There are a couple of anti poverty strategies that can be addressed here: 1. Use the Cuban bio, psycho, social approach to medicine where family doctors are assigned a neighbourhood and they are required to go out and visit everyone in that neighbourhood. If you have poverty by postal code, this is an important step, because you don't really know how people are living until you see them in their homes. In order for this to be not invasive, your doctors and public health need to be trained to be radically egalitarian so people do not feel judged and then refuse to open their doors. And medical teams need to be the same people, over and over, to establishment relationships of trust. Preferably, your medical teams would be people who come from poor neighbourhoods, who are medically trained as is the case in Cuba. 2. Women in poor neighbourhoods are already organizers. This is well documented in the US literature. Find those women and empower them to collectively identify problems and solutions with their neighbours. Poor people are poor due to lack of resources, not because they aren't smart enough to identify problems and solutions. You want to build collective capacity, not individual dependence on social workers. The one social worker to one family approach is seriously flawed - the social worker probably with the least understanding of poverty and the least lived experience, is the gatekeeper of the resources. Now everyone has to wait for them to understand poverty, in order for problems to be solved. And that's if they are motivated. Never put social workers in charge.
Americans would whine and cry if they had a government official assigned to them, even if it improved their situation. This is another reason China is kicking our butts.
During the War on Poverty in the sixties, the government actually paid poverty class women to organize collectively in their neighbourhoods to solve problems and the result was free medical clinics, welfare organizing, organizing to remove lead from the local water supply, and campaigns to improve local schooling and housing. Local Republicans and Reagan killed these initiatives.
Thanks for some insight not available otherwise.
Neil, is there a good critical book that analyzes the successes and failures of the Chinese poverty reduction campaign? I would like to read it.
There are a couple of anti poverty strategies that can be addressed here: 1. Use the Cuban bio, psycho, social approach to medicine where family doctors are assigned a neighbourhood and they are required to go out and visit everyone in that neighbourhood. If you have poverty by postal code, this is an important step, because you don't really know how people are living until you see them in their homes. In order for this to be not invasive, your doctors and public health need to be trained to be radically egalitarian so people do not feel judged and then refuse to open their doors. And medical teams need to be the same people, over and over, to establishment relationships of trust. Preferably, your medical teams would be people who come from poor neighbourhoods, who are medically trained as is the case in Cuba. 2. Women in poor neighbourhoods are already organizers. This is well documented in the US literature. Find those women and empower them to collectively identify problems and solutions with their neighbours. Poor people are poor due to lack of resources, not because they aren't smart enough to identify problems and solutions. You want to build collective capacity, not individual dependence on social workers. The one social worker to one family approach is seriously flawed - the social worker probably with the least understanding of poverty and the least lived experience, is the gatekeeper of the resources. Now everyone has to wait for them to understand poverty, in order for problems to be solved. And that's if they are motivated. Never put social workers in charge.
Americans would whine and cry if they had a government official assigned to them, even if it improved their situation. This is another reason China is kicking our butts.
During the War on Poverty in the sixties, the government actually paid poverty class women to organize collectively in their neighbourhoods to solve problems and the result was free medical clinics, welfare organizing, organizing to remove lead from the local water supply, and campaigns to improve local schooling and housing. Local Republicans and Reagan killed these initiatives.