Honoring the legacy and lessons learned from the War on Poverty in the 1960s

We open this podcast and close our season with this thought from our co-host Carol Jenkins:

We’re talking about poverty, democracy, race, and the unfinished promises America keeps making to itself.

Co-host David introduces our first guest, Adam Green. He’s an associate professor at the University of Chicago. HIs academic career focuses on black political and cultural history. As part of his work, he wrote the introduction to a memoir that we nearly lost: We Called It a War: Lessons Learned from the Fight to End Poverty.

The Sargent Shriver Peace Institute says this about the book: “Written in the 1960s and rediscovered in the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute archives, the memoir has been edited and annotated by Shriver’s friend and colleague, David E. Birenbaum, Esq., and a new introduction has been written with some additional annotations by Professor Adam Green of the University of Chicago.”

Adam says bringing this book to print was done to help further the conversation around someone who was an important architect of the ways this country could imagine working on the problem of poverty.

The manuscript was originally written as a series of interviews based on Shriver’s experiences after leaving the Organization in Economic Opportunity, which was the administrative arm of the federal government dedicated to the War on Poverty in the 1960s.

Although this book was intentionally not published when it was written due to Shriver’s political and career interests, Green says today might be the best time for it.

There’s a different constituency of people who are actually eager to learn from what was attempted during the War on Poverty.

A large portion of Sargent Shriver’s work was dedicated to bringing those invisible Americans into the calculus about intelligent and sustainable public policy. Who better to be enfranchised to participate in these processes and help us determine the ways in which the current laws are not adequate?

Did you know? Programs started as part of the War on Poverty still exist today.

• Head Start | Comprehensive early childhood education program
• Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) | An anti-poverty program designed to be a domestic version of the Peace Corps
• TRiO | Federal student outreach programs that identify and provide services for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds
• Job Corps | Free education and vocational training to young people ages 16 to 24

Shriver advocated for the idea that we as a society can do a better job of investing the resources that we do have to enrich and equalize the lives of those living in poverty. The truth is, poverty is a choice made by one policy after another, but we could transform and optimize our society.

Green leaves us with this: We need to make sure that we’re making credible gestures and credible commitments to the young people in our country so that we can design a future together.

Budgetary hopes for New York

Our last guest of the season is friend of the podcast Kate Breslin, president and CEO of the Schuyler Center.

She gives us an update on the (late) New York budget and what the Schuyler Center is working toward and hoping to see.

• Universal child care
• Expanding eligibility for child care assistance based on income level
• Funding to increase the workforce for childcare workers

These steps would be critical to the Child Poverty Reduction Act, which is aimed at reducing child poverty in New York by half before 2031. They also discuss another way to reduce poverty: child tax credits. New York has increased the amount of the credit and not requiring a Social Security Number to receive the credit.

Breslin also discusses the legacy of the Schuyler Center, which has been providing assistance to disenfranchised people for 155 years. Breslin says she thinks most people would be surprised by how many children and families live in poverty. This is because it is very easy to not see them; this is why we call them the invisible Americans.