One of my most
vivid experiences with poverty stems from a childhood experience in India,
where I saw families and kids in tattered clothing and bare feet pushing and
pulling themselves through the small town my parents are from.
As a child, I
related most to the poverty-stricken children I saw. Our servant’s daughter, would help serve me
and looked after me, moving through her arduous tasks with such ease while I
stayed in a cool room watching TV. Her
relaxed and dutiful approach towards her task inadvertently agonized me. Why was she responsible for such work? Couldn’t she play with me? Could we get her shoes?
These are the
kinds of questions I would present my family with. And they explained some permutation--whether it
be the caste system or another excuse--that justified her role. I would often think about ways to help her,
and other girls like her. But as a child
in the early 80's, I was at a very nascent point of my understanding of how to
do well by doing good. And, survive off
of it!
Generation after
generation, a vast majority of Indian families are employed by other Indian
families in the role of servants. It has
been a continuous cycle out of acceptance that there is no way to break out of
that cycle. Year after year, visit after
visit, I return to the US only to arrive at the same point: something has to
change. The Economist article “Let’s hear those ideas” was especially interesting to me because it brought to light the
disparity among communities, not just in the developing world. I always attached poverty to India because
that was my initial introduction; however, I see that efforts, even at the
federal level here in the US, are aiming to help deliver solutions towards
social issues. Most of these issues
appear to stem from funding and the limited resources within the public sector
can make it challenging to deliver a holistic solution – they are addressing the
symptom, rather than the illness. The
“social innovation” approach has identified a way to create public-private
partnerships that will help transform the way public services are provided.
What the social
entrepreneurs have identified is a way to re-invest in people and communities
that may have experienced some sort of disinvestment. Whether it be through education like Wendy
Kopp or through micro finance like Muhammad Yunus, they have found a way to
address an issue that can ultimately help break the cycle that I’ve grown all
too familiar with through my India visits.
As these social
ventures are created and begin to become scalable models, I also hope the
psychology of the poor also shifts and empowers them to uplift themselves. I recently read “Escaping
the Cycle of Scarcity” where an economist and a
psychologist propose a way to explain why the poor are less future-oriented
than those with more money. This article
made me consider another segment of the poverty-stricken population: what about
those professionals who complete graduate school, have large loans as a result
of their academic investment and have yet to secure a steady income? They make similar decisions based on a
limited band-with too.
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