Today is Blog Action Day, and this year's theme is poverty... a huge topic and a daunting prospect in terms of thinking about ways to improve the problem. In fact, it might be so huge and so daunting that you decide you can't do anything to help.
But that's not true. A simple way for one person to make a difference is to join a local initiative that transforms your time and money into real assistance to people who need it. When I was in grad school, walking along the poverty line myself (don't laugh-- I could've qualified for foodstamps), I donated the salad once a month for my church's soup kitchen: six heads of lettuce and whatever veggies were on sale that week, chopped up and tossed in a garbage bag. It wasn't much, but it was something.
In Athens we have a big poverty problem, and a big initiative trying to fix it. I've written about OneAthens before, because last spring's PR Campaigns team worked with them. OneAthens addressed poverty from the bottom up: community members did research to identify problems, met in committees to propose solutions, and told their leaders in government, nonprofit, education, and local business what they could and should do to help.
OneAthens did not treat poverty as the problem of individuals but as a problem of the community, and it sought system-wide solutions that considered education, transportation, housing, employment, and healthcare as intertwined parts of the problem -- and the solution. The organization is in a transitional phase now, and only some of the proposed solutions have been enacted, but it has already begun to make a difference by changing how people think about poverty.
If you live in Athens, OneAthens suggests using Hands On Northeast Georgia to locate volunteer opportunities that can also make a difference. You may not have a lot of time or money, but doing something is vastly better than doing nothing.
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