CBC speaker says poverty accepted only because people are dehumanized

from the Tri City Herald

Joe Chapman, Herald staff writer

Spending her honeymoon in a cherry field outside of Wenatchee didn't exactly put Donna Beegle on the path to success in life, she told an audience Friday at Columbia Basin College in Pasco.

Beegle, who grew up in a migrant labor family, dropped out of high school at 15 to get married. By 25, she had two children and no husband.

Still, Beegle went on to earn her GED and eventually a doctorate from Portland State University. Now she's president of a consulting firm and CEO of a nonprofit organization, through which she works to improve communication and the lives of people in poverty.


She visited CBC on Friday to talk about generational poverty and reshaping how people view the problem.

Like another lasting problem, war, poverty encourages people to dehumanize one another, she said.

"Otherwise, a human being couldn't walk by another human being on the streets. You couldn't," Beegle, 46, told the audience of about 150 people.

"Only can you do that if you've dehumanized them. If you've bought into the stereotypes about the causes of poverty being their personalities, their choices."

The words people use contribute to their understanding or lack of understanding, she said.

People often blame the ones in poverty for their situation, she said. When the media uses the label "the homeless," it carries connotations of people who are dirty, lazy drunks, she said.

But saying "people without homes" humanizes the problem and allows you to consider the possibility they may have lost their jobs or lost their homes to fire, she said.

Beegle doesn't see drug addiction and domestic violence as poverty issues, because those are problems the rich and famous experience, too.

"The capacity to deal with those issues is the poverty issue," she said.

She talked about education as the key to escaping poverty. But the people who need it may not pursue it because they don't have other people in their lives who have done it before them.

"I never heard the word college. No one I knew had a career. So it wasn't even part of my thoughts," Beegle said in a video clip she played. "I wanted to be a mom. I wanted to be a good mom who would play with them and sing to them, and we'd find a way to get by. That's all I knew."

Her audience Friday included students, service agency employees, foster parents, child care providers and the general public.

Some of them knew the topic from their own personal experiences, said Judi Yearout, literacy coach for the Pasco School District.

"This is how I grew up, going from racetrack to racetrack, cleaning the stalls of horses," she said.