A National Commitment
To end poverty, we must develop a strategy that both helps those who are poor get out of poverty and eliminates conditions that allow poverty to keep its stranglehold on communities. This requires, first, determining a set of “preconditions for prosperity.” The preconditions should incorporate a holistic assessment of the factors that contribute to a person’s well-being, such as access to health care, access to services that facilitate work, access to affordable and nutritious food, access to an education that provides both the academic and social foundations for success, and access to financial services that encourage saving and protect against predatory products and practices. Second, it requires developing measurable targets for achieving those preconditions. And most importantly, it requires making a national commitment that holds us all accountable for making progress toward the targets. If we are to reduce hunger and poverty, everyone must do their part, starting at the top. Congress and the administration must reallocate resources to reverse the shameful trend of growing hunger and poverty. But ending hunger and poverty requires not just that we change course, but that we stay the course once the efforts have begun. Setting a goal to reduce hunger and poverty in a specific timeframe will keep us focused on the target and provide a way to measure progress.
The intractability of poverty is due partly to the fact that there are myriad ways to try to solve the problem. All too often, anti-poverty efforts are stymied by a polarizing debate over which framework provides the best approach for tackling the problem. But no single policy change will end poverty. Instead, reducing poverty requires a commitment to a series of complementary policy changes. This is where goal-setting can help. Focusing on the end goal of reducing poverty rather than the individual instruments to get there provides clarity of purpose that can synthesize fragmented ideas and efforts. Setting a goal with a deadline will propel us to take action rather than getting lost in a theoretical debate. Finally, charting overall progress allows us to see how we are doing and to take the true measure of our commitment.
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