Childhood poverty has myriad faces

Like many meetings these days, there were plenty of Power Points at Thursday's conference about children and poverty in Utah — so many statistics and bullet points that it's hard to keep them all straight. Instead, it's the little stories that stay with you.

There was, for example, Erin Trenbeath-Murray's story about the Cheerios. Trenbeath-Murray is director of the Salt Lake Community Action Program Head Start, and the cereal was part of a necklace activity that a Head Start pre-schooler was doing one day while his mother looked on.

"Put those Cheerios in your pocket," the mother whispered to the little boy. "That's your brother's breakfast in the morning."

Whether we see it or not — and often Utahns "don't know or want to know what poverty looks like here," noted keynote speaker The Right Rev. Carolyn Tanner Irish — 93,000 children are living in poverty in Utah. The cascading effect of that poverty includes untreated cavities, poor test scores, hunger, homelessness and despair. It was this huge agenda that the ambitious conference set about tackling.

"The 'Urgency of Now': A Conference on Finding Solutions for Utah's Children Living in Poverty" took place at the Fort Douglas Officers' Club and was sponsored by the Kepler Fund and Intermountain Healthcare in partnership with Utah Issues.

The event was funded by an anonymous donor, said conference organizer Professor Jennifer Bauman of the University of Utah. She described him as a University of Utah professor who grew up poor on a Midwest farm, so poor that his mother made his shoes out of coats and rags.

Several of the conference participants grew up in poverty, including State Office of Education early childhood specialist Sharon Lay, who was one of 13 children in a West Virginia family that was often on welfare; and Dr. Mansoor Emam, head of the Maliheh Free Clinic, who grew up in a mud hut in Iran and had no health care as a child. Gina Pola-Money of Utah Family Voices didn't grow up poor, but the disabilities of two of her children did force her family into poverty, she said.

The truth, said The Right Rev. Irish, Utah's Episcopal Bishop, is that we tend to care about our own children "but not other people's kids." Often we see poverty as punishment for bad choices, or we say, "It's not my problem." But as the title of the conference suggests, there's an urgency to poverty, she said. Sick babies, for example, need help now, not later.

Utah can find solutions, she said, but lawmakers "need to be pressured to do so." Other developed nations provide universal health care, she noted. "And even I can spot the red herring in the phrase 'slippery slope to socialism.' It's another excuse for doing nothing."

Panelists looked at the manifestations and possible solutions to childhood poverty, including free clinics, SCHIP funding and high-quality preschools for low-income families. There are currently 10,000 eligible children who can't get into Head Start preschools because of underfunding, said Trenbeath-Murray.

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com