Community Conversation on Poverty Draws Sparse Crowd

ABINGDON, Va. – Stop giving poor people so many incentives to stay poor, a group of social services directors and others said Saturday.

Rather than calling for an elimination of the programs in which they work, this informal gathering of poverty fighters said the government aid process should be overhauled so recipients can do something for the money they receive – and feel empowered to better their lives.

“They want to work,” Dottie O’Quinn, a program assistant for a nutrition program operated through the Virginia Cooperative Extension, said of her clients. “The problem is if you have four children and you take a minimum-wage job, your children lose their medical, they lose their food stamps.

“I’ve got women who’d love to get out and work, but they can’t afford it,” O’Quinn said.

Billed as a community conversation on poverty, Saturday’s discussion at Virginia Highlands Community College was one of 25 held around the state as part of the “Act on Poverty” project. Organized by the governor’s office, the project is designed to address the state’s record poverty rates.

Only a dozen people attended the Virginia Highlands conversation, and just one of those actually wandered in from the community. But the exchange of ideas was frank and open. And their consensus was clear: The existing system fails to bring people out of poverty; instead, it gives them reasons to stay.

According to a video presented at the event, Virginia’s poverty rate has seen little improvement in recent decades, hovering around 10 percent for the past 20 years. However, since 2004, the rate of children in poverty has been increasing. Today, one in 12 Virginians receive food stamps.

In the video, Michael Cassidy, executive director of the nonprofit policy research group Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis, discussed ways the system might increase assistance. Those ideas included providing more food stamps, giving more payments to unemployed workers and offering more free medical insurance.

But Doug Meade, a retired Washington County Social Services director of 36 years, said the solution to poverty in Southwest Virginia lies not in Richmond or Washington, but here – in Southwest Virginia communities.

“You sum all those 36 years up and you’re sort of frustrated with not making a bigger difference,” Meade said. “Fighting poverty has been pushed down from the federal and state level as if they have the answers … some way it really needed a bottoms-up approach.”

Mead said the community needs to create a task force to help restore hope by engaging communities, fighting substance abuse and finding alternatives to shrinking staple industries.

Abingdon businessman Hammond Hunt said the state should be calling on the people to help one another in their own neighborhoods – not distributing more tax dollars to the poor.

“You go back to FDR, the Great Society, and people estimate some $6 (trillion) to $9 trillion was spent addressing poverty, and it’s been an abject failure,” Hammond said. “You have created a world of dependency.”

Hunt’s idea is a pilot program that would challenge the private sector in Washington County to fill a charitable role – and replace food stamps with personal food donations, along with providing transportation assistance and other kinds of help.

It would be more effective, he said, because people know the history of the families in their own neighborhoods and they – unlike a means-challenged government program – can differentiate between the drug dealers and scam artists and those truly in need.

“If Gov. (Tim) Kaine or whoever came up with a way to put this on the map, you’d have this multiplying throughout the country,” Hunt said.

He also pointed out the many “Help Wanted” signs posted around town – and said the public education system needs to provide more options to young people, with hands-on training that gives them a reason to stay in school even if they aren’t able to learn trigonometry or Shakespeare.

Smyth County Department of Social Services Director Pat Arnold said the number one thing the region needs to fight poverty is jobs – and an economic development effort that provides the incentives that convince industries to locate here.

Washington County Department of Social Services Director Tom Casteel said the increasing cost of living for the frail elderly and disabled folks must also be addressed – and tax breaks adopted to help a struggling aging population.

Tony Fritz, Virginia Department of Social Services director for Southwest Virginia, said the overall solution could be coordinating all of the social service programs into one lump-sum payment – given with restrictions on how the money can be spent, but allowing people to manage the money themselves.

Putting all of the money in one pot would cost the state less, he said.

The money could be distributed based on the difference between a recipient’s earnings and the living wage, Fritz said – but also could require proof of work to access the cash. That way, the system would supplementing those working their way out of poverty rather than supporting those who don’t work at all.

Fritz said the current system is full of reverse incentives, and as an example he offered the case of an employee he promoted to manager: Her public housing rent increased the minute she was promoted.

The incentives must be to work and improve, Fritz said, not to stay down to avoid financial penalties. He also said a new social services model could be created and tested right here in Washington County.

Molly Campbell, who works for the nonprofit Rural Areas Development Association, said benefit programs should require even those who can’t work a regular job as a volunteer in some way to help their community – even if it’s just visiting lonely neighbors.

“As long as they’re doing something that’s beneficial to the community,” she said, “they can access the pot (of aid) based on a living wage.”

dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701