Author points out perspective of poverty

Housing. Food. Illness. Child care. Time spent at social service agencies, navigating the complex system.

These are the concrete realities of a poor person's life, the things that prevent them from getting ahead of the game.

"At some point you've got to stop talking about the concrete problems and get to the abstract," said Philip DeVol, co-author of the book "Bridges Out of Poverty: Strategies for Professionals and Communities."

Unfortunately, he said, "You have to have a stable life in order to go to the abstract," and stability is something that is sorely lacking in the lives of the poor.

"That environment is unstable and the people in it are vulnerable," DeVol said. "America has a form of poverty right now ... where there are people whose lives are so unstable that they spend all day long solving concrete problems.

"What that really does is it robs people of their future story."

DeVol was at the Salt Lake City Main Library Thursday, giving a daylong workshop to more than 200 local service providers for low-income Utahns. DeVol also spoke last week in Ogden and St. George.

"We're building a critical mass," said Lloyd Pendleton, director of the state's homeless task force. "We want people to get an understanding of a new paradigm of how we deal with people in poverty."

DeVol's goal during this week's Utah appearances is to provide people with an accurate "mental model" of poverty and show how one's economic class contributes to how they handle certain situations. Knowing the hidden rules of the classes, he said, "decides how we plan our programs."

For instance, as noted in DeVol's book, the driving forces for people in poverty are "survival, relationships, entertainment." For the middle class, however, driving forces are "work, achievement." And the wealthy are driven by "financial, political, social connections."

In order to encourage the poor to succeed, then, service providers, who generally belong to the middle class, must work toward helping them build healthy relationships, not luring them with promises of great success.

"We're trying to solve their problems the way we would solve our problems," Pendleton said, noting the approach hasn't worked in the past — child poverty has risen for the past three years, with some 8.9 million U.S. children now living in poverty — and isn't likely to work in the future.

DeVol's approach represents a true paradigm shift in thinking about poverty, he said, and is necessary "so we can really make the changes that are possible."

---

E-mail: awelling@desnews.com