Fixing poverty may mean fixing mindset

from The Barre Montpelier Times Argus

By Mel Huff Times Argus Staff

MONTPELIER – There's little disagreement that poverty acts as a brake on the state's economy, devours tax dollars and undermines the health of communities.

The question is what to do about it.

Philip DeVol, co-author of "Bridges Out of Poverty," told a group of some 20 social service providers, business people and legislators Monday that solutions to poverty must be worked out with the poor and be rooted in an understanding of their "mental model" of reality.

Bridges Out of Poverty concepts are gaining increasing credibility in Vermont. This was DeVol's sixth trip to the state; more than a thousand Vermonters have attended his trainings. The event Monday was sponsored by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and the Northfield Savings Bank.

DeVol characterizes economic class not by conventional means – income levels, for example – but by how stable people's lives are. The lives of the poor are unstable.

"They spend all their time solving immediate, concrete problems," he said. Although people living in generational poverty – poverty that passes from one generation of a family to the next – are good problem-solvers, their problem-solving is reactive. They are subject to "the tyranny of the moment," DeVol said.

Preoccupation with continual crises, such as cars breaking down, leaves the poor with no margin for planning for the future. "You are robbed of your future story," he said.

Unlike the middle class, who define themselves by their work, the jobs of the poor are often part- time and patchwork. Stress-related illness and depression are prevalent. Housing consumes a large proportion of income. In one group with whom DeVol worked, 40 percent to 79 percent of the participants' income was spent on housing.

One woman observed to him, "You know, the arithmetic of life doesn't work for us."

Although people who live in poverty get "stuck in the concrete," when they are helped to examine their lives from an abstract point of view – to analyze their lives – they "get it" and make changes, he said.

In contrast to the mental outlook of the middle class, which is centered on work and achievement, the mental model for the poor revolves around relationships, DeVol said. Those models affect attitudes toward work, time, money and entertainment.

The poor may make choices that are anathema to their middle-class employers. If a man living in poverty gets a call from his brother-in-law saying that his car won't start, the man will typically help his brother-in-law get the car on the road and come to work late. Or a Licensed Professional Nurse might take a telephone call while she is caring for a patient. For these people, the central value in life is the relationships they depend on for survival.

The most important way out of poverty is education, DeVol observed, but the distraction created by instability makes it difficult to focus on its distant rewards. While the children of the middle class usually complete four years of college in a block, the children of the poor often stretch their post-secondary education out over many years, stopping to work, care for sick relatives or respond to other needs, he said.

Solving the problems of the poor requires including them at the planning table, DeVol argued. The results of excluding them from planning can be seen in the evacuation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck: If the poor had been included in the evacuation planning, buses would have been provided, he observed.

DeVol said employers are often surprised to learn that the mental model of poverty applies to their low-wage workers. Clarion Health Partners, the largest health care provider in Indianapolis, found 500 employees who qualified for help buying Christmas presents for their children, he said. When they started looking more closely at the economic situation of their employees, they also discovered that 1,700 of their workers were eligible for the federal earned income tax credit, a payroll tax refund for low-income workers.

DeVol cited a World Bank study that found the best return on investment came from focusing resources on issues of equity – making sure everyone in a country "had a fair shot" at getting a good education or accessing health care. Those were the conditions associated with economic growth. "You don't think of the community as being responsible for the prosperity of everybody," he observed.

The Bridges Out of Poverty strategy for helping the poor out of poverty is providing the supports they need so that they can build resources and assets. "Today, getting out of poverty is not anything anyone can pull off by himself," he said. The results can be substantial for businesses as well as for nations.

DeVol, who lives in Ohio, cited the example of changes made by Cascade Engineering, a privately owned plastics company with headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan that had many poor people an expensive problem with retention: In 1991, it retained only 29 percent of employees for 60 days or more. By 1999, the company had increased its retention rate to 80 percent by improving education efforts.

DeVol acknowledged that the cost was high, but noted that "you get payback in the end. If we're working with people in poverty, don't you think we should be good at it?" he asked.