Samford Hosts State Poverty Meeting

Jeff B. Hansen

The Birmingham News

August 18, 1996

Kimble Forrister told the kitchen to prepare 150 meals for people coming to the Poor in Alabama conference Saturday at Samford University.

He needed 280, as a large crowd who study and fight poverty across the state con- verged in the chapel at Beeson Divinity School to share methods and discuss goals.

They came from all over, said Forrister, the conference coordinator. They came from Lauderdale County to Baldwin County.

Poor in Alabama is the first of a planned annual meeting sponsored by the Alabama Poverty Project.

The day-long event kicked off with an attack against the stereotypes of poverty.

I wish the words I have to say could be said to everybody in the state, said Jack Shelton, a University of Alabama expert on the rural poor. He said that stereo- types about poverty – that the poor choose to be that way, that they are all working-age people instead of children or the elderly, that they are healthy, that the adult poor don’t work – are ways to avoid facing the problem.

As long as we can blame the poor, as long as we can blame the system that helps the poor, we don’t have to do a thing, he said.

Scott Douglas, executive director of Greater Birmingham Ministries, talked about the wisdom the poor have to explain their own needs.

A two-hour workshop in the afternoon featured 13 anti-poverty programs at work in Alabama. They included:

The BEAT Housing effort in Ensley, where a low-income community is creating new, affordable housing.

Model programs in Dothan and Hale County to help families become self-sufficient.

A home instruction effort in Montgomery that gives parents books, lessons and the knowledge needed to prepare their preschool children to do well in school.

How the First Baptist Church in Montgomery went about assessing the needs of its community for outreach efforts.

Wayne Flynt, historian at Auburn University, was scheduled to close the conference talking about prospects for the future.

The Alabama Poverty Project is based at Samford. Jo Dohoney, a faculty member in Samford’s sociology department, is its first executive director.