Forum focuses on fighting poverty

from The Times of Trenton

BY MICHELLE McGUINNESS

TRENTON -- The Trenton Area Soup Kitchen provided the setting yesterday morning for a public forum about the causes of and solutions to poverty.

TASK's policy forum brought together residents and experts in social issues to discuss poverty. TASK spokesman Irwin Stoolmacher said the group intentionally invited a wide range of panelists to the 8:30 a.m. forum to show that "one could be conservative or progressive or liberal and still care about the needs of those in poverty."

He said the event was intended to inform the general public, something it seemed to accomplish since the question-and-answer session ran past the scheduled ending time of 12:30 p.m. due to the amount of questions and comments.

"In a time when the state of New Jersey is making some cuts, it is important" for the public to know about the needs of the poor, Stoolmacher said.

According to Jon Shure, president of New Jersey Policy Perspective, one in five working families does not earn enough money to live in New Jersey, yet the government categorizes only 8.7 percent of the state's population as being under the poverty line. This, Shure said, is because the cost of living in New Jersey is much higher than in many states.

Shure said the fact that most people in poverty do have jobs contradicts an American tendency to view poverty as an individual failure or a racial issue, even though "nobody makes it in this country entirely on their own. As someone once said, 'It takes a village to raise a billionaire.'"

Gregg Edwards, president of the Center for Policy Research of New Jersey, said the problem of poverty isn't purely economic, however. Edwards contended that family structure and education is just as important as the economics of poverty. He focused on education for solutions, saying that charter schools and Catholic schools are often good alternatives to public schools, which he believes fail students.

He said the "complete and total failure of our public schools in urban settings" is "the most pressing civil rights issue" facing society. For example, Edwards said, teachers at public schools in urban areas are often young and inexperienced because the compensation at such schools is low.