Blog Action Day: Poverty in Peace River?

October 15 is Blog Action Day and the topic for 2008 is poverty. Some people might wonder whether poverty actually exists in Peace River. There are, of course, a few street people who are the more visible face of poverty, but people working with families see another side and understand that yes, we do have poverty and we have far too many children growing up in poverty.

What IS poverty anyway? Vibrant Calgary has defined it as “the condition of a human being who does not have sufficient economic and other resources to live with the dignity, choices and power which support full participation in society.”

And why is full participation in society important? We all need to feel that we belong, and unfortunately, when a person is poor, that sense of belonging may be harder to achieve. Most seriously, for disaffected youth, joining a gang may seem like a good way to gain a sense of belonging.

The recent spate of violence in Peace River is largely gang-related, according to the RCMP. Our community needs to find ways to address the problem by looking beyond criminal activity to the root causes, and one of those is poverty.

When I attended the Tamarack Collaborating Communities Institute in Kitchener in September, I was hugely impressed with what a number of communities are doing to reduce poverty. For example, as I've written in a previous article, in Hamilton, where in 2005 20% of the population lived in poverty, the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction was convened and has mobilized the whole city to work on poverty reduction.

Could Peace River do something similar on a much smaller scale? I once belonged to the Poverty Action Committee in Peace River, but we needed a much larger body of people, including businesses, if we were going to make much difference. That group runs the Peace River Soup Kitchen, which is important, but clearly only one piece of the whole.

When the Town does its community visioning activities (stay tuned for details), I hope that residents will participate fully and will bring their best thinking and creativity to the complex issues, like poverty, that are facing us.

How do we ensure that everyone feels a part of the community? How do we help people move beyond poverty into good jobs? How we do ensure that people have safe and affordable housing in which to live and raise their families? How do we accommodate all ages and stages of life? Lots of questions--let's see if we can work together to find solutions.