How Can We Include The Voices Of The Poor? Ask Them.

I was in a group session the other day when the question, “Why is it so difficult to include the voice of the poor in policy and discussion?” arose. The group members offered many reasons the voice of the poor is often muted. Most of the discourse centered on education and systems that perpetuate class structures. While these substantiated arguments made a lot of sense, to me the issue can narrowed largely to two antecedents: inclusion and access, or lack thereof.

Inclusion

How many times have we walked passed a homeless person and tried your hardest not to make eye contact? Why do we do that?

We often try to resolve issues without first developing a clear understanding of the situation and the parts that keep the system going. That’s human nature—we operate by limiting the information we perceive and make decisions based on those limited sets of information. Just because something may be human nature doesn’t mean it’s the right way to do something.

How can we expect the poor to have a voice when we don’t include them in the conversation? The poor are not represented in our political system. Ethnography is not a common practice among politicians. Who was the last public official you knew of who spent any significant time living with poor people as they do in order to gain a clearer understanding of their unique issues? Go head, I’ll wait. Unless we spend considerable time with the people we are trying to serve we cannot develop solutions that will adequately address their issues. We will only serve those with which we have more intimate relationships. Otherwise we’re using limited information to create ethnocentric solutions that may or may not solve problems that do or do not exist.

Access

In my opinion, access is the today’s social currency. The gap between access to social, cultural, and financial institutions is widening. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black, white, male, female, gay, straight, or whatever. If you don’t have access to education, health facilities, nutritious food, a safe environment, the likelihood you’ll be able to reach your goals (and in many cases develop goals) is severely lessened. For example, we still have a large portion of our country that doesn’t have access to the Internet (See digital divide). It’s hard for somebody to apply for a job online and check the status of that application if the Internet is not readily available to them. If we don’t work to ensure that people have access to, and the literacy around, the systems in place we can never expect they participate. How does one register to vote? Who’s my council person? If I have a complaint, to whom do I voice that complaint? What if I’m qualified for a job, but never get it because I don’t have the right connections?

If you want to know what somebody is thinking, ask them. It’s not easy. In order to face “them” we must first face ourselves. However, if we don’t invite people to the conversation, and make it possible for them to do so, we will never work together to create comprehensive and sustainable solutions. Until we make all stakeholders part of the conversation we won’t even begin to be able to identify all the real issues for which we need those solutions.

Don't Tolerate Diversity. Celebrate It.

 “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” claims Thomas Jefferson in the United States Declaration of Independence.  As much as I would like to agree that this statement from an all-so-important document in United Sates history is true, I can’t. I just can’t.

Access to crucial institutions and resources such as education, love, leadership, followership, art, literacy, health, and money are so widely varied that many have little to no chance to develop the opportunity to even dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A few weeks ago, I participated in an activity that made this painfully obvious—again.

The world would be a very boring place if everybody were the same. If we all looked, behaved, dressed, and spoke the same way there would be no reason to explore what we all have to offer. We would never need to ask a question, because we’d all have the same set of information, perspectives,  and opinions. How bland. Not only is it boring, but also a lack of diversity exposes us to all sorts of risks. Diversity of thought leads to innovation that solves or mitigates man of the world’s problems. Remember polio? The vaccine never would have been developed if nobody ever thought, “Hey, what if we fought the virus with the virus?”

We often say we value diversity, yet behavior often suggests otherwise. We, more often than not, gravitate towards people who remind us of ourselves. We form strong bonds with those who share our political views, sexuality, race, gender, schools, and geographic location. We often harm those we view as outsiders, whether it’s intentional or not. In doing so, we harm those in our group as well, making dissenters invisible and creating a culture in which fear of retribution prohibits people from speaking up. Things become more complicated when we analyze the interconnected roles discrimination play in perpetuating class disparity and access to resources and institutions. It’s a shame that it often takes a tragedy or catastrophe to make us realize that one thing that binds us together is that we’re all human.

A diversified portfolio is the one investment method we know works. Investing all of one’s money in one security exposes that person to unnecessary financial risk many of us aren’t willing to accept. So why do we put ourselves at such social risk? It’s not the world most people claim they want. But it’s the world we continuously create.

I am making a consious effort to better understand the complex outcomes that are derived of my actions. Maybe one day we will transcend the idea that we need to “tolerate” differences to the practice of “celebrating” them.