(ABP) — The dispersion of 1 million Hurricane Katrina evacuees is straining a social safety net that's already stretched to the limit by the needs of the country's 36 million poor people.
But those engaged in the long-term fight against poverty see a silver lining: Caring for Katrina's newly homeless is forcing Americans “to put a face on poverty” — an entrenched social ill they say is often overlooked in a consumer society.
The recent disasters — and the response they triggered — have made life worse for poor people nationwide, said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a charity-watchdog group in Chicago.
With supplies and workers stretched so thin, Borochoff said, people outside the Gulf region who need assistance have to wait longer to get help. For instance, subsidized housing is harder to get all across the country, he said, because the diaspora of Katrina's homeless into 33 states has overloaded the cities that have taken them in.
The Katrina tragedy evoked an outpouring of both money and volunteerism , particularly from young adults, say social-service workers. In addition to the $2.8 billion donated to hurricane victims, many good Samaritans wanted to “get their hands dirty” by donating their time as well.
That's been a good thing, and it could have lasting impact, said Ginger Smith, executive director of Baptist Mission Centers in Houston. “The greatest challenge in communicating poverty in America is discovering a way to personalize it,” she said.
“We [in Houston] had 200,000 neighbors that had lived through a horrific experience and were suddenly at our doorstep in need,” she said. “The multitudes presented opportunities that could not be ignored.”
“Many volunteers who went into the shelters had life-changing conversations with people that days earlier had only been faces on TV,” said Smith, whose organization operates three mission centers in Houston that feed an average of 3,200 people a month.
In the days after Katrina, Baptist Mission Centers decided against turning one ministry center into a shelter for evacuees. “I had several reasons for not opening as a shelter, and one was that I couldn't imagine telling a community homeless man I knew by name that he couldn't stay in the shelter because it was only for people from Louisiana and Mississippi,” Smith said. “I felt like that would be more damaging in the long run of our ministry to choose who we serve.”
When a crisis occurs, it places a special burden on community ministries that provide ongoing ministry to local people in need, she explained. After Katrina, Baptist Mission Centers combined two children's programs from different sites to make room for other ministries, only to see attendance drop from 50 kids to as few as four.
“We serve the impoverished, and their needs did not change through this disaster,” Smith said. “Our initial commitment was to them and our community, which meant we had to maintain our ministry as it is.”
Nationwide, 12.7 percent of the population (or 37 million people) lives below the poverty level, according to 2004 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, and the number continues to rise each year — even before Katrina's impact is measured.
“The abject poverty revealed by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans exists in every urban area of the United States,” said Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches. “It's poverty so severe that it kills people.”
Edgar criticized legislators who warned paying for the Katrina recovery will require cuts to traditional social programs. “It's simply a sin for Congress to cut spending for other poor people to make up for unplanned but essential spending elsewhere,” he said in a statement.
Others worry that Americans have become callused to long-term, intractable poverty.
The poor “blend into the background of our communities as we drive by, and they just become part of the landscape,” said Jim Young, director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas Missions Equipping Center. “It's a theological problem when we look at the poor and don't see the image of God the way we should. When we look at 'the least of these,' we should see Jesus.”
Addressing long-term poverty needs will be more difficult after Katrina, Borochoff predicted. It's always harder to raise money for long-term programs, he said. People are naturally drawn to the disaster of the moment and tend to ignore unseen, unpublicized poverty. And while people want to get involved in hands-on ways — like passing out food at shelters — what's really needed is money for long-term solutions, he said.
Borochoff urged donors not to abandon their traditional charities in order to help disaster victims. Contributions to those organizations tend to dip in the wake of disasters, he said, increasing the hardship on the poor. “These people should not do without because people are serving disaster victims.”
Despite those concerns, some anti-poverty voices say the enormity of the Katrina disaster may change the anti-poverty debate.
“To be poor in America was to be invisible,” wrote Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post soon after the hurricane, “but not after this week, not after those images of the bedraggled masses at the Superdome, convention center and airport. No one can claim that the post-Reagan orthodoxy of low taxes and small government, which does wonders for the extremely rich, also inevitably does wonders for the extremely poor. What was that about a rising tide lifting all boats? What if you don't have a boat?”
Borochoff is one who believes Katrina may change how Americans respond to hunger. “Kartina increased knowledge that there are working poor in America,” he said, and it also energized more people, particularly young adults, to get involved in the solution.
Jimmy Dorrell, who runs a community ministry in Waco, Texas, agreed. “Among churches that opened their doors, housed people in their buildings, and got to know them, it could have a long-term positive effect,” Dorrell said. “But the jury's still out. It could go the other way.”
Some potential donors may think they already have done their part for meeting human needs by giving to disaster relief, noted Dorrell, director of Mission Waco. That could create a problem for community ministries that rely heavily on year-end gifts to sustain them through lean months, he said.
“Maybe what's happened will raise awareness about poverty and need,” he said. “Or maybe people will think they already have given and don't have any discretionary money left.”
For the answer, Dorrell said, they will simply have to wait and see.
Tom Prevost, who directs a long-term anti-poverty program for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, looks overseas for hopeful signs. He said the unprecedented international response to the South Asia tsunami, as well as the debt-relief campaign for Africa, have awakened previously uninvolved Christians.
Some of those mobilized Christians have volunteered in overseas projects, and that creates a positive “spillover effect,” he continued. “Those who have seen some of this face to face in these poverty-ridden counties are more sensitive.”
“There seems to be a growing awareness that it's going to take more than a quick fix” to reduce poverty at home and abroad, said Prevost, national coordinator of Together for Hope, the CBF's rural poverty initiative, a 20-year commitment to fight poverty in the nation's poorest counties.
The CBF initiative is “a long-term commitment to self-sustainability” in historically poor communities, Prevost said. The program helps the poor recognize they have the resources to change their economic destiny.
“They just feel alone,” he said of the entrenched poor. “And to know someone is going to be with them for 20 or more years, that's the thing that really seems to change the conversation. … They are tired of hit-and-run missions.”
A long-term solution to poverty will require all these elements — volunteerism, money and a long-term commitment — as well as political action to change public policy.
“There needs to be more concern for what is happening in our communities, more concern for the public witness that we have,” Prevost concluded.
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