Outside funding to pay a living wage for professionals to alleviate the suffering of those who live in poverty. I keep wondering if the salaries and programming fees from the community center aide to the government official who signs off on the request for proposals (RFP) are really worth the end result. I spent sometime today at an organization that is representative of a $2.8 million budget. With 48 employees, warehouses, plans for expansion I have yet to hear a population breakdown of people served. My interest is not just to find fault in programming but it makes me wonder where relationship falls into the work to aid people. I heard a phrase today that made me shiver. A program was described today as an antidote to a communities “moral decay”. I shivered because from my personal perspective, it means that the foundational philosophy of the program starts from a point of negative judgment that will be hard to overcome as a stereotype. The condescension implied by that phrase truly leaves no room to build a relationship of respect between organization and community member. I keep thinking, maybe that phrase (and others like it) are tossed about because we are perceived as outsiders ourselves. We are put into the category “colleague” which gives us an intimacy that is not even afforded the community members served.
How much is this fact finding for us, as opposed to our being able to speak up in disagreement when things just don’t quite sit right with us? Where is the permission to voice our concern? If we don’t do it on site and just save for reflection is that disingenuous? I keep thinking how I would feel if these groups came to visit me in my former job as a social worker, working in an at risk community. (My philosophy is that all are at risk because of the What would student. vs. management say in breakdown and processing of such a visit? I think R.A. would do his typical run to the street away from us after feeling as if he’d been looked “at”. C.M. would feel as if our program had reached another level of importance, also distancing us from R.A. and our other community members.
I think maybe that is the vision of Willie Baptist and the Poverty Initiative’s Poverty Scholar’s program. It helps to build that bridge between the program and the people. The other thing that is amazing thing is that it reconciles the two parts of those of us who have lived on both sides of poverty and service.
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