Great Expectations

I'm live blogging from The Enterprise Center in West Philadelphia about issues of poverty and prosperity in Philadelphia. Today's discussion is cosponsored by the Great Expectations project and the Urban Studies program at Penn.

On the schedule is a presentation on New York City’s anti-poverty efforts, a panel discussion on how that approach might translate to Philadelphia, and citizen dialogues aimed at sketching out an anti-poverty agenda for our city and region. Things should be getting underway momentarily, as the lights have dimmed.

One of the challenges for today, according to the opening speaker from the Urban Studies group, is for participants to come up with specific ideas for the next mayor to build on. This format is similar to that used during the community forums held earlier this year to discuss leadership in Philadelphia and what characteristics citizens want in the next mayor.

Today's first speaker is Veronica White, executive director of New York City's Center for Economic Opportunity. She says the mayor often says "Prepare New Yorkers to work and make work pay." The city comissioned a report that recommended focusing on three groups: The working poor, young adults 16-24 and young children, 0-5. Since 1990 the percetage of working families living in poverity in NYC has grown from 29 to 46 percent.

Some examples of efforts under way:
- providing a local child care tax credit;
- trying to help families claim their Earned Income Tax Credit;
- creating an Office of Financial Empowerment to help empower low-income people to protect their assets
- working with the City University of New York to increase graduation from community colleges;
- implementing nurse-family partnerships to provide regular home visits to first-time mothers. (Although expensive, this plan pays off in the long run.);
- funding condidtional cash transfers, which means providing money to families to do certain things, like going to the doctor or getting preventive care, that might fall through the cracks for people working multiple jobs. This last program has been success in other countries, she says.

Today's panel, introduced and moderated by Chris Satullo, is made up of four members: Sharmain Matlock Turner, president of the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition;
Gloria Guard; president of the People’s Emergency Center and the PEC's Community Development Center;
Michael Katz, a historian of poverty from the University of Pennsylvania;
and Willie Baptist, of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union

First question: What struck you as something from Veronica's presentation on NYC that Philly could do, or something that seemed a little off?

Gloria: New York has actual hard information, which for a long time we've been lacking.
Sharmain: New York is putting its money where its mouth is. They're going to make an investment.The best ideas: Having an actual strategy of how to eliminate poverty. Next mayor must come up with a strategy.
Michael: That NYC actually formed a committee and is willing to put poverty at the forefront of the political agenda. How much can other cities accomplish?
Willie: This is not an issue of just poor people. This issue is cutting across racial and gender lines, and this problem is going to require a social movement beyond just the individual cities.

2. What in Philly is trapping people in poverty?
Sharmain: We're trying to find opportunities for young people to work during the summer. In Philly, we're seeing a change in the economy. The kind of factory jobs that we had 20 years ago are no longer here. We're getting people into the workforce, but we're not seeing them move up.
Gloria: If there's no way for people to move up, those entry-level jobs aren't there for others who need them. Also, as housing becomes less affordable, it's harder for people to pay market-rate rent. Interested to see how the cash-incentive program works out in NY. Commending the GUAC for taking on predatory lenders.
Michael: Real wages have been going down since the 1970s and the protections people once had have also been eroded. The only reason family income has remained stable is because so many women have gone to work. It's astounding that poverty has been missing from the political agenda. What are we going to do about low wages? So far, we've all agreed to subsidize people rather than raising the minimum wage.
Willie: Each of us has a sense of responsibility to come up with creative solutions so that we can draw from diversity of experiences. My situation, being poor with diabetes and formerly homeless, is one that faces so many people in this country. We're talking about America, and people are dying in the streets while houses sit empty. Poverty is tomorrow's slavery.

The crowd of about 85 people responded to Willie's passionate answer with a round of applause.

The panel moves on to discuss predatory lending and how immigration plays into issues of poverty.

Sharmain's group is trying to address the predatory lending issue. An important point, she says, is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater: While trying to remove predatory lenders, we must make sure that not all the money is taken out of the low-income community.

On the issue of immigration, Michael points out that not all immigrants are poor, so it necessary to pinpoint where the povery is within the immigrant community. A large part of Philadelphia's growth recently has come from immigration.

Last question for the panel:

Imagine that it's Nov. 10, 2007, and you're in the elevator with the city's new mayor. The elevator gets stuck. Now's your chance to tell him what needs to be done about poverty. What do you say?

Willie: We need to study Chicago's experience, and invite the people who are affected by this to be part of the conversation. We should also look at successful programs, such as HeadStart. We need to get the people who are involved in the issue, who feel the pain of the issue, to participate in discussions on how to address the problem. People are not poor because they're stupid. They're poor because of a certain set of circumstances that could happen to anyone.
Michael: We need a broadly based commission to make poverty a priority. We need to set up an office of immigration. We need to enact a living-wage ordinance. We need to fund community organizing; and we need to remember that social change has always been started by people outside the government. The mayor shouldn't be afraid of that.
Gloria: Two thoughts: Philly has no place where you can go an get information about poverty. We can't make informed decisions without information. We wouldn't know what to focus on if we had a commission, because we don't have that information. Also, replicate a program we're doing to get children who are failing in sixth grade to work on computers.
Sharmain: What happens to our poor is what happens to our entire city economy. And it's about the region as well. Many of the jobs are in the suburbs. School choice is a critical part of our education strategy, and we need to ensure people are graduating from high school and community college. We must end the isolation of the poor. Where are the incentives and disincentives in our system to help boys and men, esp. those of color, to bring them into the mainstream as a way to address violence?
Veronica: All politics is local. It's fine to look to another city, but for example, transportation is not an issue in New York.

Now, it's time for the attendees to get involved. Harris Sokoloff from Penn and the Great Expectations project explains that everyone is going to break into small groups to talk about the following questions:

What does it take for a neighborhood to work so that residents can flourish and thrive?

What actions can groups - residents, businesses, community groups, government - can take to strengthen and create those characteristics in neighborhoods?

Each group will spend about 30 minutes on the questions and then everyone will come back together to share their group's ideas. The goal here is a conversation, not a debate, that will come up with some specific ideas.

To wrap up today's event at the Enterprise Center in West Philadelphia about issues of poverty and prosperity in Philadelphia, each of the break-out groups are going to share one idea that they found exciting, interesting or novel.

Margit Olsen joined the Great Expectations citizen blogger team for the Dec. 2 Citizens Convention. She's 25 and preparing to go back to school in order to become a special-education teacher. She moved to Philly three years ago from Delaware and currently lives in West Philly with her girlfriend, dog and three cats.

Margit writes:

I held “Great Expectations” for the day. I came in pumped to talk about real issues. I signed up for my first topic, Transportation, and I took my seat. I have been in Philly for the last three years, and I have grown to have a deep love for the city and its people. I thought long and hard about the other two topics I wanted to delve into. I made my decision: poverty and education. I thought to myself, “I will do what I can.”

Transportation: I am not a daily Septa rider. I don’t claim to be. I am not because I think that it is a flawed system. I appreciate the ease of taking Septa from my house in West Philly into the city when I want. I love that the trolley stops right outside my door. I hate a lot of things about Septa, too. I hate that the trains stop running pretty early. I hate that its fare keeps increasing. I also hate that from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m. right now they are doing construction outside my house.

Citizen blogger Beth Lewis, who previously about the civic leaders' summit for Great Expectations, returns to give us her take on the Dec. 2 Citizens Convention. She writes:

There was no question that Michael Nutter’s presence, and the determination with which he spoke about Philly already being great, buoyed up the spirit of the group that had gathered at last Sunday’s Great Expectations Citizens Convention with the sense that a “new day”, as he described, was dawning. But equally uplifting, I felt, was the opportunity to meet people from the entire Philadelphia community and together discuss the strengths and shortcomings of the Citizens Agenda. While the problems we face as a city are large, the recognition that we need to pull together to dialogue about what needs to be done to address them, to me, represents the value of the Great Expectations effort.

Citizen blogger Peak Johnson graduated from high school last spring and former editor of the North Philly Metropolis. He gives his perspective on three issues he decided impacted youth in the community: poverty, crime and transportation. He writes:

Although I had blogged before as part of my after-school program, I never thought much about the medium. As a writer for my community paper, the North Philly Metropolis, I’ve wanted to reach readers in my community rather than in the cyber community. But after my friend Mr. Ben Lowe explained that the Great Expectations project was looking for citizen journalists, I decided to give blogging a shot. He thought the Citizens Convention might be of interest to me because writing is what I do. I thought that being fresh out of high school and having already built a reputation as writer in the Metropolis, I should try a new approach.

Unfortunately, I really have no sense of direction when traveling around Philadelphia – or anywhere else for that matter, even if my destination is just a few blocks from home. As I waited for the No. 33 bus, I hovered over the stack of The Metropolis that I was taking with me and repeated the directions to the Convention Center in my head. I had the reoccurring wish that someone would see me, know me, and drop me off where I needed to go. Despite the gray skies and rain, this was my lucky day. A neighbor pulled up and asked, “Where ya going?” “Twelfth and Arch, the Convention Center,” I replied. And with a wave of his hand signaling me to hop in, we were on our way.

Citizen blogger Albert Yee weighs in on the District 4 "Presenting the Agenda" forum. In Part 1, he writes:

Approximately 50 people gathered for Feb. 25 Great Expectations District 4 agenda forum at the North Light Community Center (175 Green Lane) in hilly and narrow-streeted Manayunk/Roxborough. I sat down at a table with 5 locals, most who had been to a previous Great Expectations meeting. Barbara was especially pleased she attended the Citizens Convention in December and was looking forward to seeing how the Nutter administration does over the next year in regards to the agenda laid out by the citizens through this project. The ongoing basketball games next door in the other gym kept a steady beat throughout the night for the group to work by. The fluorescent lights kept things difficult for me to take photos. We were told that 4th District Councilman Curtis Jones Jr., 40 days into office, would be attending and hopefully At-Large Councilwoman Bondell Reynolds Brown would make it too.

Citizen blogger Peak Johnson graduated from high school last spring and is former editor of the North Philly Metropolis. A North Philadelphia resident, he returns to the Great Expectations blog to give his perspective on issues he thinks most affect city youth. He attended the District 5 event held Feb. 24. He reports:

Another chance to blog and another chance to be able to represent the youth of North Philadelphia. When Ms. Jodie Lowe sent out a list of the different spots of where the bloggers would be delivering the Great Expectations Agenda, I chose The Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News building. What better place to be for a future writer?

I had managed to catch the No. 3 bus to Broad Street, where my intention was to catch the next bus and be at my destination in no time. However, the one thing I overlooked was that this bus, the C, is never known to come on time. I knew where this building was located, unlike many others, and as I did for the December Citizens Convention I received a ride from a friend, except this time I called him asking if he could drop me off.

Arriving at approximately 7:10 p.m., I dashed into the building and was directed to the event. “Just follow the balloons,” the person manning the guard station in the entryway said in a rather dull voice. The balloons were nice, but what really seemed more appealing were the framed covers and articles of the Daily News and Inquirer lining the walls.