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Creative, personalized plans needed to tackle poverty

The Brandon Sun - 7/24/2018

Poverty is a social problem, but it will never be solved if it is treated like a social problem. There are many contributors to poverty; mental health, lack of parenting skills, language, cultural isolation, crime, gangs, drugs and alcohol, seeing oneself as a victim, corrupt governments, the list is almost endless.

Governments around the world have tried, with the best intentions, to lower poverty rates, but most of these have been ineffectual, especially when one considers the amount of money spent on these programs.

It is good that Brandon is looking at making a fresh start with this problem, but everyone needs to do homework. If there is an idea, research needs to be done to see if it's been tried before and, if so, was it effective. A complete list of existing resources needs to be drawn and kept up to date.

The book "The Prize," by Dale Russakoff, was written to look at the effect of Mark Zuckerberg's very generous gift of $100 million to improve the suffering Newark, N.J., school system. The gift was given dependant on a matching $100 million being raised; it was.

The sad result was for the $200 million there was almost no improvement. Politics, unions, crime and gangs, lack of parenting were all contributors to the failure. One profound finding was that a child had to believe their future would be better for doing well at school. Many of the children had no reason to believe this. It was also concluded that each child had a different set of challenges and these had to be handled individually.

There is good reason to believe solving poverty will have many of the same challenges. If an individual doesn't believe life will improve with effort, why would that person put in all the effort it will take to escape poverty? There needs to be clear obtainable opportunities. Each person in poverty will have different needs. Poverty will only be solved individual by individual, not as a "social problem."

A personalized action plan, taking advantage of the community's resources, will need to be written for each individual along with timelines; a mentor will need to be assigned. Brandon needs to take a creative, but evidenced based, approach to poverty. Objective measurements need to be taken to evaluate the success of the effort and this information used to evolve the effort.

Jay Winburn

Brandon