Bill Shore’s Letters

Letter for the New Year

January 2005

Welcome back and best wishes for the New Year. I hope your holiday was filled with many blessings.

As we look ahead, one blessing for which we can all be grateful is membership in the first generation in history with the potential to eradicate poverty here at home and around the world. In this season marked by the tragedies of suicide bombing in Mosul and devastation in South Asia, the sentiment expressed in the Economist excerpt above, reflects cause for great hope.

In 2005 poverty reduction will dominate global policy agendas. A series of international reports will be released in the first half of the year and in July, Tony Blair plans to host a G8 Summit devoted to poverty, especially in Africa. In September there will be a special UN session reviewing progress toward the Millennium Development Goals forged by our friend Jeffrey Sachs.

In today's divided and precarious world, these actions are timely and directly relevant to our own security and future. As outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in the journal Foreign Policy: "Development is not a 'soft' policy issue, but a core national security issue. The United States cannot win the war on terrorism unless we confront the social and political roots of poverty. We want to bring people to justice if they commit acts of terrorism, but we also want to bring justice to people."

But the opportunity to confront poverty and deliver justice is not confined to the developing world. It exists here in our own backyard.

Toward the end of 2004, Share Our Strength led a Hinges of Hope trip to neighborhoods in Anacostia where few of us ever venture. Business and foundation leaders visited housing projects and "hot spots" notorious for open air drug markets and gang violence. The economic and social isolation of these neighborhoods and their residents was palpable. But far more striking were the extraordinary people we met whose efforts affirm the promise of ending poverty:

• Eric Adler and Raj Vinnekota, former management consultants who refurbished an abandoned school that had been repeatedly set on fire into the SEED school, the nation's first urban, public boarding school that last year sent 100% of its graduates to college.
• In the Wellington Park housing project we sat in an empty and chilly cinderblock apartment talking with three young mothers whose children have dodged bullets at the playground and who struggle to find and put nutritious meals on their table. Their shared goal is simple: to move out as fast as they can.
• We toured the mobile medical van run by Dr. Gloria WilderBrathwaite, a 40 year old physician who grew up on welfare in Brooklyn, attended Howard University and Georgetown Medical School. As director of mobile medical services for the Children's Health Fund in DC, she ensures continuity of high quality health care for some of the most underserved children in America.
• And we met with Ms. Stamps, an older African American woman who, after a heart attack left her nearly helpless, created her own crisis center for parents in Lincoln Heights that seems to be sustained less by money or manpower than by improvisation and prayer. Seemingly short on concrete solutions, but invoking God's will with every breath, Ms. Stamps is a beloved force of nature. The respect she's earned from the community was evident from the way both of our van drivers hugged her. She read from a prepared statement when we arrived and as we left she directly asked for our help.

What it will take to end poverty in communities like Anacostia is different from the policies, like reduction of trade barriers, necessary to address poverty globally, But both types of poverty share one truth. We can no longer claim that we don't have solutions. They exist in abundance, especially here at home. Just look at the Harlem Children's Zone's comprehensive array of early interventions, or Chrysalis's workforce development programs in Los Angeles or LISC's community development successes in dozens of urban settings.

The larger problem is that we don't like what we know about the solutions. They are expensive, requiring substantial private and public support. They take a lot of time before results can be achieved, measured and trumpeted. They can't be replicated easily or in cookie-cutter fashion. All of which makes them politically unpopular with taxpayers and voters impatient for more immediate gratification.

The challenge of our time, and a purpose of Hinges, is to help build the political will to sustain and bring to scale programs that work. By definition, that is an enormous, uncertain and evolutionary undertaking. But as Ms. Stamps taught us, even the largest tasks often begin with finding and conveying one's own faith. She brought to mind a passage from an Alice Munro's short story: "Every day opened her up to have God's will done in it. Every night she toted up what she'd done and said and thought, to see how it squared with Him. That kind of life is dreary, people think, but they're missing the point. For one thing, such a life can never be boring. And nothing can happen to you that you can't make use of. Even if you're racked by troubles, and sick and poor and ugly, you've got your soul to carry through life like a treasure on a platter."

As we greet the new year with bold ambitions for ending childhood hunger and building the will to eradicate poverty, our own faith will surely be tested at times. Faith takes many forms - some overtly religious, others not at all. It is not something that can be donated to Share Our Strength or generated through events or corporate partnerships. But we should never underestimate its vital role in all we seek to do. As I watch interviews with America's troops, even the grievously wounded - especially the grievously wounded - I can't help but admire their idealism, their eagerness to rejoin their comrades, their faith in what they're doing.

As they bring that faith to their challenge, so must we bring it to ours. Our shared commitment to the work ahead is the very soul of Share Our Strength and Community Wealth Ventures, it is what we have "to carry through life like a treasure on a platter."

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