Fighting Poverty in CT

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation. Posted November 21, 2007.

At 37 years of age, Deborah Glover says she had lived a middle-class life and never knew poverty. That all changed when she had a car accident, and as a single mother with three kids she could no longer afford to make ends meet.

"I'd never lived in poverty before that time," she told an audience of 300 at the recent Connecticut Association for Community Action's (CAFCA) annual conference, Ending Child Poverty: Investing in Our Future. "I had ignored poverty all together."

When she was advised to go to a shelter to get the help she needed, she responded, "What the hell is a shelter?"

But Glover did go. And she received treatment for a substance abuse problem she had developed as a result of the daily pain she suffered from the car wreck. She also received mental health services, through which she obtained part-time work, and said that was where her recovery started. She learned that even with these challenges she could work again, could own a home, could further her education.

"It was very difficult, living at the poverty level. And even though it didn't last long it seemed like forever," she said.

Glover now owns her own house and works in the shelter where she once dreaded going. She said most clients just need people to listen to them. "We need these programs," she said. "We need these programs to help people be aware, to get the higher learning that they need, to get their health…. A lot of people that are in crisis don't understand what we as able people can do."

Glover was on a panel of four women - three of whom now work to eradicate poverty - who talked about their way out of poverty. She and the other panelists broke down the barriers between what Mark Greenberg, Executive Director of the Poverty Task Force at the Center for American Progress (CAP), described in his keynote address as "an 'us' and 'them' attitude towards poverty. 'Them' being people living in poverty, and 'us' being unaffected by it. If we move from 'them' to 'us' it would be transformative for our country." With 55 percent of the nation now looking for the government to "do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people," certainly this kind of transformation would be an important step towards changing the way we battle poverty.

Connecticut is a key state in an emerging anti-poverty movement. It passed landmark legislation in 2004 that mandated a 50 percent reduction in child poverty by 2014, and it has served as a model for similar efforts in Vermont, Minnesota, and Delaware. But the state has made little movement towards its goal. In fact, the child poverty rate has risen from 10.1 percent to 10.7 percent since 2004 - nationwide, 4.9 million more people are living in poverty than in 2000, including 1.2 million more children. Connecticut is the second richest state in the richest nation in the world, and advocates are frustrated with what they see as a lack of political will - a point activists across the nation would second in describing the conditions in their respective states and at the federal level.

The federal poverty level is an unjustifiably flawed measure - $20,614 in income for a family of four. If one measures poverty as the ability to actually pay for basic needs in a state - an income two to three times the federal poverty level is needed and the child poverty rate in Connecticut jumps to 1 in 4 kids. "Over 206,000 Connecticut kids live in low-income or poor households," said Juliet Manalan, Government and Public Relations staffer for CAFCA. And Mark Winne, former director of Hartford Food System wrote in the Washington Post that 275,000 Connecticut residents are hungry or "food insecure."

One reason Connecticut has failed to make the progress advocates hoped is because Republican Governor M. Jodi Rell maneuvered to kill the state Earned Income Tax Credit (a refundable tax credit that supplements the earnings of low- and moderate-income workers) for the second year in a row. State Representative Mary Mushinsky, who introduced the legislation mandating the 50 percent child poverty reduction, said she had been counting on EITC passage to get the state 60 percent of the way towards its goal. State Senator Jonathan Harris, Chair of the Human Services Committee, vowed at the conference to bring the EITC back next session. Harris is also focused on adult literacy, saying that if parents can't navigate the system - read, write, and communicate - kids won't have the parent-advocates they need.

But Gwen Eaddy-Samuel said when she was living on $62 per week she wasn't thinking about getting her education, or getting her kids into pre-school, she was "living in the moment and just trying to survive…. As much as you're trying to get to [point] B… A and C are calling you today," she said.

Only when Eaddy-Samuel got involved with the Community Renewal Team Head Start program, and learned about empowerment and being more involved in her child's life, "something inside me started clicking." She began to talk to people about the domestic violence that she had grown up with and realized that she "wasn't in this alone." She had been taught during her childhood that "what goes on in the home, stays in the home, you keep it to yourself." And now she found herself with an abusive boyfriend whom she stayed with - partly because they had three kids and she didn't want people to think of her as the stereotypical single mother.

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Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation.