We Can and We Should End Poverty

 I was in New York City one day, having a conversation with a former United Nations ambassador about my first book, Until It’s Gone: Ending Poverty in Our Nation, in Our Lifetime. He asked me several questions about my assumptions regarding the nature of poverty and about my work as the founder of Circles USA. After 30 minutes of dialogue, he revealed what was really behind his questioning when he said, “Jesus said the poor will always be with us. Is ending poverty going against the Bible?” 

The former ambassador was not alone in asking this question. For many in America, the biblical proclamation that “the poor will always be with us” strongly suggests that no matter what we do, we will always have poverty. From this point of view, any attempt to eradicate poverty feels like a task with no hope of success, that perhaps the best we can hope for is to manage poverty or save a few people. But can we believe in ending poverty? Yes, I believe we can—but only if we change our mind-set. 

We need to review our assumptions about high-impact strategies worth investing time and resources into. High impact means efforts that aim to change the mind-set that created the organization or system in the first place. The mind-set informs the goals that shape the programs of the organization. To create a system that ends poverty, the system needs to change its entire culture. 

For example, when people don’t believe the poverty rate can be reduced, let alone eliminated, they create a poverty management system. To change that system, we must apply resources to affect the deeper beliefs that shape the system’s culture. How can we challenge such a dominating belief? 

I took the former ambassador’s belief that “the poor will always be with us” to a theologian who works closely with us and discovered that the original teaching has been taken out of context. If you Google “the poor will always be with us,” you’ll find evidence of this confusion along with warnings not to use this statement to discourage social action. Additionally, many passages in the Bible suggest a much more active stance toward the poor. While it is obvious that life two thousand years ago is dramatically different from today, we cannot underestimate the power of a belief, especially when it’s associated with Jesus. 

The profound work of the next decade in anti-poverty efforts is to shift the belief that we can only manage poverty to the belief that we can alleviate it. Belief comes from observing new possibilities. By creating a new intention in one’s community, state, or nation to build a system accountable for helping people completely out of poverty, we begin to believe that something new is possible. I’ll repeat: Only managing a poverty management system is doomed to fail. 

Poverty can be eradicated. I believe it is inevitable. But at this point in history, the initiative must begin to build new systems that show us how we can eradicate poverty. That is the mission of The Poverty Solution. We are inspiring and equipping community, state, and national leaders to build pathways completely out of poverty and to let go of the outdated poverty management system we’ve had in place for the past century. 

In the next blog we will look at how the poverty management system is failing your community and what upper education and philanthropy can do differently to make a difference in your poverty rates.  

-Scott C. Miller 

Founder, The Poverty Solution