Blog Action Day 2008

This year for Blog Action Day, the topic is Poverty, which is something I'm both familiar and unfamiliar with in different ways.

I am a VISTA (which stands for Volunteers In Service To America), which is a program that was started in the 1960s to eradicate poverty in the US. Obviously, we haven't achieved that goal yet, but every year thousands of people of all ages and backgrounds participate in this 1 year volunteer program. We are assigned to a program site that is generally a nonprofit organization that has a social service mission. VISTAs work all over the country, in both rural and urban areas. We do receive a living allowance (mine works out to be about $750 a month, but the actual amount varies depending on where you are) and some health care coverage, but part of the idea is that you live in poverty while fighting poverty.

My VISTA situation isn't maybe what people would think when they think about eradicating poverty. I work for an affordable housing organization in a fairly affluent small town. The clients I work are considered to have low to moderate incomes, but they are not destitute (small irony- most of them make roughly three times as much money a year than I do). Some people might look at this and shake their heads, thinking that there are so many worse situations to be in than a renter in an affluent small town. This is true. But poverty isn't just how much money you make.

There is a certain poverty to a town that does not have a range of affordable housing. Many of the people who work in our town, especially people who work for some of the larger employers, like the local nursing facility, cannot afford to live in our town. They live in nearby cities where housing is more affordable. But with rising gas and food prices, they are squeezed even more than they were before. If they lived in town, they would have a considerably shorter commute- almost nothing in town is more than two miles from anything else. Most of them could probably walk or bike to work if they lived in town, which would save them a not inconsiderable amount of money a month. And with even that little bit of savings, there's no telling what they could do. Get out of debt. Further their educations. Help their children with their educations. Save for retirement. People can do amazing things, given the opportunity. And affordable housing is one of those things that can give people opportunities. But when there is no affordable housing, everyone loses. Employers lose because their employees have more obstacles in getting to work. The community loses because the lack of affordable housing means young families have a harder time living in our town, and when you have a town with no young families, you have a town without a future. We all lose when there is no diversity, either racially, socially or economically. The environment loses when people have to commute so far to work. This poverty really does affect us all.

That is the poverty I am working to eradicate. The poverty that leads to communities that can't sustain themselves. It's maybe not as visibly necessary as working to feed the hungry and house the homeless, but it's still vital to our communities and our world. Poverty touches us all in more ways than we realize, and it's these "silent" ways that may really be the larger problem facing our country today.