FOCUS: Alleviating Poverty

With various student groups trumpeting the alleviation of poverty as their goal, discussions about poverty have shown up on the radar of student discourse.

These discussions, however, will almost always be lacking voices truly representative of poverty. And the vast majority of individuals in the position to exacerbate or alleviate poverty are too far removed from its consequences to empathize. Though many individuals at Harvard have endured economic hardship, or know individuals that have, there are still a great many obstacles in the way of real understanding.

There are countless statistics which convey the large proportion of humanity that lives in an extreme poverty that will never touch Harvard’s halls. Statistics, however, remove poverty from the conceptual argument. For example, readers of this very page generally view the illiteracy that is characterstic of extreme poverty as the inability of individuals to read, when, in fact, the same is true for the inability of literate individuals to comprehend what it means not to be able to read. The challenge for readers of this page is not bringing others to understand these words, but understanding the lives of people who live without them. The same applies for a variety of other factors attributed to poverty.

The following pieces provide perspectives on different types of understanding, from domestic rural poverty to global poverty, from intolerance to opportunity. Their writers were given no criteria other than to write about poverty. Even the diversity of their opinions only touches the surface of true understanding.

—Kyle A. de Beausset ’08