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Phone: 510-339-3801 Fax: 510-339-3803 E-mail: jmasters@cencomfut.com |
Mailing Address: Center for Community Futures P.O. Box 5309 Berkeley, CA 94705 |
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Office of Community Services APPENDIX E: MEETING RECORDSThe following meeting records from the 2004 working sessions are included in this appendix. *
Redefining Poverty Redefining Poverty Working Session August
18-19, 2004 MEETING RECORD Distributed
to participants: October 19, 2004 Revised,
based on participant feedback: January 4, 2005 This
document contains the proceedings of the working session and has been compiled
from the small and large group discussions, the associated flipchart records,
and from the presentations given by project staff. Reaching consensus during the
session itself was not attempted. Therefore,
this document merely reflects the viewpoints as they were expressed in the
session and does not imply agreement among participants and/or project staff. Redefining Poverty Working Session: Meeting Record PRE-MEETING MATERIALS Participants
received the following materials prior to the working session:
ON-SITE PACKET MATERIALS
Participants
were provided a meeting packet containing the following materials:
MEETING AGENDA Overarching
Goal: The goal of all of the working
sessions is to allow people from a variety of backgrounds and sectors to bring
their expertise to bear toward creating a fundamentally different model for
thinking about and addressing poverty. Session
Objectives: This working session has five
objectives: 1)
Share a compelling case for change and articulate a vision and set of
principles upon which to build strategies to fundamentally change the way we
think about and address poverty as a nation. 2)
Catalog the current definitions and measures of poverty and assess their
utility in moving toward the stated vision. 3)
Identify some key elements of a desired future state (i.e. what it would
look like in the ideal) from the perspectives of the individual, the community,
and society. These elements go beyond the snapshot of the conditions of poverty
(based on the income/consumption definition) to the individual, social, and
economic capacities and dynamics that are more fully representative of the
causes of poverty and the solutions to it. 4)
Identify some of the areas in which work must be undertaken (i.e. change
levers) in order to close the gap between existing and the ideal states. 5)
Brainstorm preliminary strategies for filling the gaps. Wednesday,
August 18, 2004: 3:00
– 4:00 Welcome and Overview by Clarence Carter:
The overall case for change and why we are here; the vision of the 21st
Century Model to Address Poverty and the
underlying principles for the development of the model. 4:00
– 4:45 Session Content and Context: Overview
of the overall initiative, an exploration of the current state and key themes
regarding definitions and measures of poverty, and large group discussion of how
we arrived at the current state from the participants’ perspectives. 4:45
– 5:00 Facilitative Strategy (Facilitator) 5:00
– 6:00 Break 6:00
– 7:30 Dinner 7:30
– 9:00 Small Group Work (3 groups—person, community, societal): Each
small group engages in visioning to describe what definitions and measures of
poverty would ‘look like’ in the ideal. The goal of the small group work is
to bring focus to a desired future—built upon the principles—from each of
the three perspectives.
9:00
– 9:45 Small Groups Report: Groups
present their work to the large group. Large group will not discuss presentation
content at this time, but will be asked to post questions and comments on wall
for discussion the next day. 9:45
– 10:00 Evening Close Out: Facilitator
leads interactive session about the work that’s been done so far, and what
remains for tomorrow. Thursday,
August 19, 2004 8:30
– 10:15 Large Group Discussion: Processing Small Group Work from Wednesday 10:15
– 10:30 Break 10:30
– 11:45 Identification of Gap Areas and Change Levers: Identification
of levers for change (and related considerations and challenges) that would
require work in order to get ‘there’ from ‘here.’ 11:45
– 12:45 Lunch 12:45
– 2:15 Identification of Preliminary Change Strategies: Moving
from visioning and change levers to ideas for closing the gap. 2:15
– 3:00 Session Close Out and Next Steps: Discussion
of how the work that’s been done here will be synthesized to create the pieces
of a draft systemic change strategy and about how to begin the work of change. PROCEEDINGS August
18, 2004: Afternoon INTRODUCTIONS
(facilitated by Barbara Hulburt) WELCOME
AND OVERVIEW BY CLARENCE CARTER As
America continually strives to form that ‘more perfect union’ envisioned by
our founding fathers, one of the key factors we have always struggled with as a
society is how to care for those in greatest need. For purposes of our work
here, we focus on the segment of our society that exists within the condition we
define as poverty. Every
generation or so, our society recalibrates its thinking and approaches for
addressing poverty and it is clearly time for another recalibration. It is time
for us to change the way we think about and address poverty because:
All
of the above leave America with less than the most effective helping system. As
the economic, social, technological—societal conditions change the
nature of poverty, we must also change the way our society thinks about it and
addresses it in order to remain economically, socially, and morally sustainable
as a society. We
need to create an urgency in society to do the work of this recalibration, such
that our society views eliminating poverty as:
As the
Director of the Office of Community Services, I draw on the history and intent
of my organization to help communities address issues of poverty—first as the
Office of Economic Opportunity, and in its subsequent evolutions as the
Community Services Administration, and now as the Office of Community
Services—to leverage the power of its mandate toward new constructs for
thinking about and addressing poverty. We
have convened this group of the best and brightest thinkers to help begin a
social movement toward developing this new construct. Understanding that it will
be a long-term, complex endeavor, we recognize that we will not, over the course
of the next 24 hours of our initial working session, solve the problem. Rather,
we are simply seeking to start the dialog by putting forward some guiding
principles upon which to build a new construct and by creating the “space”
in which to begin building it. Welcome, thank you for coming, and let’s get to
it. SESSION CONTEXT AND CONTENT (Nancy Polend, Ed Strong, Jim Masters) Project
staff presented context and content material to ground the work of the session:
1) Overview of the overall initiative using the characteristics of successful
change as a conceptual framework and a description of the project’s activities
as an operational framework; and 2) an exploration of the current state and key
themes from the research regarding definitions and measures of poverty. See
Appendixes D and E for staff presentations. The
Characteristics of Successful Change presentation suggested that, since
the initiative is at its core the creation of systemic change, it is useful to
map its evolving strategies and activities to a framework that represents
components of successful change. The change
model this initiative is using for this purpose is based on the work of
John Kotter and John Corlett. The presentation made connections between the
change model and the working session activities in which participants would be
engaging. The presentation also made distinctions between what could reasonably
be accomplished during the working session and what was long-term, evolving work
to be done over the next decade and beyond. Acknowledgment of the uncertain,
uncharted territory of this work was made explicit. The
second component of the Characteristics… presentation included the
operational flow of the project’s short-term activities, showing what had been
done to date, where the working session fit in, and what would come next. The
subject-matter-expert presentation, The Impact of Changes in Measuring
Poverty, provided an environmental scan of definitions and measures of
poverty that have been established and the impact different definitions have had
and could have on society. The literature review that was conducted as part of
the initiative, as well as the collective view of the participants (as observed
during the discussions) suggests strongly that the existing U.S. Poverty
Index—based on a 40-year old consumption/income model—is not representative
of the real conditions of poverty and is therefore incomplete. The
Impact… presentation also provided a historical perspective, beginning
with the 1960’s and the establishment of the current U.S. Poverty Index. In
the 1960’s, antipoverty workers liked the “poverty line” for several
reasons. (1) It was easy to understand and apply. (2) It could be used to
‘prove’ to skeptics -- who claimed there was no poverty in their community
-- that poverty existed in their area. (3) It was an easy target to reach. For
example, if you helped Dad get a GED and get a job in the factory at the minimum
wage then that family moved above the poverty line. In
the 1970’s, there were many initiatives to better integrate services in the
hopes that by better linking services (inputs) it would help create better
family outcomes. In the 1980’s, the emphasis shifted to the providing public
charity functions that provided a “safety net” of basics (food and income).
These, too, were based on consumption and family “needs.” There
were numerous efforts to change the poverty index in the 1980’s and 1990’s
– to add other cost elements such as housing and health care and to add other
income sources such as the cash value of benefits. None of these efforts at
large-scale reform were successful, and so even today we are still using the
income/consumption model and the basic formula as designed in the 1960’s. Turning
to large-scale frameworks, one of the largest was developed by Nobel Prize
Winning economist and Harvard Professor Amartya Sen. In it, he creates a
framework of society that flows from inputs, to rules and processes, to
outcomes. He says that “…every normative theory of social arrangement that
has at all stood the test of time seems to demand equality of something –
something that is regarded as particularly important in that theory.”
(Inequality Reexamined. P. 12, Harvard University Press, 1995). One challenge in
his model is that you can only establish equality across one slice of the
system, because everything on either side of that plane will of necessity be in
disequilibrium. Sen
says that too great an emphasis has been placed on trying to generate equality
of outcomes -- which in our example is family incomes. Further, the traditional
counter argument to the idea that the government should guarantee these outcomes
(the welfare/majoritarian/utilitarian arguments) has been the libertarian
argument, that the government should only guarantee the processes or ‘rules of
the game’ and should have no role in assuring outcomes. Sen
moves further back from both of these arguments, and says that the best role for
government is helping people get the education and other “inputs” (primary
goods) that they need to function in that society. Sen’s work is useful to us
because it provides a framework that is generally accepted in the fields of
economics, philosophy and international development. Sen’s framework enables
us to organize and synthesize all the bits-and-pieces of the other definitions
in use. It is consistent with the principles proposed in the 21st
Century initiative and can be operationalized
and used to assess existing policy and program priorities. Sen’s
work moves us away from a focus on “needs” and shifts our attention to a
focus on “strengths,” including social capital, human capital and financial
capital. These forms of capital – which in Sen’s approach are the “primary
goods” that people should start with or acquire -- provide insurance against
slipping into poverty and provide effective ways to get out of poverty. They are
therefore worthy of further development as potential elements of the 21st
Century Model. As
we survey the definitions in use in international organizations and other
countries, we see that they have added in many dimensions that are not
considered in the current U.S. definition. These offer insight and examples of
alternative ways to define poverty. One approach that was tried was an
“inductive” approach to synthesize these existing definitions. An effort to
compare the dozens of definitions and their thousands of variables through a
‘factor analysis’ got lost in the virtual blizzard of factors. Instead, it
is recommended that we turn to guiding principles, such as the ones proposed in
the 21st
Century Model, to help us develop a new
definition that is more “deductive” in character. We
will start with the broadest possible vision, and develop definitions that are
derived from the desired future. FACILITATIVE
STRATEGY The
facilitator set up the evening’s small group visioning activities by restating
the idea that “definitions lead to strategies” and “if you don’t know
where you’re going, any road will take you there.” She also announced the
rosters of each of the groups and addressed various housekeeping and logistical
items. Participants
took an evening break to check in to their rooms and convened in the dining room
at 6:15 for dinner. After dinner, each of the three small groups convened in
their break-out rooms to begin their task of envisioning the elements of an
ideal definition of poverty (i.e. more encompassing and representative
definition of the conditions of poverty). SMALL
GROUP WORK: VISIONING THE IDEAL (DETERMINING DESIRED FUTURE STATE) Based
on the belief that the existing operational definition of poverty is outdated
and incomplete, the large group was broken down into three small groups
representing specific perspectives of poverty—Individual, Community, and
Society. The groups were tasked with identifying elements of a new “ideal”
definition relative to the perspective their group was assigned. The goal of the
small group work was to bring focus to a desired future—built upon the
principles — from each of the three perspectives. Ideal
Elements of a Definition: Individual Perspective This
small group was given the following definition to help focus their discussion:
Individual includes human capital -- the education, attitudes and
experience that enable a person to avoid poverty or get out of it.
As the
group attempted to settle in to their task of identifying ideal elements for a
new definition of poverty, they decided to start with “what poverty is NOT.”
The participants acknowledged that this was an exercise in defining
“non-poverty.” The group’s ideas represent a first glimpse of possible
components of a future definition, upon which future indicators and measures
could be based. They also explored the work of Peter Townsend and others as
starting points for their discussion. Elements
of a Definition (non-poverty):
 Self-definition of role in society | Ability/
latitude to make mistakes | Hope | Extent to which individual have control over
circumstances (e.g. work, housing) | Extent to which individual has control over
“response” to circumstances (voice in society in self definition, influence,
power) | Interdependent relationships (access to spiritual
nurturance and support) | Education |
Work (access) | Money, meaning, friendship | Physical environment |
Ability to protect self/family (capacity and
conditions are diminished if you are poor; e.g. predatory lending, police
brutality) |
Responsibility for ones future, circumstances, change | Stamina/health | The
group decided to explore some existing conceptual definitions offered by key
published experts to ‘mine’ for additional useful elements.
If access to these items are available to individuals,
then they should be equipped to play/participate in their customary
roles within that society | A
Definition of Individual Poverty (also adapted from Townsend)
The
group developed a narrative statement of a definition of individual poverty
based on the results of their brainstorming and discussions: “People
are poor when they don’t have hope, access/ability to participate, and
adequate income to opportunity to meet physical needs, to achieve innate
potential of all kinds, and to achieve a meaningful life, and when they lack the
resources, abilities and moral clarity to lead others out of poverty.” Ideal
Elements of a Definition: Community Perspective Before
the group was able to envision what the ideal community would look like in a
future where poverty was optimally defined, a number of members were compelled
to identify and discuss a range of definitions for “community.” They felt
this was important to do to set the stage for a visioning conversation. Possible
Definition of Community (“How do you define community?” “One size does not
fit all.”)
The
group then began to describe different elements of a strong or healthy
community. They saw these elements comprising a set of indicators or measures
for poverty (or for non-poverty) from the community perspective. Ideal
Elements
Ethnic diversity leads to richer communities |
Economics
of Healthy Community
o
Local Ownership
Community strategies include a focus on: |
Entrepreneurial Support | Population retention (especially in crisis) | Safety |
Natural Capital |
Indicators
of (Non) Poverty
Shared standards on equity | Reduced disparities | Commonality | Connectivity |
Local ownership | Self Reliance | High Labor Standards | Networks (of support systems) |
Participation, Empowerment, Optimism (Non alienated) |
Integration of Sub communities into Larger Communities | Land use policy supports integration (e.g., Mixed
income housing and Inclusive Zoning) | Helping
System
Informal |
Multiplier
The
large group made the following additions to group’s flipchart record:
Ideal
Elements of a Definition: Societal Perspective This
small group was given the following definition to help focus their discussion:
Societal includes: the broadest frameworks -- the social values, norms
and laws that create ‘the rules of the game’ (e.g. non-discrimination, terms
and conditions of work), the economic opportunity structure and the dynamics of
social mobility (what enables or promotes movement). The
discussion was an open one in which the participants freely exchanged ideas
moving from area to area as their thoughts developed. It was a self-guided
process with the facilitator acting as note taker more than process guide.
Therefore there is an appropriate randomness to the flow of the conversation but
very powerful nuggets of inspiration that emerged from the collective wisdom. Society
Vision In
viewing society in a future where poverty was optimally defined the group
described what they would see to include:
Access to Technology for all | A society that leaves no one behind | All levels of society have assets to tide them over in
times of instability (accumulated assets) | All members of society have the capability to take
advantage of opportunity – including opportunities to access quality
education and quality health care. | All parents know their children have safe and
nurturing surroundings | Cultural and societal standards and practices that
allow access to services for all including undocumented immigrants | Cultures are honored, maintained and revitalized.
Individuals and groups are free to pursue their own unique heritages
recognizing that all are not the same e.g. Native American cultures differ
from immigrant cultures. | Hope is part of everybody’s future. | Freedom from abuse by legalized economic exploitation
(e.g. check cashing, loans) | Financial service are available to all |
Solid planning is in evidence. Planning can only come
when hope is invigorated | Intergenerational communities are nurturing | Viable, legal opportunities are available for all | Role models and support systems exist for all | There is access to support systems to overcome social
injustice | Inclusiveness pervades all society does | Society has solid social values and solid social
systems; both are needed | Every individual is given the opportunity to maximize
his or her potential to: |
Learn |
