By Robert L. Wharton

In more than a decade since the passage of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which was intended to help eradicate poverty by transitioning welfare recipients to the mainstream of America’s workforce and fuel the economy, 37 million Americans continue to live in poverty. In hindsight, the Welfare Reform Act may have succeeded in moving some of America’s poor from public aid to financial independence, yet it failed just as succinctly in providing a long-term solution to the nation’s poverty crisis. Individuals from low-income backgrounds only qualified for low-wage jobs and temporary positions that required little to no education or work experience. As a result, people were soon forced with the daunting task of figuring out for themselves how to escape the thresholds of poverty without a viable program in place to provide the necessary assistance needed to succeed in their endeavors.

Although there are countless organizations and government agencies throughout the country that now advocate better education, job training and placement, which can be attributed to the Welfare Reform Act; there remains much work left to be done to offset the economic inequities of our day. We must be able to point to a paradigm of success that will provide hope to those who feel hopeless.

Hundreds of thousands of people throughout Illinois struggle to make ends meet during the current economic downturn, recession, or whichever term one chooses to use. Everyday people are forced to make tough decisions that affect their livelihood—from paying their mortgages or rent on time to dealing with the rising cost of groceries and affordable healthcare—the need to help individuals and families sustain and improve their quality of life is an imperative initiative we must remain steadfast in undertaking.

Recently, the U.S. Census Bureau released 2007 data on poverty in America. While national statistics show the unemployment rate slightly increased from 4.7 percent to 5.7 percent over the last year and incomes were down nearly 2 percent, the report only underscores the severe hardship for which families of all economic backgrounds are enduring. It is not only the poor and unemployed that need assistance with housing, paying utility bills and basic food supplies, but the middle-class are fast becoming a growing population threatened by the imbalance of supply and demand. Nearly 2 million Illinoisans are at risk of falling into poverty due to lower wages and higher costs of basic goods and services.

Since 2001, energy prices have increased by 60 percent and gas prices have skyrocketed by more than 90 percent, literally crippling our economy. Additionally, median household incomes have decreased in 70 of Illinois’ 102 counties between 2001 and 2005. Cook County’s poverty rate of 14.6 percent is higher than the national poverty rate of 12.5 percent. Simply put, the average family cannot keep up with the current rate of inflation and poverty is on a progressive path to put more people at a competitive disadvantage in life.

Our current economic condition is in part due to the lack of a comprehensive long-term strategy to promote professional prosperity and economic development among the uneducated and working poor that should have been an integral part of welfare reform. What we see now is the compounded effects from short-sighted public policy and a failure to adequately invest in the people that have been underserved and all but forgotten.

Right now Americans are losing the war on poverty. We need smart, practical approaches to create real solutions.

By Robert L. Wharton

Forty-one years ago, in 1966, Dr Main Luther King Jr. and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, his co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, brought the civil rights movement against poverty; they joined black and white activists already fighting racism here. Thus was born the Chicago Freedom Movement.

Some historians say it was the Chicago campaign that convinced Dr. King of the root cause of the problems African Americans face in our society. Here, some say, Dr. King came to believe that fundamental economic inequalities -- not necessarily founded in or based solely on race - profoundly affected the lives and fortunes of both blacks and whites.

"If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking," Dr. King wrote in his book "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?" (Beacon Press, 1968). The Nobel Peace Prize winner called for a guaranteed income for all families at the same time he warned against trying to spread around the world the U.S. brand of capitalism, with its insistence on putting profit before the well-being of people.

In our continuing national obsession with race, Dr. King often does not receive the credit he deserves for prodding America toward a national agenda that focused on the poor. Early on, he met with President John F. Kennedy to discuss the matter, planting a seed that, in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, blossomed into the War on Poverty, a group of targeted antipoverty initiatives, including the spectacularly successful Head Start, that might have been characterized as a legislative version of King's beliefs.

Martin Luther King, Jr., gave hope to those of us who committed our lives to eradicating poverty. The agency where I serve as executive director began around the same time Chicago Freedom Movement, back in 1965 -- a time when people spoke of poverty as an intolerable condition of human existence that we would not allow to continue. To this end, Dr. King pushed us to be revolutionary. "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring," he said.

And this: "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism," he told staff in Frogmore S.C., in late 1966.

Forty years after Dr. King made that statement, America's gap in wealth distribution has widened dramatically. Today, what the average CEO of even a medium-size U.S. company makes in one day is more than the average American worker makes all year - if he or she is lucky enough to have a job.

Clearly, we are still in need of the revolutionary thinking Dr. King came to as he worked within the American system. During this week of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday, I miss the man who galvanized a nation, who inspired so many to care so much for those who have the least. We want and need now a national agenda that includes abolishing poverty. We must acknowledge that poverty is another form of violence against humanity, and as such it must end.

"The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty," Dr. King wrote.

Today our President is sending more troops to Iraq, Congress is raising minimum wage after a decade of neglect, and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has joined Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich in recognizing that the states must address the need to provide healthcare for all. Today as in 1968, the most basic needs of America's poor - a living wage, health care - are buried under the demands of war.

Dr. King, it might be said, reached the mountaintop before we did. He stood above the illusion of liberty and justice for all. He understood, and tried to show us, that people cannot be free, cannot be free, cannot be educated, cannot realize their potential - cannot even think clearly -- when they are hungry.

It's time to admit that, unless we make some real changes in our national thinking, some of us will always be hungry.

And Dr. King would not want us to live that.

Robert L. Wharton
President/CEO

Saturday, May 3 many wonderful volunteers from CEDA and Comcast joined forces for clean-up duties, painting and also landscaping responsibilities at Southeast CEDA in Robbins and CEDA Center for Community Action in Harvey.

The event was part of Comcast Cares Day, Comcast’s national, company-wide day of service in which tens of thousands of Comcast employees, along with their families, friends, and community partners worked together to make a difference in hundreds of local communities across the country.