Dear Friends,

During 2011, faith and individual donors like you contributed $12,964 to the Alabama Poverty Project. That means we are nearly 75 percent of the way to our 2011 goal of $17,500. Thank you!

We are immensely grateful to partners like you.  You inspire us and constantly remind us that, together, we have the power to end poverty and hunger in Alabama.

We hope that you had a chance to join us at one of our programs this year.  The highlights included:

• The  Blueprints College Access Initiative, which worked with 246 students at seven high schools across Alabama. Blueprints increases college access by supporting families in college and career planning, financial aid literacy, and ACT preparation.  Thank you for helping equip students to pursue their college dreams.

• Celebrating the publication of APP Co-Founder  Wayne Flynt‘s memoir, Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives.  Wayne challenges and inspires us to keep fighting for a more just Alabama. Thank you for helping us keep his flame going.

•  Alabama Possible Community Conversations, which bring together Alabamians to talk about our aspirations for our communities, the barriers we face in achieving those aspirations, and what actions individuals, leaders, and communities can take in turning possibilities into reality. Thank you for helping us listen to the dreams of everyday Alabamians.

• July’s  Tornado Recovery Workshop and September’s  Lifetime of Learning Conference, which brought together students, educators, and community partners to talk about poverty and long-term tornado recovery. Thank you for ensuring that the structural causes of poverty are addressed in rebuilding efforts.

We have just 5 more days to raise $4,536.   Please ensure that we have the resources to continue our work together by making a contribution today.

Thank you,

Kristina Scott

Executive Director

Alabama Poverty Project

On August 23, 2011, APP had the immense pleasure of honoring our Co-Founder Wayne Flynt.

A sold-out crowd gathered at Woodlawn’s Woodrow Hall to celebrate the publication of Dr. Flynt’s memoir, Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives.

In his powerful testimony, Dr. Flynt captured the essence of his story.

“I am an historian.  I was shaped by a new way of telling history, telling the story from bottom up instead of top down, trying to convince ordinary people who didn’t even know they had a history that history happens to everyone because everyone has origins, struggles, failures, and victories.

“For me that consisted of public activism and university outreach, or taking Alabama history off the campus and to the people, out of the sanitized classroom and into the cacophonous public square. “

Dr. Flynt is a Professor Emeritus of History at Auburn University and a prolific writer with 12 books to his name, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Poor But Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites.

Dr. Flynt challenged and inspired the crowd to take the long view of his work – and our work – to make Alabama a better, more just place for us all.  As little as 50 years ago, Dr. Flynt said, that gathering of business leaders, activists, ministers, and just plain folk would never have taken place.

Imagine what can happen during the next 50 years.

Editorial Coverage on APP’s Evening in Honor of Wayne Flynt:

Jim Evans, Montgomery Advertiser, August 23, 2011, Alabama Voices: Flynt has been the state’s conscience

Bob Blalock, Birmingham News, August 28, 2011: Wayne Flynt keeps the faith, and provides it

Here’s where you come in-

We know Wayne Flynt has a huge fan club in Alabama, and we’d like this page to be a place where you can share why Wayne has had such an influence in your life.  Please leave a note in the comments.

Hannah, Kristina and Nicole at the Blueprints table in NCAN’s Best Practices Gallery

Here’s a guest post from Blueprints founder Nicole Bohannon:

Earlier this month, Kristina, Hannah, and I had the opportunity to attend the National College Access Network’s (NCAN) annual conference in St. Louis to share experiences from Blueprints College Access Initiative and learn from other college access providers around the nation.

From breakout sessions sharing best practices for assessment and sustainability to inspiring plenary sessions and networking opportunities, the conference provided for an incredible time of learning and growth that will undoubtedly prove valuable as we work to deepen the relationships with our Blueprints partners and their communities.

During the conference, we also had the privilege of presenting Blueprints at NCAN’s Best Practices Gallery, which focused on best practices in helping diverse student groups access and success in college. We were thrilled to share information about what Blueprints is doing in Alabama with over 600 conference attendees.

One of the most important things we learned was the power of state and local college access networks.  These networks work to get more 21^st century students into and through college, and by leveraging their collective impact they are able to create large-scale social change for student success. Alabama does not currently have a college access network, and that is something we aim to change over the next year.

The NCAN conference was a wonderful learning opportunity, but even more so, a motivator to see the ground we must make up in college attainment in the state of Alabama. Increasing college access is vital to fighting poverty in Alabama, and we couldn’t do it without your help.

Want to learn more about best practices to increase college access?  Some of the conference sessions are posted in the virtual conference section here, and many of the presentation handouts are available here.

Want to get involved with Blueprints? Here’s how:

• Organize college visits with local high school students: email Hannah Selles to get started.
• Become a mentor: connect with Blueprints programs currently underway in Tuscaloosa (at the University of Alabama), Marion (through Judson College), Montevallo (at the University of Montevallo) and Birmingham (with UAB).
• Help cover the costs of materials and staffing with your financial gift.
  

Last Wednesday I volunteered at the West End Community Gardens, an undertaking of Urban Ministry and the Community Church Without Walls. Urban Ministry, a faith-based but non-sectarian 501c(3) nonprofit, has worked tirelessly since 1976 to address both the immediate and structural causes of poverty in the Birmingham area. The West End Community Garden is devoted to meeting poverty at its core: the stomach.

In my experience, food movements usually advocate a “healthy” or “fit” lifestyle with little concern for the politics of their cause. However, WE Gardens mark an emergence of health-based advocacy from within a community. Rather than promote an ideal of the human body, the Gardens are directed toward a community’s specific needs, as defined by that community. These needs, however, are properly universal in nature: the right to nutrition.

“WE Gardens is a place to build community and provides jobs for young men through the internship program,” Zac Henson, a veteran volunteer at the Gardens, echoed via email. ”It’s community economic development from the ground up.”

Garden Manager Myron Pierre similarly said, “The way to a community’s heart is through its stomach.”

Upon arriving, Garden Director Ama Shambulia tasked me with staking rebars around the two plots of emergent pepper plants. Because I’m relatively inexperienced–well, I can count the amount of times I’ve walked through a garden on one hand–I wasn’t planting rebars with confidence until I reached the second plot.

After running out of rebars, Myron asked me to use a hoop-hoe to cut weeds out of the soil around a small crop of blueberry shrubs.

I was furrowing the ground with some difficulty until Myron pointed out to me that my hoop-hoe was upside-down.

So with my bearings set, I would throw my instrument forward, but rather than rake the earth I tore at it, dragging it back to me. In time a dense, earthen sweat pulled at my shirt, my hoop-hoe unpacking the dirt in thin, weed-strewn hollows.

After about an hour, Zac arrived and we weeded together. The sunlight broadened, but my sweat somehow began to shrink–likely due to the easing humidity, the heat itself sharpening as the weeds disappeared with our effort, not one-by-one but as a stolid mass. I understood working as a body beside another body: how it feels, the chatter than ensues, the flat continuous length of the day.

At the end of my short shift, I hung around with Antonio and Jamal, two Urban Ministry Interns. We–I should say they–talked about Camelbaks, the nylon potables toted on one’s back to provide easy-access hydration.

I then watched Jamal, Myron and Antonio do what I never could: alter a plastic drum to, I assume, store and preserve flowering plants. Jamal pored over it with a drill while Myron and Antonio dispensed backseat advice: a nail here, a strip of wood there, a dollop of concrete at either end.

There’s no easy way to end this post, no touching last moment that will varnish this day with blog-ready hope and the promise of a solution. West End Community Gardens is not the solution to a problem. “Let food grow”—as one of the garden’s signs declares—might someday be a divine command, but until then it testifies, quietly though not impassively, to a community’s resilience, which however proceeds only to a point, to a stubborn limit beyond which more expansive action is needed; to pass beyond this limit is not to enter politics, but to affirm that food is political, that hunger is the brutish bottom of politics.

“Natural disasters hit high poverty communities the hardest,” says Kristina Scott, Executive Director of the Alabama Poverty Project (APP).  “They are more vulnerable to personal injury and property damage when a storm hits, have fewer financial resources and are more likely to experience severe mental health impacts, including post-traumatic stress disorder.”

According to the US Census Bureau, 14.3 percent of Americans live below the federal poverty threshold.  The poverty threshold is determined by age and number of people in a household and was $21,954 for a two-adult, two-child household in 2009, the most recent year for which poverty data is available.

The Census Bureau also reports that 17.5 percent of Alabamians live in poverty.  Fourteen of the tornado-impacted counties have poverty rates greater than 20 percent, including Chambers (20.7 percent), Choctaw (22.8 percent), Clarke (29.1 percent), DeKalb (21.7 percent), Franklin (21.8 percent), Greene (28.4 percent), Hale (26.6 percent), Marengo (24.9 percent), Marion (21.2 percent), Monroe (23.4 percent), Perry (31 percent), Pickens (28 percent), Sumter (35.1 percent) and Winston Counties (24.9 percent).  A full list of impacted counties with key poverty data is attached.  More information is also available on the APP website at http://alabamapossible.org/datasheet/.

In their 2004 report “Poverty and Disasters in the United States,” Sociologists Alice Fothergill and Lori Peek conclude that while poor individuals are more likely to perceive hazards as risky, they are less likely to prepare for hazards or buy insurance; less likely to respond to warnings; more likely to die, suffer injuries, and have proportionately higher material losses; have more psychological trauma; and face more obstacles during the phases of response, recovery, and reconstruction.

In response to the catastrophic tornadoes, APP is compiling resources for individuals to give, volunteer and advocate for those impacted by the storms.  They are regularly updated and available at http://alabamapossible.org/tornadorelief.

About the Alabama Poverty Project:

Alabama is the sixth poorest state in the nation. The Alabama Poverty Project (APP) mobilizes Alabamians to eliminate poverty through strategic relationships with faith communities, higher education institutions and civic organizations. For information and resources, visit our website, http://alabamapossible.org.

###

What’s my take away?  That many people don’t understand TANF (aka welfare) or drug addiction (which even the US Government recognizes is a disease).

These Facebook groups, coupled with South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer’s comment that when the government helps the poor, it’s like people feeding stray animals that continually “breed,” have re-opened a conversation about Americans’ lack of empathy for the poor in hard economic times.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a comprehensive examination of this phenomenon on Monday in the article “In hard times, Americans blame the poor.”

Some highlights:

In an April 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center in Washington, 72 percent agreed with the statement that “poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs.” That’s up from 69 percent in 2007.

“The economic downturn has made the middle class less generous toward others,” said Guy Molyneux, a partner at Hart Research Associates, a Washington firm that researches attitudes toward the poor. “People are less supportive of the government helping the poor, because they feel they’re not getting enough help themselves.

. . .

Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University, agreed: “Hatred of the poor is fueled by the middle class’s fear of falling during hard times.”

Americans don’t understand how the poor are victimized by a lack of jobs, inefficient schools, and unsafe neighborhoods, experts say.

“People ignore the structural issues – jobs leaving, industry becoming more mechanized,” said Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson. . . “Then they point to the poor and ask, ‘Why aren’t you making it?’ “

Alabamians are facing hard times – 1 in 6 of us and 1 in 4 children live on less than the federal poverty threshold, which is just over $21,000 for a family of four.  And unemployment has hit 11 percent, the highest it has been in 26 years.

Alabama has poor as long as we have been a state.  And I for one don’t think that’s because Alabamians are lazy or drug addicts.  I think it is because we all face some major structural hurdles in achieving the prosperity I know we are capable of.

Want to learn the facts about welfare in Alabama?  Check out our fact sheet here.

And want to learn about the larger structural issues?  Wayne Flynt’s Alabama in the 20th Century is a terrific resource, and I highly recommend reading the first four chapters.

Posted by Kristina Scott

Leonard Pitts: Public silence greets poor’s powerlessness

If he’d said it of Jews, he would still be apologizing.

If he’d said it of blacks, he’d be on BET, begging absolution.

If he’d said it of women, the National Organization for Women would have his carcass turning slowly on a spit over an open flame.

But he said it of the poor, so he got away with it.

“He” is South Carolina Lt. Gov. André Bauer, running for governor on the GOP ticket. Speaking of those who receive public assistance, he recently told an audience, “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

Read the rest here.

I am interested in your reflections – please leave them in the comments.

Posted by Kristina Scott

These statistics closely correlate with the number of students on free- or reduced-lunch plans, which is one measure of poverty.

To add insult to injury, kids who struggle with reading are frequently asked to leave school when they turn 16.  That just continues the cycle of poverty.  Instead, we should be creating a nurturing, supportive environment that recognizes that every child can and should learn how to read.

Read the complete analysis – and learn about possible solutions here.

Posted by Kristina Scott

According to the Census Bureau, poverty is low among veterans. Only 5.6 percent of veterans lived in poverty in 1999 – or about half the rate for all adults, which was 10.9 percent.

However, our youngest veterans, those who served in August 1990 or later, were among the most likely to be poor, with a poverty rate of 6.2 percent. And, according to this story from the Boston Globe,  the VA says that the number of homeless women veterans is on the rise.

An estimated 6,500 female veterans end up homeless.  While that’s a relatively small number, it is twice was it was a decade ago. Again, younger veterans are more at risk: One out of every 10 homeless vets under the age of 45 is now a woman.  And many are single moms.

More from the Globe:

In the 2007 fiscal year, the average of state and local taxes collected per person in Alabama was $2,909. Mississippi finished 49th at $2,989. The national median was $4,011.

Alabama’s tax system is upside down, meaning it takes the most from those who have the least.  Average, middle class Alabama families pay 10 percent of their income in state and local taxes, compared to 5 percent for our wealthiest citizens.  And the poorest families – they pay 12 percent.

Here’s a link to the full study and the census data it was based on.

You might also enjoy this editorial cartoon from today’s Mobile Press Register.

Posted by Kristina Scott