Attack poverty, not people living in it, speakers urge

FORT WORTH—Middle-class social service providers and educators who try to communicate with people trapped in generational poverty might as well be speaking in a foreign language—unless they intentionally become “poverty-informed,” Donna Beegle told participants at a Christian community development conference.

“America is segregated by social class,” Beegle, founder of Communication Across Barriers, said at the No Need Among You Conference at Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth.

“We need to fight poverty, not the people who live in it,” she said at the conference, sponsored by the Texas Christian Community Development Network. “Poverty steals hope.”

Beegle described spending “28 years living in the war zone of poverty.” Growing up, she seldom understood the vocabulary her teachers used, and their examples based on middle-class experiences rang hollow.

When Beegle told a teacher she planned to drop out of school, the teacher tried to motivate her by saying she needed to earn a diploma if she wanted to get a job.

“I told her I didn’t want a job,” Beegle recalled.

When the teacher talked about a “job,” she meant a meaningful career that would enable her to have a decent lifestyle.  She interpreted Beegle’s response as evidence of laziness.

When Beegle heard “job,” she thought about all the migrant workers and other laborers she knew who worked long hours at jobs that didn’t pay a living wage, and she wanted no part of that life.

“If you judge, you cannot connect. If you cannot connect, you cannot communicate,” Beegle said.

As a divorced mother in her late 20s who wanted to provide for her children, Beegle enrolled in a program for women that enabled her to earn a GED.

After two years at a community college, she continued her studies at the University of Portland, where a professor offered to teach her the communication skills she never learned as an elementary school student. After completing her undergraduate degree, she went on to earn a master’s degree in communication and a doctorate in educational leadership.

“Now I am bilingual. I speak fluent middle-class English,” she said.

‘Put poverty in its place’

Beegle challenged Christians involved in community development to recognize if they control resources people in poverty need, they should “hold that power as sacred.”

“See the unknown potential of the human in front of you,” she urged.

Touching on some of the same themes, Coyletta Govan of Cornerstone Assistance Network in Fort Worth led a workshop on “Thriving in the Wake of Poverty.”

“Poverty is like a vicious predator,” Govan said.

People trapped in poverty are like the enslaved Israelites in Egypt who were commanded by Pharaoh to make bricks without straw. In other words, they were required to work but not provided the resources necessary to accomplish the assigned task, she said.

She challenged Christians in community development to act with “courageous compassion” and find the STRAW—Solutions That Restore Access To Wealth.

“Poverty is the problem, not the people living in poverty,” she said. “Remove obstacles and replace them with resources. We can put poverty in its place.”