I Fight!

[Michael Guinn works at CitySquare as a life coach to youth who age out of the Texas foster care system.  He is extremely effective at what he does.  What follows reveals just what's behind his fierce dedication to his work and to the young people he touches.]


I Fight!
                                                                                                                                                   
Do you know what it’s like to want and can’t have? To be so hungry that you eat dirt so you don’t feel  so…empty!  Do you know what it’s like to not have running water, to do homework by candlelight. To steal and lie and hustle to help out your family?

I do.                                                                            

And some nights skinny then reminds bigger now of the times when he brought home food found at the landfill, fished for compliments and crawdads, sold squirrel and black birds to pay for school clothes.                                                  

And yesterday I wondered! What good is my master’s degree if I can’t even master me?

See I fight …for the father who desperately wants to provide. But in shame he cries in the shadows of his own pride.                                                                                                                   

I fight… for the mother who stands in welfare lines, wanting more, defined by less knowing that this is not her best.

I fight.. . for the son whose hunger pangs are so loud that he can’t focus on his lesson so he sits embarrassed by his stomach’s angry confession.

I fight…for the daughter wearing hand me down smiles and borrowed blues forced to wear too tight shoes.

I fight ...for grandparents on fixed incomes feeding mama’s children when baby’s daddy runs.

I fight, I live and I learn to shape dreams from the fist of poverty’s grip as I fuse the light in their eyes with mine and pray to God to help them find hope inside.                  

And this ain’t easy! It is hard to lift self-esteem when dreams have been assaulted  and peppered  with despair so much so that they’ve forgotten to breathe freedom’s air.

And it’s not their fault that they were born verbs in past tense, unwilling subjects in sentences that kept on running. Fractured by the manner in which the wind whistled and blew down their future, I fight because I don’t want their existence to be another statistic on the back page of history.  I don’t want their lives to end up camouflaged chalk lines, lost in the shaded silhouette of a lonely bulls-eye searching for another target!

I didn’t choose this fight, this fight chose me. And I want my example to foster a deep desire for survival no matter how loudly suicide speaks of rivers. Because I believe that if they see my love and feel my soul reaching out to them that this simple act of kindness will change their lives forever.

And now that I’ve made peace with this section 8 hate, now that I’ve overcome the demons of then... I know that every time I find a new resource, service, home I am reconnecting the dots of frowns and turning them into smiles. People ask why do I fight poverty with so much energy and passion? And I tell them it’s because I know that I am still fighting for that little boy inside of me!

Michael Guinn

TRAC PSH Coach at CitySquare

May 17^th 2016

Cutting poverty today!

Poverty. . .

I’ve lived in the inner city for almost 14 years.  As a result, poverty is no longer an abstraction for me. 

Poverty feels like a crushing weight. 

Poverty inspires fear. 

Poverty gets personal real fast. 

Poverty sucks the life out of a person one day, one hour, one block at a time. 

Poverty is contagious. 

Like a cancer, poverty can grow wildly, quickly. 

Poverty leads to death, death of hope and spirit. 

Poverty is anti-family. 

Poverty humiliates. 

Poverty breeds hopelessness.

Poverty is unjust—you’ll find no fairness underneath the surface of poverty. 

Poverty inflicts cruelty. 

Poverty is inhumane. 

Poverty wrecks lives here and now. 

Poverty leads the way to generations of suffering and defeat. 

My faith tells me. . .

. . . my experience tells me,

. . . my friendships tell me,

. . . my abundance tells me,

. . . my heart tells me that poverty must not go unchallenged. 

If I am a human being made in God’s image, I must respond to the terrible reality of poverty and the suffering it inflicts. 

Working among the poor is a war. 

Not everyone can be here. 

We are. 

We need your help in the battle that rages around us every day. 

It’s real simple. 

Will you help us today? 

Give the poor money!

Years ago a silly sounding question kept coming to my mind.  It went something like this,

"What if, instead of doing all the stuff we do, we simply raised money and handed it over to the poor to see what they could do with unfettered opportunity?" 

Of course, we never did anything like that, I suppose for a number of reasons, good and not-so-good.  Still, the notion of putting assets in the hands of the poor to craft their own destiny just feels right.  What is needed in the equation would be "benchmarks" of accountability and progress. 

Now comes, as reported by The New York Times, what appears to be a worldwide movement to accomplish just what my question hoped and implied.  Give it a read and let me know what you think

January 3, 2011, 8:15 pm


To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor

By TINA ROSENBERG

The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium. Parts of Brazil look like southern California. Parts of it look like Haiti. Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty. But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world.

Today, however, Brazil’s level of economic inequality is dropping at a faster rate than that of almost any other country. Between 2003 and 2009, the income of poor Brazilians has grown seven times as much as the income of rich Brazilians. Poverty has fallen during that time from 22 percent of the population to 7 percent.

Contrast this with the United States, where from 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent of earners. (see this great series in Slate by Timothy Noah on American inequality) Productivity among low and middle-income American workers increased, but their incomes did not. If current trends continue, the United States may soon be more unequal than Brazil.

A single social program is transforming how countries all over the world help their poor.

Several factors contribute to Brazil’s astounding feat. But a major part of Brazil’s achievement is due to a single social program that is now transforming how countries all over the world help their poor.

The program, called Bolsa Familia (Family Grant) in Brazil, goes by different names in different places. In Mexico, where it first began on a national scale and has been equally successful at reducing poverty, it is Oportunidades. The generic term for the program is conditional cash transfers. The idea is to give regular payments to poor families, in the form of cash or electronic transfers into their bank accounts, if they meet certain requirements. The requirements vary, but many countries employ those used by Mexico: families must keep their children in school and go for regular medical checkups, and mom must attend workshops on subjects like nutrition or disease prevention. The payments almost always go to women, as they are the most likely to spend the money on their families. The elegant idea behind conditional cash transfers is to combat poverty today while breaking the cycle of poverty for tomorrow.

Most of our Fixes columns so far have been about successful-but-small ideas. They face a common challenge: how to make them work on a bigger scale. This one is different. Brazil is employing a version of an idea now in use in some 40 countries around the globe, one already successful on a staggeringly enormous scale. This is likely the most important government antipoverty program the world has ever seen. It is worth looking at how it works, and why it has been able to help so many people.

In Mexico, Oportunidades today covers 5.8 million families, about 30 percent of the population. An Oportunidades family with a child in primary school and a child in middle school that meets all its responsibilities can get a total of about $123 a month in grants. Students can also get money for school supplies, and children who finish high school in a timely fashion get a one-time payment of $330.

Read this entire fascinating report here.