploitation. … Poverty is really a global issue.” (SPLC)
“When I think about poverty, what I think about is how I grew up,” Fair said in an interview for the SPLC’s Apathy Is Not An Option podcast announcing the new initiative. “We would have so many people who were living on the margins, who were poor, who couldn’t afford housing, who had food insecurity, who couldn’t pay utilities. Mine was one of those families that was constantly moving just ahead of overdue rent or not being able to provide enough food for a month, relying on public assistance, which was inadequate. Literally, each month, my family was running out of food, not being able to pay utilities in the wintertime.”
One key point of the new campaign is to help the public better understand what poverty is and how it should be addressed. The SPLC Economic Justice legal team defines it as “a human condition characterized by the sustained deprivation of the resources, choices and power necessary for an adequate standard of living.”
While many people may see poverty merely as the lack of income needed to provide for basic needs, it is more complex than that. Economic strength can help solve some needs, but social, political and environmental factors also play a role. From one community to the next, those factors change, meaning that poverty can take a different appearance from city to city, block to block or home to home.
“It’s an issue in every part of our country,” Fair said. “It’s a global issue where many people, billions of people in the world, experience poverty, circumstances of poverty because of the lack of employment opportunities, the lack of educational opportunities, because of discrimination by race, by gender, because of failed governmental policies. And I’ve come to know, in my adult life, that we could do much more about the systemic conditions of poverty across the globe, and we could do much more in this country if we had the will to do so.”
To hear the full interview with Fair, click here.
Illustration at top by Miriam Martincic.