Temporary solutions fail to address the hidden underbelly of our nation’s poverty
“All of a sudden they would just disappear.”
Daron Babcock was on a mission to create jobs when he started an urban farm in Bonton, TX, a neighborhood just south of Dallas, in one of the poorest zip codes in the country. Bonton has the highest rate of child poverty in the nation, a shocking 85 percent of men have been incarcerated, and it’s known as a “food desert” — a place where healthy food is simply inaccessible. Babcock quickly learned that poverty is far more complex than he had ever imagined.
“From the beginning, people showed up eager, developed quickly, and were ready to work and learn,” said Babcock. “But we [would] be six months into the relationship with them and something would change. All of a sudden they would just disappear. We wouldn’t see or hear from them for weeks at a time.”
He soon found out what was going on.
“After a few weeks they would show back up and we would hear the same stories over and over again. Always something like this: ‘I was staying with my auntie. She has six kids. She was barely getting by. And [I was] a burden on her. I didn’t want to be a burden on her anymore. So I’ve been bouncing around trying to find a place to stay. I’m sorry I didn’t let you know. I didn’t have a ride over here and my phone’s been cut off.’”
This story is emblematic of a much larger problem happening in America.
A large academic study found that absolute social mobility rates in the United States have fallen sharply since the 1940s and continue to flounder, hovering around 50 percent. Meaning, the poorer someone is growing up today, the more likely they are to stay poor through adulthood.
Like Babcock, most people understand that poverty is an issue. But what most people don’t understand is the complex interconnectedness — the layered, tangled web of external and internal challenges that compound against an individual born into poverty rendering them hopeless for any kind of escape.
How Many People Are We Talking About?
In America, 12.3 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line. That’s roughly 40 million people (the entire population of California) who are not sure if they’ll have a warm meal or safe place to sleep tonight.
Yet, total wealth per adult in the United States has grown every year since 2008, according to the Global Wealth Report. Global wealth soared to $317 trillion last year, jumping up 4.6 percent from the year before. The United States sits atop the list with $98 trillion—the richest country in the world.
But, something is broken when poverty persists while average income increases. While most Americans upgraded their streaming subscriptions last year, others had to decide between paying their rent or their utility bills just to get by.
Auspiciously, poverty in the U.S. has dropped since 2013, per the Census Bureau. But historical data shows that the dip is probably only temporary.
“Sustained, long-term progress in lowering poverty rates has been more difficult in subsequent years,” writes Ashley Edwards, Chief of the Poverty Statistics Branch at the U.S. Census Bureau.
“Even after recent declines, the 2017 poverty rate of 12.3 percent is not statistically different from the rate in 1970.”
This cyclical pattern of “macro” national poverty mirrors the “micro” experience of the family home, only household poverty is far more personal and jarring than clean graphs and sterile statistics.
Escaping vs. Enduring Poverty
Poverty in America today might be easier to endure than it was 50 years ago, but it’s not any easier to escape. How can communities come together to help break the cycle of poverty? The answer lies in achieving long-term outcomes that go beyond the ability to endure poverty, and work to transform the trajectory of an individual’s life from one of surviving to thriving. It’s these long-term outcomes and whole-person transformative solutions that Stand Together, a social change platform for social entrepreneurs, believes will truly break the cycle of poverty in America.
Since 2016, Stand Together has invested in an innovative network of partnerships with 115+ (and growing) highly effective nonprofit organizations. Through partnering with these social change organizations on the ground in communities across the country, the organization has uncovered innovative insights into poverty and is helping to support the people with effective solutions to get out of it.
Namely this: a better understanding of how one becomes trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty illuminates the pressing need of dynamic and innovative approaches to help people escape this cycle. Permanently.
So let’s start by getting a more comprehensive look at the ongoing barriers individuals face when stuck in the cycle of poverty.
The Macro and Micro Roots of Poverty:
On the macro level, historical injustices are often at the root of poverty in America. Slavery. Segregation. An unequal criminal justice system. Cultural racism. Fear of immigrants.
While we must acknowledge these injustices, to make progress, we also have to acknowledge the potential that every person has within themselves to overcome even the most incredible obstacles – then help break the barriers holding them back.
On the micro level, the on-the-ground research from S+, in corroboration with findings from the Centre for Social Justice, has found five significant factors driving poverty today:
Chronic unemployment
Personal debt
Educational failure
Addiction and trauma
The breakdown of the family
Major drivers of poverty rarely occur in isolation, but are interconnected with one another. They stack together, compounding the complexity of the individual’s scenario and increasing the barriers to escape. Often, the biggest misstep of building solutions to these problems is to think there needs to be one, comprehensive solution—one that addresses every aspect above for every person.
But the truth is, poverty is unique for everyone. That line cannot be emphasized enough. Each person’s story is utterly unlike the rest. For this reason, blanket solutions, quota-assessed programs, and theories based on numbers instead of people, fail to enact lasting transformation, and, instead, result in eventual relapse, recidivism, and ultimately, despair. The solutions that temporarily relieve the symptoms of poverty generally fail to provide any permanent, lasting transformation for an individual or family. For example, the National Institute of Justice shares a devastating study of incarcerated individuals in 30 states released in 2005: “Within five years of release, about three-quarters (76.6 percent) of released prisoners were rearrested.” This fact shows that long-term change is not happening.
We need solutions that yield long-term lasting results. The ones that empower each individual to realize and tap into their own unique gifts and talents, leveraging their unique experiences to break down these individual barriers. This is the key to solving poverty. But it can’t be done alone; it requires people and a community.
As stated above, since everybody’s path into poverty is unique, it’s important to understand what placed a person in poverty to begin with. These pathways are described as either situational or generational poverty or both.
Situational poverty, as defined by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ACSD), is generally poverty caused by a sudden crisis or loss. It can be temporary, or, if left unaddressed, bloat into prolonged periods of poverty. Events triggering situational poverty include environmental disasters, domestic distress, addiction, job loss, or health problems. For example, when a single mother in North Dakota, Amanda, landed her fourth DUI in a car accident, her life spiraled out of control and her beautiful daughter Zooey clung to her mother for survival. From drug court, Amanda became successfully sober, but it wasn’t enough. “I was sober and living clean but I did not have any confidence in myself nor did I believe I could become anything because of my past and the fact that I was a single mother living in poverty.”
Generational poverty (ASCD’s definition again) occurs in families where at least two generations have been born into poverty. Rather than a sudden event, as in the case of situational poverty, generational poverty is more gradual and steeped in time. Families living in this type of poverty are often afflicted with psychological, behavioral, and physical barriers and not equipped with the tools to move out of their situations. For example, Freddie lived with her mother and sister in one of the local housing projects in New York. In the third grade, her family moved in with a close friend as Freddie’s mother’s health began to fail. Freddie’s mother passed away when she was eight and her father passed away when she was nine. She was consistently getting into fights with her peers, had trouble staying focused in school, and was often disrespectful to her teachers.
For many people, it can be a brutal combination of both situational and generational poverty. “My dad was killed by a drunk driver when I was five years old,” said Becca Stevens from Nashville. “Poverty was always present in our lives.” Her own experience with abuse seared a dark reality into her young mind. “It went on for years,” she said. Tragically, as she grew older, she encountered others with similar stories. “They are not innocent kids anymore. They understand how the world is unsafe and how you have to start manipulating it or working around it or running from it. You have to disassociate from it.”
Whether someone is experiencing situational poverty, generational poverty, or both, the truth is clear: Poverty is not just about being poor. It goes deeper - a hidden, internal experience that robs individuals of uncovering their own unique gifts and talents – stopping them from becoming who they could be. This is the unseen spiral for individuals stuck in this cycle, one that often leads to isolation, loss of self-worth, and hopelessness. These internal barriers compound with societal barriers to form a complex and tangled web that defines the poverty experience – unique for everyone, but universally challenging to solve. When we try to build solutions simply by looking at statistics and numbers, we miss the human approach that is central to the individuals experiencing these barriers and is ultimately the key to solving it. Lost hearts, minds and souls are not numbers. There is no sweeping solution or infinite funding that will solve these problems. But human-connection will. People working together is the foundation of human-kind and is where we need to start.
To illustrate this, follow this typical chain of events: an individual grows up in an absent, unhealthy, or abusive home. To cope with these experiences, they experiment with drugs, alcohol, and sex at a young age. They drop out of school. They fall further into an addiction, perhaps to harder substances. They can’t keep a job. They struggle to meet basic needs for themselves and their families. Unable to afford rent, transportation, and/or food, their health plummets. They fall into crime. Incarcerated, they are damned to unemployment by a criminal record. They are stuck in a survival mindset, buried in poverty, with no way out.
Countless government programs and private philanthropies only scratch the surface of poverty dissolution, hamstrung by ineffective programs failing to move people out of situational poverty, often treating emergencies with bandaids that cause dependency and no long-term solution.For fifty years, solutions to poverty have focused almost exclusively on addressing the symptoms, providing access to material necessities like food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare. While the results of these well-intentioned efforts might make poverty easier to endure, they do not make it any easier to escape. And most of all, they fail to acknowledge or cultivate the innate abilities and knowledge of those who are currently entrenched in the problem, helping them discover fulfillment and meaning in their lives.
To break the cycle of poverty in America, we need to disrupt its root causes and help remove barriers, but our solutions at their core must empower people to understand and tap into their unique skills– to see their value, paired with the opportunity and space to put their gifts to use. This will empower people to permanently break down barriers in their lives and in the lives of those around them. To unlock such masked potential will spark massive transformation inside communities – led by people who have experienced transformation themselves. When poverty continues generation after generation, this is the potential that is lost.
This is not an easy task. Helping people navigate and overcome the complex web of barriers to uncover their unique talents is a delicate balance, but worth it. The problems of poverty won’t be solved with top-down, sweeping solutions, but rather a focus on amplifying how individuals inside their own communities are solving problems.
The opportunity to escape the cyclical poverty trap can only be initialized through a solution as layered and complex as the problem: personalized treatment (i.e., tailored case management), powered by local knowledge of individuals and social entrepreneurs inside communities. These individuals understand and have often experienced poverty first-hand, which enables them to develop more creative and more effective solutions, driven by their ability to deeply empathize and understand these complexities and put emphasis on personal dignity.
That’s why we invest in people with firsthand knowledge of the problems their communities face. They are the ones breaking barriers people confront in society and inside themselves. People need opportunities to learn, contribute, and pursue success because everyone is capable of extraordinary things when they have the tools and support to overcome barriers and realize their potential. The solution to breaking the cycle of poverty lies in empowering all Americans with the education, tools, and community support they need to transform their own lives out of poverty and become self-sufficient. And by building innovative and new solutions that focus on internal beliefs in oneself, these leaders see first-hand transformation when individuals realize their unique skills and talents. They start to identify how their experiences, habits and skills can add value to those around them, and that completely alters what they see as possible for their future.
Check out some of the Stand Together stories of transformation below:
Amanda struggled with addiction most of her life. Plagued by repeat DUIs, Amanda believed she would never be able to escape her past and give her daughter the future she deserved. “I was sober and living clean but I did not have any confidence in myself nor did I believe I could become anything because of my past and the fact that I was a single mother living in poverty.” Soon, Amanda found the Jeremiah Program, a nonprofit focused on transforming lives two generations at a time, and unlocked her natural passion for teaching. She is now enrolled at North Dakota State University, pursuing a degree in human development and family science/elementary education. “I can’t wait to become the teacher I have always wanted to be and just have a better life and opportunities for my daughter.”
Freddie was six years old when she was selected to participate in Friends of the Children New York. Throughout the difficult times of living in poverty while watching her parents’ lives slip away before she turned 10, Freddie’s Friend (a trained, professional mentor) was there by her side, supporting and encouraging her resilient attitude and natural intelligence. Freddie graduated from Syracuse University in December 2017 with a degree in Economics.
Becca Stevens leveraged her personal experiences growing up in poverty, healing from childhood trauma, and her business acumen, and founded Thistle Farms in Nashville. Thistle Farms is a social enterprise that houses, loves, and employs women survivors of trafficking, prostitution, and abuse, as artisans who make beautiful handcrafted products. Thistle Farms’ results are stunning. To cherry-pick one statistic, this partner organization generated over 74,800 hours of employment resulting in over $1.5M in income for women survivors of human trafficking, prostitution, and substance abuse.
Daron Babcock mobilized his strategic compassion for his community to build a safe and affordable housing program at Bonton Farms and saw an 82 percent increase in steady employment when people were provided with stable housing. Daron and his neighbors also developed multiple social enterprises in his community to provide transitional jobs, including building one of the largest urban farms, all of which has transformed the lives of so many in the community.
Stand Together invests in these social entrepreneurs, and dozens more, who are leveraging innovative and effective approaches that break the cycle of poverty in America.
True and lasting results will only be achieved with solutions that are as dynamic, agile, and relational as every person that is working to escape the trap. The best vehicle for driving this type of personalized transformation is through local social entrepreneurs, working with people inside communities that are thinking differently about the problem, and are successfully breaking barriers that stand in the way, one-by-one. This is what sets Stand Together apart. The belief in the extraordinary potential of people, that they are the solution to the biggest problems facing our communities. Stand Together is on a mission to scale the efforts that are working to bring about long-term transformation.
To learn more, and join the movement to support successful social entrepreneurs making progress in breaking the cycle of poverty, visit https://standtogetheragainstpoverty.org.
Experience more amazing stories and transformations of this work in action from Stand Together at https://stories.stand-together.org.