Finding New Alliances to Fight Poverty

This morning, the New America Foundation hosted an event entitled “Poverty’s New Challenges, New Alliances, and New Ideas.” It featured Rev. Jim Wallis (a left-leaning man of the cloth) and Michael Gerson (a right-learning proponent of compassionate conservatism and former Bush speechwriter). They hatched an idea last year to bring together Christian leaders from diverse backgrounds committed to finding consensus proposals to address domestic poverty. It was a good intentioned effort that they dubbed The Poverty Forum, and it actually produced some meaningful results.

They organized themselves into 8 teams and came up with 25 different proposals designed to mitigate poverty, including several specific ideas to promote asset building. Some of these were drawn right out of our playbook, including Children’s savings accounts (which they called Lifetime Savings Accounts), a Saver’s Bonus (similar to a proposal we encouraged Senator Menendez to introduce last Congress), and a Financial Services Corp. Today’s session focused on these ideas and the possibilities to promote anti-poverty ideas at this particular moment of economic recession.

Usually it is quite difficult to get policymakers to focus on the needs of the poor, let alone develop consensus around specific intervention strategies. Normally advocates like myself argue that we need to find ways to broadly share our propserity. But since this has generally not worked, I too am open to alternative strategies that may get a better hearing as more Americans experience the economic hardships associated with poverty. There is potential for new alliances to emerge, such as those reflected by the work of the Poverty Forum, and I suspect there will be growing interest in pursuing a set of policies that help families save and build up their assets over the long term as a means to create greater economic opportunity.

The session was moderated by Ray Boshara and included insightful commentary by Mark Greenberg of Georgetown University and the Center for American Progress and David Gray, my colleague here at the New America Foundation. Enjoy.