01-16-25 A Letter From Our Servant Leaders

01-16-25 A Letter From Our Servant Leaders https://ssvpusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/servant-leader-john-berry.png 1200 1200 SVDP USA SVDP USA //ssvpusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/svdp-usa-ssvp-int.png January 16, 2025 January 16, 2025

A New Year Call to Hope and Action

My Fellow Vincentians,

As we stand at the beginning of a new year, our hearts may be filled with a mixture of emotions. There’s the excitement of new beginnings, the anticipation of fresh starts, and perhaps a touch of apprehension about the challenges that may lie ahead. But amidst these feelings, one constant remains: the enduring power of hope.

Hope is the belief that even in the face of adversity, goodness and redemption are possible. It is the conviction that we can overcome obstacles, heal divisions, and build a more just and compassionate world.

This hope, however, cannot be a passive hope. It must be a hope that is rooted in action, a hope that translates into tangible efforts to make our world a better place.
This year, SVdP USA will be taking new and stronger action to channel our hopes into concrete actions. With the opening of our second National Office in Washington, DC in February, we will be creating a base for increasing our efforts to advocate on behalf of those we serve, and turning our focus more intensely towards the pressing issues of our time, particularly the scourge of poverty and homelessness that afflicts far too many of our fellow Americans.

The stark reality is that millions of our brothers and sisters struggle to meet their basic needs. They lack access to affordable housing, nutritious food, and quality healthcare. Children go to bed hungry, families are forced to live on the streets, and countless individuals are trapped in a cycle of poverty that seems impossible to break.

This is a crisis of conscience for our nation. It is a stark reminder that our pursuit of individual prosperity cannot come at the expense of the common good. We are called, as followers of Christ, to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves.

How can we translate our hopes and dreams into meaningful action?

First and foremost, we must open our eyes and our hearts to the suffering around us. We must acknowledge the realities of poverty and homelessness in our own communities. We must listen to the stories of those who are struggling, and we must seek to understand their experiences. In our encounters with those we serve, we must listen with a Servant Heart — not only hearing the facts and numbers associated with the support we give, but hearing their hopes, dreams, and the stories that make them who they are. We cannot help if we do not understand. And we cannot understand if we do not listen.

Secondly, we must challenge the systems and structures that perpetuate poverty. We must advocate for policies that provide affordable housing, living wages, and access to quality education and healthcare for all. We must support organizations that are working to address the root causes of poverty, such as systemic racism and economic inequality. That will be the role of our Washington, DC office and staff. To work with USCCB, Congress, and like-minded nonprofits to drive the change needed to address poverty at its source.

And finally, we must cultivate a spirit of solidarity and collective action. We must recognize that we are all interconnected, and that the well-being of each of us is dependent on the well-being of all. We must work together to build a society where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.

The task before us is daunting, but not insurmountable. We cannot solve the problems of poverty and homelessness overnight. But we, each and every one of us, can make a difference. We can be a force for good in the world. We can build a more just and compassionate society, a society where everyone has the opportunity to live a life of dignity and hope.

Let us, therefore, embrace this new year with renewed hope and a renewed commitment to action. Let us strive to be instruments of God’s love and mercy in the world. Let us work together to build a beloved community where all are welcome, where all are valued, and where all have the opportunity to flourish.

Peace and God’s Blessings,
John

John Berry
National President

7 Comments

Lynne Betts January 16, 2025 at 7:57 pm

Nicely stated, John!

Margaret Delegato January 16, 2025 at 8:18 pm

Truly this is the best article I’ve ever read. My thoughts exactly.

Danny Blonien January 17, 2025 at 8:13 am

Vincentians, good afternoon.

I just finished reading Dr. Matthew Desmond’s new book that came out in April of this year, Poverty, By America. This is the same author who won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2017 for his book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. I have become a quick fan of this talented writer and sociology professor at Princeton. He clearly has a passion for trying to understand the poor and why we continue to have a very high rate of poverty in America given our abundance of resources. He also lived below the so-called “poverty line” growing up, and lived among the poor in Milwaukee during his research for his book, Evicted, so he can relate to the plight of the poor in a very personal way. The new fascination I have is his ability to tell the individual stories that give us a glimpse into this other world (through Evicted) while also stepping back and taking a macro view to understand and explain why poverty in America persists after all of these years (through Poverty, By America). This new book gets to our public policies over the last 100 years and helps us to see what has contributed to our poverty in the past and now. It was a real indictment for me as I now see some of the systemic reasons why we have 38,000,000 Americans living in Poverty in the richest country on the planet. I am implicated, and that has made me very uncomfortable, as it should. The Lord has always heard the cry of the poor and we all should too, not just the good Vincentians among us, but all Americans should vow to join the war on poverty in some way. You folks are already doing it, but it will take more resolve of our policy makers and voters to decide this war is important and to do things to address it. At any rate, here are some of my takeaways.
High poverty in America exists because we do not have the will or care to address it; it is not a resource issue.
“There is not one banking sector. There are two- one for the poor and one for the rest of us – just as there are two housing markets and two labor markets. The duality of American life can make it difficult for some of us who benefit from the current arrangement to remember that the poor are exploited laborers, exploited consumers, and exploited borrowers, precisely because we are not. Many features of our society are not broken, just bifurcated. For some, a home creates wealth, for others, a home drains it. For some, access to credit extends financial power; for others, it destroys it. It is quite understandable, then, that well-fed Americans can be perplexed by the poor, even disappointed in them, believing that they accept stupidly bad deals on impulse or because they don’t know any better. But what if those deals are the only ones on offer? What good is financial literacy training for people forced to choose the best bad option? Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.” (This sums up the entire book for me sort of like John 3:16 sums up the Gospel.)
It is expensive to be poor in America. (This means they have less access to reasonable credit, their hoursing is more expensive for what they have access to, their wages are way less than those living in nicer neighborhoods and less than needed to make ends meet.)
Landlords in poor neighborhoods earn more money per unit than landlords in middle class neighborhoods ($300 vs. $225).
Almost one in nine Americans, including one in eight children, live in poverty.
More than a million of our public school children are homeless.
More than two million Americans don’t have running water or a flushing toilet at home.
Thirty million Americans remain completely uninsured a decade after the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Over the past twenty years, rents have soared while incomes have fallen for renters; yet the federal government provides housing assistance to only one in four of the families who qualify for it.
We have more than 3.6 million eviction filings a year in America creating a huge churn in this group of Americans who cannot afford their rents.
Poverty diminishes life and personhood. It changes how you think and prevents you from realizing your full potential. We see this all the time in our neighbors, right?
Being poor creates a “bandwidth tax”, meaning it reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going a full night without sleep. We might think our neighbors make a lot of bad decisions because they are stupid or lazy – think again.
Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents.
Increasing the minimum wage has negligible effects on unemployment. (We have to resolve to increase minimum wages that allow our citizens to make a living. Some states and cities have done this; I would like to see this done at the national level.)
Consumers and shareholders benefit when companies pay less than living wages to their employees and contractors; it is exploitation of those working for substandard wages; we are complicit and should not be ok with this.
In 2019, the largest banks in America charged customers $11.68 billion in overdraft fees. Just 9 percent of account holders pay 84% of these types of fees, and that 9 percent were customers who carried an average balance of less than $350. The poor were made to pay for their poverty while the rest of us enjoy free checking. It is not so free, right, at least for some.
In 2020, Americans spent $1.6 billion just to cash checks; if the poor had a costless way to access their own money, over a billion dollars would have remained in their pockets during the pandemic-induced recession. Some 7% of all households in America are “unbanked”.
In recent years, seventeen states have brought back strong usury limits, capping interest rates and effectively prohibiting payday lending. But the trade thrives in most places. The APR for a two-week $300 loan can reach 664% in Texas, 516% in Wisconsin, and $460% in California. The average borrower stays indebted for five months, paying $520 in fees to borrow $375. The payday loan fees are $9.8 billion a year.
The US economy lost millions of jobs during the Covid pandemic, but there were roughly 16 million fewer Americans in poverty in 2021 than in 2018. (This was due to the generous unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, rental assistance, expanded Child Tax Credit and other forms of relief. See, we can address poverty when we have a will to do it.
Today as then, the able-bodied jobless adult on welfare remains a rare creature. According to one study, only three in one hundred poor people in America are working-age adults disconnected from the labor market for unknown reasons.
“There are no official estimates of the total amount of government aid that goes unclaimed by low-income Americans, but the number is in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Consider the amount of money left on the table by low-income workers who don’t apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit. Rougyhly 7 million people who could receive the credit don’t claim it, collectively passing up $17.3 billion annually. Combine that with the amount of money unclaimed each year by people who deny themselves food stamps ($13.4 billion ), government health insurance ($62.2 billion), unemployment insurance when between jobs ($9.9 billion), and Supplemental Security Income ($39.9 billion), and you are already up to nearly $142 billion in unused aid….The American poor are terrible at being welfare dependent. I wish they were better at it, just as I wish that we as a nation devoted the same amount of thoughtfulness, creativity, and tenacity to connecting poor families with programs that would alleviate their hunger and ease their hardships as multinational corporations devote to convincing us to buy their potato chips and car tires.” (There are several of our Vincentians that can attest to how difficult our government agencies make it for the poor to apply for aid. Many of us have college degrees and we struggle with completing some of these 20-30 page applications. Come on people!)
In 2020 the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies, a figure that far exceeded the amount spent on direct housing assistance for low-income families ($53 billion). (We have a large welfare system in America, but less is spent on those who need it the most, those living in poverty. What is wrong with this picture?) A fifteen-story public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home are both government subsidized, but only one looks (and feels) that way.
On average, poor and middle-class Americans dedicate approximately 25 percent of their income to taxes, while rich families are taxed at an effective rate of 28 percent, just slightly higher. The four hundred richest Americans are taxed at 23 percent, the lowest rate of all.
The American government gives the most help to those who need it least.
Those who benefit most from government largesse – generally white families with accountants – harbor the strongest anti government sentiments…They lend their support to politicians who promise to cut government spending, knowing full well that it won’t be their benefits that get the ax. Overwhelmingly, voters who claim the mortgage interest deduction are the very ones who oppose deeper investments in affordable housing, just as those who received employer-sponsored health insurance were the ones pushing to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It’s one of the more maddening paradoxes of political life.
We have built up walls between whites and blacks and wealthy and poor with “municipal zoning laws.” Racial discrimination in housing was made illegal in the US in 1968, but clearly it persists today via these zoning laws; “Most Americans want the country to build more public housing for low-income families, but they do not want that public housing (or any sort of multifamily housing) in their neighborhood.” Where is the justice in that?
The great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, also noticed the extreme poverty when he moved from the country to Moscow and this was his statement of conviction, “I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means, except by getting off his back.” Desmond writes, “There is so much poverty in this land not in spite of our wealth but because of it. Which is to say, it’s not about them. It’s about us….How do we, today, make the poor in America poor? In at least three ways. First, we exploit them. We constrain their choice and power in the labor market, the housing market, and the financial market, driving down wages while forcing the poor to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit.Those of us who are not poor benefit from these arrangements. Second, we prioritize the subsidization of affluence over the alleviation of poverty. The United States could effectively end poverty in America tomorrow without increasing the deficit if it cracked down on corporations and families who cheat on their taxes, allocating the newfound revenue to those most in need of it….Third, we create prosperous and exclusive communities. And in doing so, we not only create neighborhoods with concentrated riches but also neighborhoods with concentrated despair – the externality of stockpiled opportunity.”
If you do not have time to read the book or simply do not like to read non-fiction, here is a cliff notes version via a 61 minute Youtube video that captures the main themes of the book.
https://youtu.be/kz7HXwQViwI?feature=shared. I have the hard copy book that I would be glad to loan to anyone in our group who would like to read it. It is about 200 pages of large text and can be read in a few sittings. I will bring it to our next Tuesday night meeting if you are interested. It is a compelling read for anyone trying to understand poverty in America. Sometimes I wish I did not know so I could remain in my ignorant bliss and support the status quo, but when we know the truth, we are compelled to fix what we can when we can with the means that we have.

Regards,

Danny Blonien

- Tricia Massa January 18, 2025 at 4:32 pm
  
  Thank you so much for taking the time to share what you have learned with us. I am going to pass it on to my fellow Vincentians and look into sharing the book with our local Voice of the Poor Committee!
  
- Annette Giaquinto January 19, 2025 at 9:51 am
  
  Thank you for taking time to share this important information. Very often we judge people based on our own experiences without truly understanding the facts of their situation. Through your summary of the book, you have shed light on this. I am adding this book to my reading list. Blessings!
  
Bruce Toplek January 17, 2025 at 9:09 am

And the cost of office and staff is? Would not the Society better put these resources to raising funds for Councils to fund concrete actions at the local level (housing, food, jobs). I assume there are already multiple interest groups advocating for the same things. Could not a couple visits to Washington DC during the legislative year achieve the same purpose?

Karen Smit January 18, 2025 at 2:08 pm

Nicely stated. Prayers for all.