Poverty...

Hunger Banquet

I attended BYU's Hunger Banquet yesterday. The whole production was absolutely fantastic, and it was great to see so many people making a difference.

I was especially impressed with the key note speaker Martin Burt, who used to be the mayor of the capital city of Paraguay. His ideas on solving poverty seemed more effective then a lot of the other ideas presented that night. Here are some of my thoughts based on a lot of things he said:

Solving poverty:

What is poverty?

Before one can solve poverty, one needs to know what poverty is. Martin mentioned that this is often one of the biggest discussions amongst government organizations, where does one draw the line of poverty? If you are making $600 a month, and your neighbor is making $590, are they impoverished and you are not? Is it those who are unemployed? Employed but do not have housing?

I believe that self-reliance is the ultimate goal, and an easy indication of whether you are living in poverty or not. If one cannot provide themselves with food, shelter, clothing, and hygiene then they must be dependent on others or else they live in poverty. Many college students are not completely self-reliant, they have families paying their housing, maybe food, and other expenses. What would happen if all of this support were suddenly taken away? They too would be impoverished, until they learned how to provide these necessities for themselves.

This creates three categories:

-Poverty: Those who cannot provide the basic necessities for themselves.

-Threshold of poverty: Those who cannot provide the basic necessities for themselves but are fortunate enough to have someone providing these for them.

-Affluent: The self-reliant. They provide themselves with what they need and thus are free to pursue what they want. This might also included a desire to provide for those in poverty.

Notice, though, if an affluent person provides the basics for someone in poverty, they have taken someone from poverty and placed them into the threshold of poverty. As soon as the affluent is gone, if the beneficiary has not learned by then how to be self-reliant themselves, they will immediately fall back into poverty.

This creates three strategies for fighting poverty:

- Fighting poverty from the top down: This is when the affluent provide basic needs to the impoverished, thus putting them on the threshold of poverty.

- Fighting poverty from the bottom up: This is when someone who is self-reliant teaches the impoverished how to be self-reliant, and the impoverished pull themselves out of poverty by providing themselves with their own basic needs, and thus become affluent.

- Fighting poverty from both the top down and the bottom up: This is when the affluent provides basic needs to the impoverished as well as teaches them how to be self-reliant.

How are you going to fight poverty? This is rhetorical. I know for myself my goal is to help those who are either impoverished or on the threshold of poverty advance to the freedom of affluence and self-reliance.

Achieving self-reliance: on a large scale

If I wanted to be self-reliant, (and I am) in that I provide myself with my own basic needs, I would do the following:

I would increase my income so that I could afford my needs.

I would look for needs that I can afford.

In the same way, we can fight poverty by:

Teaching people how to increase their income, and

Creating basic needs that people can afford.

I can see dozens of potential service projects in these two areas, there are plenty of opportunities for teaching and plenty of room for innovating a cheaper and more affordable need.

This can be done first on a small scale, individually each of us can do this.

I will dive more in depth on how to do this on a large scale after I have done it.