Milo Mumgaard is the founder and former Executive Director of Nebraska Appleseed.
Peter Edelman recently wrote an on-point opinion piece in The New York Times on the challenge of ending poverty.
This article is sobering stuff with the release of the annual poverty figures coming out next month, which will show the highest percentage of Americans living in poverty since before the War on Poverty was launched- effectively negating the progress made over the last fifty years.
So much of what Nebraska Appleseed is doing goes right to the heart of what needs to be done both in the short and long term to really help society end this grinding poverty around us. Nevertheless, it’s saddening to know that our present political and legal predicament is almost entirely about just hanging on to the small amount of what we know works, with little attention paid at the state and local level on how we can actually address the problems of poverty.
But there’s hope, I think, that Nebraskans still realize that we all rise and fall together, and this state of affairs of having one-third of our children born and raised in families that do not know if they will have a decent job and can feed, clothe, shelter, and inspire them from day to day…. will finally end.
At Appleseed, we will continue to go “upstream” and fight to keep those families from falling in the waters of poverty in the first place. And one day, we can dream, there won’t be any more getting wet!