“U.S. Poverty: It’s Timed to be Ashamed,” declared the first slide of director of Washington and Lee University’s Shepherd Poverty Program, Dr. Harlan Beckley’s Oct. 25 presentation. Beckley was the keynote speaker in this week-long symposium: American Poverty in Context.
The title, taken from a book by David Shipler, was meant to shock the audience into realizing something Beckley thinks Americans have yet to acknowledge: there is rampant poverty in the United States.
“There is a magnitude [of poverty] in the U.S. that we don’t notice and don’t like to admit,” Beckley said. “We’re the most impoverished developed nation in the world.”
Beckley postulates that a major source of poverty is the inability of the impoverished to participate in the labor market; this lack of basic human “capability” may be due to education and health. He told the audience about how the rate of child poverty in the U.S. has jumped to an all-time high of 20.7 percent and that infant mortality in the U.S. is worse than any other developed country besides Poland.
So in 1997, Beckley and a group of colleagues and students decided to do something to combat these disturbing statistics. Beckley helped found the Shepherd Program for the Interdisciplinary Study of Poverty, named after benefactors and Washington and Lee Alums Nancy and Tom Shepherd. For the first eight to nine years after is inception, the program was an optional concentration within another, established major. Now, students at Washington and Lee take interdisciplinary courses in poverty that relate to their area of interest, whether business, education, healthcare, journalism, public policy or law.
“We want people to gain knowledge in the area they are most interested in and where they are likely to become career professionals,” Beckley said.
In addition to fulfilling the course requirements, students must complete an eight-week internship, during which they work with disadvantaged groups. The goal is to create citizens with a greater consciousness of poverty.
“We’re not trying to convert everyone to social workers,” Beckley said. “We want people to see that being a good lawyer involves paying attention to the legal needs of the indigent. We want doctors to be different. We want lawyers to be different. We want businessmen to be sensitive to these issues.”
The Shepherd Program is looking to expand, and has already begun collaboration with 11 schools. Beckley and his colleagues at the Shepherd Program hope that Middlebury, like Washington and Lee, can begin the program as a concentration, gradually incorporating it as a minor. Already, two or three Middlebury students every summer take part in the internship program. Last summer, the students were Tiernan Murphy ’11 and Dan Murphy ’11.
Beckley says that Shepherd Program graduates have gone onto careers where they have found a use for their skills.
“The data reports that the program has influenced how [graduates] approach professions and civic engagement,” Beckley said.
The program hopes to make great strides in raising awareness of poverty and a drive to combat it, although Beckley accepts that there will never be a complete eradication of poverty.
“Eradicating? No. Diminishing? That’s doable if we give our attention to it and a lot of people are willing to think about it more than they have in the past 20 to 30 years,” he said.
Beckley does not think that the United States has been pursuing antipoverty goals as readily as it could, but sees healthcare reform as a step in the right direction. He hopes that Americans will learn more about poverty, and see that public policy is one of the best ways to change the prevalence of the issue in the U.S.
“[People should] become informed, and act both to address public policy and become engaged in civic affairs that deal with the issues of disadvantaged people,” Beckley said. “[It’s important] not to ignore public policy. [Poverty alleviation] is not going to be done just by people delivering soup to other people —that’s a Band-Aid at best. It covers up the problem.”
Ultimately, Beckley hopes people will learn to recognize the extent of the problem.
“In the end probably one of the problems is we have no shame and we don’t pay attention to how bad the situation is,” Beckley said. “Situation is dire and needs our attention; that’s my plea.” He concluded, “This is by all comparisons an impoverished nation.”
Beckley bears down on U.S. poverty
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