[Virginia] Discussions to investigate possible fixes for poverty

From The Daily Progress

By Melanie Mayhew

Local leaders will gather tonight to begin to develop solutions to poverty in the Charlottesville area.

The topic of the first of four meetings is "The Face of Poverty." Other meetings will tackle housing, employment and education issues affecting the poor. The initial meeting will be held at 6 p.m. in the University of Virginia Chapel.

"We hope to raise consciousness in the community about poverty," said Karen Waters, executive director of the Quality Community Council, the organization sponsoring the four-part series. "We hope to start a dialogue about how poverty fits into some of the chronic problems that we work to address."

The Quality Community Council is a resident-driven community development organization dedicated to improving the quality of life in Charlottesville's most impoverished neighborhoods. The council estimates that 25 percent of Charlottesville residents live in poverty.

The quartet of conversations will be held during the next two weeks at venues throughout Charlottesville. The conversations will draw on the expertise of members of the Quality Community Council, UVa faculty and local business, government and civic leaders. Other participants include facilitators from the University of the Poor, the educational arm of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign.

Each conversation is designed to encourage the development of strategies to address the growing number of people living in poverty in the Charlottesville area, said Corey D.B. Walker, an assistant professor in religious studies at UVa who helped plan the series.

"The desire is to create a heightened awareness around the issue of poverty to catalyze the community to begin to address the issue of poverty deeply and structurally," Walker said, "and hopefully, have people try to think very idealistically about ending poverty and take that goal seriously."

In some areas of Charlottesville, poverty rates are as high as 58 percent, Walker said. Although some people may be aware of poverty in the abstract, dealing with poverty in an everyday sense needs to be tackled, he said.

"It can't just be addressed through volunteer efforts of area nonprofits, individual aid or civil society," Walker said.

The series is the first step toward opening "Peoples College," a community-based institute targeting adult learners in low-income areas of Charlottesville. Its educational programming is scheduled to begin in the fall and include lectures, seminars and workshops covering topics such as local politics, literature, philosophy, black history and personal financial management.

"The idea is to truly create some ongoing school that offers a variety of subjects, goes along the academic year, is available to a wide group of people and targets some of the neighborhoods, but will be available to everyone and anyone," said the Rev. Neal Halvorson-Taylor, one of the planners of the series and of Peoples College.

As Halvorson-Taylor and others prepare for Peoples College, they believe the series starting today will offer a new hope for impoverished residents of the Charlottesville community.

"We're very idealistic, and we know that it takes courage to make a difference," Waters said. "We're often fighting a losing battle ? but the outcomes are well worth it."