Day 792 - Understanding Poverty for Urban Ministry, part 1

A well meaning post on Facebook a few days ago encouraged Christian altruism by suggesting one freely give money to poor or homeless people. Although the original post was well meaning and sympathetic to the plight of homeless people, I challenged the idea that freely giving money to an economically disadvantaged person in our modern society presents a challenging dilemma of making a moral choice by the thoughtful Christian.  

In this day poverty and homelessness have a schizophrenic face that must be understood to provide meaningful help to a person in a homeless and/or unemployed situation. What studies and experience shows is exactly what Christianity teaches - what is needed is to freely give oneself to help the plight of the poor or homeless, to do less may harm both giver and recipient. 

I am posting a series of reflections on the subject over several days.  The reflections are a summary and interpretation of a very good book, "a framework for Understanding Poverty," by Ruby K. Payne. (4th edition, aha! Process, Inc., Highlands, TX, 2005) and my own observations from my work in urban ministry.  Ruby Payne's book is widely used and is offered to educators, employers, policy makers and service providers. I commend it to you for an in depth reading. Dr. Payne's observations are quite synchronous with my observations and experience over three years working with urban homeless people in Chattanooga.

First there are three caveats you should acknowledge and embrace for this information to be of any use to you:

1. If you truly want to understand how a person can fall into a homeless or impoverished circumstance you have to be prepared to do one thing. It is perhaps the most difficult thing for a relatively well-off person to do because it challenges one's own underlying belief system. The first thing you have to do to understand truly the human element of poverty is suspend judgment, or put aside your own views and get into the eyes and mind of the other.

2. You must see the homeless or impoverished as human beings. You cannot diminish, or dehumanize them with words like, "those people," or "the poor," or other pejorative terms or ou will fail to understand the reality of poverty. The only difference between an impoverished person and you is a twist of circumstance.

3. Poverty is not an economic condition but is a spiritual condition at its very core. The existence of widespread poverty reflects the failure of organized (Christian) religion or our own inadequacy to practice it perfectly.

A brief summary: Only the impoverished or homeless person can take the step out of poverty, but others can be a strong support system that offers a hand up.  This change can only be achieved by separating oneself from the factors that keep one in poverty, in other words, to get something you have to give up something. If a support system leaps in and starts "helping" it more than likely will hurt both the support system and the person being "helped."  Poverty is a degrading and soul-killing condition. No one enjoys or wants to be impoverished whether in the USA or in some undeveloped country.  In an arbitrary group of ten homeless and impoverished persons, without significant number of committed mentors who are "well off," perhaps 3 or 4 will succeed in breaking the bonds of poverty.

What is poverty?

Introduction

This post is not about absolute truth. You do not have to see poverty in this way but if you fall into the trap of making judgments of the impoverished you will not understand how you may help someone escape poverty and avoid hurting either you or them. It is critically important to understand how other people see the world. 

Poverty is usually thought to be an economic matter. We seldom think about other dimensions of poverty. The most insidious, and perhaps most important poverty is spiritual poverty. These notes are an overview of respected studies by people who work with other people and congregations to ameliorate poverty.  To appreciate the challenges and opportunities we have working with impoverished persons, we must do one thing, suspend judgment. You may see a circumstance and feel absolutely that it is immoral behavior (and it may be). You may hear a characterization of a social condition and feel it is absolutely incomprehensible and illogical for persons to think that way. If you do not suspend such judgments, you cannot see the world the way another sees it. You are not endorsing the behavior (behavior that we may all agree is wrong) but seeking to understand the how and why of its existence so we can develop strategies and activities to counter the behavior. Remember, poverty is a multidimensional physical and spiritual matter.

Some facts about economic poverty

Among the key things that shape the way we move and act in the world is our social language. This is something we learn by experience, it is never taught to us in school. The language of people in low economic standing is different that those who occupy the middle class. And that of the middle class is different from those who are in the “wealthy class.”

This applies to our perceptions of “intelligence.” Even today people insist that intelligence is inherited and there are books that claim individuals in poverty have an IQ 9 points lower than someone in the middle class. But that presumes IQ measures ability, but what the tests really measure is acquired information. Let’s begin by taking an IQ test to see exactly how smart you are. 

An IQ Test  (From R. Payne's book, p 87-90)

Answer the following 10 questions:

1.    What is grey tape and what is it used for?

2.   What does dissed mean?

3.   What are the advantages and disadvantages of moving often?

4.   What is the main kind of work that a bondsman does?

5.    What is a roach?

6.   How are a pawnshop and a convenience store alike? How are they different?

7.   Why is it important for a non-US citizen to have a green card?

8.   You go to a bakery store and you can buy 5 loaves of day-old bread for 39 cents each or 7 loaves of 3-day old bread for 28 cents each. Which choice costs less?

9.   What does deportation mean?

10.  What is the difference between marriage and a common law relationship?

Some answers:

1.    (a) Grey tape is duct tape. It is what you use to tape up the grocery bags you put your clothes in when you move, (b) It is what you use to seal the joints in the HVAC ducts in your basement.

2.   (a)Diss is the Roman underworld or a market town in Norfolk, England; or (b) it means to treat someone disrespectfully.

3.    (a) Moving often makes it harder for the bill collectors to find you, but you need to buy a lot of grocery bags and grey tape; or  (b) it means we are getting a bigger house so I can throw bigger parties, but I worry about how well the movers will treat my furniture.

4.   (a) He gets my boyfriend out of jail but sucks up my money; they get crooks out of jail before trial.

5.    (a) The butt of a marijuana cigarette; (b) an insect often encountered in low rent apartment buildings.

6.   (a) They are usually found in my neighborhood where I get money from the pawnshop that I spend it at the convenience store; or (b) they are usually found in slums. I would never go in a pawnshop but do drop by the convenience store to buy gasoline for my car.

7.   (a) So I won’t get arrested; (b) to keep illegals out of the US.

8.   (a) The seven loaves, they lasts longer; or (b) they both cost the same.

9.   (a) Sending an illegal alien back to their own country; or (b) the way a person behaves.

10.   (a)  A marriage is a life long commitment and a common law relationship isn’t; or (b) A common law relationship doesn’t cost me money to enter but a marriage does.

You can see that perspective colors everything.

Cognitive Strategies

Cognitive strategies are a fancy way to describe the mental processes that allow us to negotiate our way in the social world. These are the ways we process information, the way we pack stuff into our brains. Now, it is also important to understand that learning occurs through cognitive strategies.

Cognitive strategies have 3 basic parts: concepts, skills and content. Concepts are the mental things that hold information and let us retrieve (recall) it. Skills are capacities such as reading, writing, talking, calculating, and content is what we learn in our daily activity of exercising skills and forming concepts.

Cognitive skills are subliminal, they are developed in youth, and when they do not develop it is a difficult adult struggle to learn them. We generally assume all these cognitive strategies are in place through our childhood family living and in the experience of our elementary education system. The reality is for a large part of our population living in poverty, that system is broken and many adults may not have developed these cognitive strategies. 

Learning and teaching

What is apparent is the difference between learning (what occurs inside the head) and teaching (what occurs outside the head).  To learn what is taught, one must have the cognitive strategies that allow one to learn. As the IQ test shows, without the appropriate background, learning in impossible or difficult regardless of how elegantly and effectively it is taught.

Some important work by psychologists have established that a process of mediation is powerfully effective in helping one to acquire cognitive strategies that provide a person the capability to plan, systematically process data and make appropriate decisions.

The reality:

If you cannot plan you cannot predict.

If you cannot predict, you cannot identify cause and effect.

If you cannot identify cause and effect, you cannot identify consequences.

If you cannot identify consequences, you cannot control your impulsive behavior.

If you cannot control impulsivity, you are inclined towards criminal behavior.

          This is a lot of generalized information to digest. In the next post I will take a step backwards and talk specifically about the complex characteristics of poverty.