Tag Archives: poverty

Confessions of a Nonprofit Consultant

Posted on September 27, 2010 by | Leave a comment

I’m just about one year after having commenced my nonprofit consulting work in earnest, and I can sincerely say that I feel…ambivalent about it.

Especially in this economy, I’m asked pretty frequently by students about my consulting work, and the kinds of opportunities it provides. I tell them pretty unequivocably that it’s not where I’d recommend starting a career; both because the connections that I have make it feasible for me to build a job out of it, and because I really needed the legitimacy and structure that an organizational home offers, at one point.

But, for me, at this point in my life, it makes a tremendous amount of sense: I get to work with organizations I care about, contribute to research and policy on a variety of causes, and have the flexibility to be a more hands-on parent during the day.

But, to me, my consulting work, and whether or not it’s “working” has to be about a lot more than me, and my scheduling preferences. And, so, I guess as an exercise for me as much as anything, I’ve been thinking about what I like about it, in terms of my interactions with organizations, and what prompts some of those more complex emotions.

First, the completely excellent:

  • 1. I’m relatively unbound by resource limitations and pragmatic organizational constraints. I get to make the suggestions and offer the critiques that I find most compelling, without having to always worry first whether they’re totally feasible.
  • 2. I build organizational capacity. My favorite work is doing training, providing materials, answering questions–building up the staff, Board members, and volunteers who work directly with clients and the social problems that plague us, and increasing their ability to make a difference in their communities.
  • 3. I have space in my life and legal and political latitude to be overtly political, when it’s necessary–I represent only myself, on a daily basis, and not always a 501(c)3 organization.
  • 4. I can tailor my work to an organization’s actual needs, in every way from how I communicate with staff to how much I charge to how much power and control they retain over the process.

    And, what I’m still grappling with:

  • 1. I seldom get to see things through to any sort of real implementation or follow up. There’s obviously never ‘completion’ in any social change work, but a lot of my consulting involves drafting recommendations, putting new processes in place, creating templates…without much knowledge of the degree to which those tools will really be used to effect change at the organization.
  • 2. That same freedom, to be divorced from resource and practical constraints, can mean that my recommendations seem, well, divorced from reality. A best practice is only a best practice, after all, if it can really be practiced, and I know that I sometimes set standards that don’t make sense in the daily lives of agency personnel.
  • 3. I have some real ambivalence about how my work promotes the idea of unmooring workers from an organizational context; given how critical I am of the increasing shift of risk to employees, and away from institutions, I’m very aware of how I’m contributing to this very trend. In some cases, this is less problematic, because I know that the work I’m performing wouldn’t be done at all if not for me, but, in others, I wonder if I’m not making it possible for organizations to avoid hiring regular, full-time staff for some of these functions.
  • 4. And, finally, I’m very cognizant of needing to always keep my work focused on building up the organization, rather than ever seeming like someone who swoops in, provides “expert” advice, and then leaves. That’s critical not just because of how we know change becomes institutionalized within an organization, but also because of my fundamental belief in empowerment.

    I’d love to hear from other nonprofit consultants (and it’s certainly a growing industry!) about how you balance these tensions, and what you see as the most rewarding and most challenging parts of this work. And, nonprofit leaders who have worked with consultants, what do you look for in a consultant? What contributions do consultants make to your organization that truly enrich your work, and how do they fall short of this goal?

    • → Leave a comment

    Posted in Analysis and Commentary

    Tagged , , ,

    Towards a study of pathological wealth?

    Posted on December 14, 2009 by | Leave a comment

    Mark Rank, one of my professors at Wash U, opened his class on Poverty & Inequality by saying something like (this is 10-year-old paraphrase, so I hope he’ll forgive my inaccurate memory!), “If you think about it, it’s strange that we spend so much time studying poverty and the poor, and not affluence. After all, we know why people are poor: they don’t have enough money. And we know what it does to people’s hopes and health and life chances to live in poverty. What we don’t know nearly as much about is how people can get so obscenely wealthy, why people pursue wealth to the exclusion of happiness and overall well-being, and what it does to the individual psyche, and to our society, to have such sustained and excessive wealth.”

    That comment has stuck with me for a decade, and it replayed through my mind during my reading of a few different books this fall. One, We Used to Own the Bronx, I picked up quickly as I was grabbing a couple of books for myself during a library trip with the kids. It is the story of Eve Pell, a former debutante from a wealthy family in New York, and while it is mostly a memoir, it tells an instructive story about the insidious effects of wealth and privilege on this family. One of the most notable points was that, even in denouncing her family’s sense of entitlement and superiority and the ways in which they eschewed authentic connections for those mediated by layers of paid help, she complained rather bitterly at being left out of her father’s will, as though, after all, intergenerational transfer of property is some kind of inalienable right.

    Somewhat similar was Slaves in the Family,a rather remarkable effort by one descendant of slave owners to track down the descendants of those enslaved by his family. There was a lot going on there, including his struggles with the painful legacy of his ancestors’ actions, but, given my context at the time, I thought most about what the book had to say about wealth. It was wealth that allowed some people to purchase others and wealth and the pursuit of more wealth that prompted that evil action. It is, perhaps, the clearest example in history of the horrible, horrible consequences of having too much.

    One of my students chose the book Affluenza for the reading reflection assignment that I use to open the fall Social Policy and Programs class. The assignment is designed to get students to engage with a piece of popular literature about the social condition that they might not otherwise choose, not immediately connected to their area of practice, and look for insights that might inform their advocacy and/or social administration. I hadn’t read this book yet, so I decided that I should. For the most part, this wasn’t a book that really spoke to me personally. As my students know, I don’t really watch TV, I rarely buy new clothes, we don’t really do ‘entertainment’ or ‘recreation’, my kids will only get 2 presents each from us this Christmas–mostly I work and hang out with my kids, activities that tend, particularly because of the focus of my work, to keep me rather insulated from commercialism. But I definitely saw some ways in which the lessons of this book, really a sermon on anti-materialism, resonate with social work practice, sometimes in surprising ways.

    One point was that the Internet has become much more a tool of e-commerce than a revolutionary democratization of knowledge. For those of us committed to social justice, we have to care about the openness of this medium and the ways in which it, too, is shaped for corporate ends. It also occurred to me, in the section on student debt, that social work students’ debt levels may, indeed, influence graduates’ career paths. If I was graduating with more than $20,000 in student debt, it might have been harder for me to pursue advocacy (initially often a low-paying field) rather than management or private practice. How much do you think that the out-of-pocket cost of social work education influences subsequent professional specialization? The authors also stressed that we increasingly see ourselves as consumers, not citizens, a realignment that erodes the social contract and support for public goods (parks, public schools, libraries)–this is a now-familiar argument (perhaps most famously associated with the ‘Bowling Alone’ thesis), but, here it was presented as one that can be influenced even by individuals in their own behaviors as consumers, or not. Finally, and perhaps most associated with the title of this post, they cite numerous indicators of the social and psychological toll that unceasing pursuit of wealth has on individuals and families. It made me wonder how much of social workers’ collective energies are spent dealing with these symptoms: families that spend little time together, addictions that self-medicate stress, anxieties related to perceived inadequacies…what I take from this is not a ‘so we all just need to spend more time around the campfire’ kind of message, but, instead, that it really is all of this wealth that is noteworthy, and that, if we dedicated some of our study to why we have a society that allows people to accumulate so much, we might find that we build structures that prevent others from falling into such deprivation. And that, in fact, everyone is better off.

    → Leave a comment

    Posted in Analysis and Commentary

    Tagged ,

    Review: The life you can save

    Posted on October 15, 2009 by | Leave a comment

    So I have two stacks of books sitting on my desk at home: one of books that I still need to read (I get through them rather slowly, as I mostly read during the few stolen moments available to a stay-at-home mom with 3 young children) and one of those that I have managed to read but want to write something about. I’m trying to wade through some of the latter stack, since even my generous faculty book check-out period at the university is coming to an end, and the former might need to get made into two stacks, lest they all come tumbling down.

    I read Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save after hearing about it on The World, one of my favorite public radio programs. That’s the way that I hear about a lot of the books (and mostly all of the fiction) I read. I was particularly interested in this one because of the Poverty in the Global Economy course that I taught early this summer, although I didn’t end up using it directly in the course. It’s very quick to read and worthwhile, especially if you have a particular interest either in moral reasoning (he’s a philosopher, and the beginning of the book really lays out his personal philosophy around shared responsibility for survival of the world’s most vulnerable) or in global poverty, although it’s lighter on critique of the global economic structure than I would have liked or expected.

    Here are my reflections on the book, with the major caveat that I am no literary reviewer, obviously. I review articles for a couple of journals, but that kind of criticism is much different, and much more regimented, than this, so take it more as though we were having a book club and I’m a member offering my take on it, okay? And then feel free to totally disagree with me and offer your own thoughts in the comments.

    As an aside, I’m interested in starting a real book club for radical social workers–I’ll do a whole post on that later–but if you’re at all interested in meeting monthly for drinks/coffee/discussion of the kinds of books that appeal to me, at least, as a radical social worker…please let me know!

    The basic premise of the book is that our world is rich enough to end dire poverty, if we just spread our wealth around better and that our failure to do so is an individual moral failing no less egregious than if we saw a child drowning and did not jump in to try to save her. He challenges us to think about every penny that we spend unnecessarily and whether we can legitimately claim that to be ethical behavior. It’s a premise that I personally accept, yet there were many parts of the book that gave me pause. My thoughts, in no particular order:

    There’s a section where Singer challenges the validity of the whole concept of self-interest, even enlightened self-interest (see p.77). He gives several examples where compassion is obviously not stemming from self-interest and then asserts that the norm of self-interest compels people to claim it as a motivation for their actions rather than to appeal to our own higher instincts and those of others. This discussion made me question the role that self-interest plays in community organizing, in particular, where it is pretty much universally the motivating factor around which people are brought into relationships. Should it be so? Or should we, in fact, be operating from a perspective of more altruistic motivation, using different language to talk about how to bring people together?

    Singer is almost apolitical in his analysis of the global economy, and I take issue with his characterization of advocacy with national governments as being so unlikely so as to be a waste of time. To expand his initial analogy, to me that sounds like saying that, if the waves are really bad and I’m not a good swimmer, so it’s unlikely that I could save the dying child, then I shouldn’t even bother trying? Especially because, in this case, we can certainly be working to exert political, social, and economic pressure on world leaders to take anti-poverty policies at the same time as we are taking personal steps to make a contribution.

    There is a chapter in the book that asks, in several different ways, questions about the extent to which we are allowed to have a preference for our own children over the children of others–basically, do we have a right to give to our own children, knowing that what we give to them effectively reduces what we can give to children in poverty around the world, and, if so, what are the limits that must morally be placed on this giving? This discussion was tough but very important for me as a mom. I think quite a bit, actually, about what my kids have compared to others. We really don’t buy toys for the kids much at all, and they rarely have new clothes, but they do have all they want to eat (not what they want to eat, my 3-year-old would point out!), great medical care, clean water, lots of attention from a well-rested and well-treated mom, access to safe and free recreation, books to look at…so very, very much. I do think, consciously, about not over-buying for them, both because we should be directing our resources elsewhere and because I believe that too much stuff is bad for them, but what about taking that further? Should we live in a less expensive neighborhood even if it means poorer-quality schools? Should I be working full-time on social justice causes rather than dedicating my time to them? I’m obviously exerting a preference for my kids’ well-being over the well-being of other kids, and I guess I really didn’t think about the questionable morality of that until I read this book. But now I kind of can’t stop thinking about it.

    Overall, I was pretty enthralled by this book until the last two chapters when, much to my shock and somewhat dismay, Singer distills his philosophical arguments to a formula that dictates how much people should ethically be ‘expected’ to give to fight global poverty, and I find that, according to his standard, we’re already giving what we “should”. As in, without giving up my frivolous fountain drink splurges or our (very) occasional dinner out or any of the things we currently buy for our kids. Those last sections left me feeling pretty empty, really, and a little bit betrayed. Here I am wrestling with these moral quandries about my right to love my kids more than an unknown, hungry child somewhere, and the guy who has been causing me to ask myself these hard questions suddenly says that, according to his formula, I’m all good? Even though I know that I could/should be doing more? But because we don’t make more money, we’re somehow off the hook for giving sacrificially to fight global desperation? Talk about a letdown.

    I’d love to hear from anyone who has read the book or has thoughts about Singer’s other philosophy or my quandries above. And I’d also take feedback about whether reviews like this are at all helpful to you and/or how to structure them to make them more so. And I’ll keep wading through the rest of that pile!

    → Leave a comment

    Posted in Analysis and Commentary

    Tagged , ,

    Rededicated to the impossible

    Posted on October 14, 2009 by | Leave a comment
    Drawings of slave ships were one the primary tools abolitionists used to tell the story of the atrocities visited upon those enslaved

    Drawings of slave ships were one the primary tools abolitionists used to tell the story of the atrocities visited upon those enslaved

    So I just finished reading Half the Sky. Meaning that I stayed up until 2AM two nights in a row (which, for a mom with little kids, tells you that I was REALLY serious about reading it), absolutely transfixed by the stories of gender oppression around the world and, even more so, the completely inspiring in a million ways women (and some men) who are working in creative, tireless, and mainly fiercely courageous ways to end it.

    I’m not going to write a review; here are links to some sources that have already reviewed it. But I do have several posts stemming from it swirling in my brain, so you’ll see some references to Half the Sky sprinkled throughout my writing over the next few weeks. This is the first.

    I like authors that make no secret that their writing is part of a crusade for social justice. When I met David Bacon in September, I had the chance to tell him that in person.

    The authors of Half the Sky do the same thing, right from the start. And here’s what I especially appreciated about their introduction:

    “Honor killings, sexual slavery, and genital cutting may seem to Western readers to be tragic but inevitable in a world far, far away. In much the same way, slavery was once widely viewed by many decent Europeans and Americans as a regrettable but ineluctable feature of human life…But then in the 1780s a few indignant Britons, led by William Wilberforce, decided that slavery was so offensive that they had to abolish it. And they did.” (p. xxii)

    Calls to action don’t get much bolder than that, do they?

    Think that you’re busy? That the problems you’re confronting are intractable? That you lack the funds, or the technology, or the public opinion that you need to move the needle on your social injustice of choice? Um, try abolishing slavery, unilaterally, at the height of the global slave trade, at a national cost of almost 2% of GNP per year for SIXTY years (plus one brief war and three war scares).

    Half the Sky returns to the abolitionist Brits at the end of the book, in the appropriately-titled “What you can do” chapter. There, they pinpoint as the key factor of success the abolitionist activists’ ability to document and vividly describe the horrific abuses and injustices visited upon slaves–this idea that we advocates seem to instinctively know (although sometimes forget)–that building relationships, however vicariously, and helping people to connect in meaningful ways with suffering that we will otherwise try to ignore is the best (and sometimes only) way to build inexorable momentum for dramatic social change. In fact, they cite some very powerful social research that statistics and generalized cries of alarm tend to repel solidarity and collective action, while personal stories of those impacted draw people in and can, even, compel significant sacrifice in pursuit of justice.

    So, besides really trying to influence my son to choose William Wilberforce or Thomas Clarkson as his ‘historical hero’ in the 5th grade, what do I take away from this refresher course in the thrilling history of abolition?

    Really, just a reminder of what I already know to be true:

  • There are no excuses. I’m making a renewed commitment to being the kind of person that people shake their heads at, wondering ‘what in the world has gotten into her?’ I will be unreasonably passionate about injustice. I will not pursue pragmatism.
  • We don’t win people over with logic; we win them over by igniting their love for their fellow human being.
  • We can’t wait for the numbers to look good for us. Public opinion alone is seldom sufficient for social change, and so facing significant opposition is no reason to wait.
  • No matter how hard I might think I’m working on a particular cause, or even in general, I’m not even beginning to give what women around the world are giving to their quest for justice. I can and must do more.

    After devouring Half the Sky, I don’t feel guilty. I feel emboldened. Audacious, even. And angry. And part of a much larger whole. And ready, to think really, really, really big, impossibly big.

    So I don’t apologize, if you are one of the dozens of people I’ve grabbed this week and told, “you must read this book!” I won’t apologize for asking you to write letters and give money, for telling you stories that are horrifying and galvanizing at the same time, and for not shutting up about the tragedy that is our treatment of women and girls around the world. We’ve got better tools and more inspiration than those Brits did in the 18th century. We can make this the century in which we eradicate the ills that have thus far plagued us.

    I want it to be written, “and they did.”

    • → Leave a comment

    Posted in Inspiration and Examples

    Tagged , , , ,

    Taking Action in the Global Economy

    Posted on July 7, 2009 by | Leave a comment

    One of my assignments for my Poverty in the Global Economy course was to take some sort of action, at the end of the course, to effect change in the global economy. The goal was to show that local initiative can, indeed, have global impact. I basically made the assignment up, because the master syllabus was all pretty theoretical, and I really felt that students needed to be able to answer, at least in part, the ‘so what now?’ question that, for me, follows any presentation about the often-disastrous consequences of our current economic order. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, though, so I was really excited by what they came up with.

    All of the projects were fairly different, and all reflected pretty well the students’ own interests and aptitudes. Some of the highlights: a bilingual student helped some immigrant acquaintances who had been recently laid off access food and other emergency assistance and talked with them about the origins of the current economic downturn; an economic-minded and fairly conservative student read an article from a prominent conservative-leaning publication and crafted a response based on what he had learned in class, that pointed out some of the fallacies in the author’s arguments; a student who works with young children created a lesson plan about global poverty designed for preschoolers and helped them raise money for a global anti-poverty organization; a student interested in urban poverty screened “Slumdog Millionaire” for a small group and then led a discussion about the realities of urban poverty in the developing world; another student made a loan through Kiva to an aspiring entrepreneur in Bangladesh; one volunteered with a community garden program that serves refugees.

    It was pretty awesome, really, to see how students could scan their own environments and their own resources to find tangible ways to make changes that support the pursuit of global justice. It was inspiring to see that they could look past the apparent intractability of global poverty to find solace and hope in their only authentic sources–work effort and solidarity. And it was exciting to see how academics can be used as a part of a strategy for social change, planting seeds of praxis that will, hopefully, continue to bear fruit.

    → Leave a comment

    Posted in Inspiration and Examples

    Tagged , , ,

    “Accidental Social Working?”–Only Fools Rush In

    Posted on June 16, 2009 by | Leave a comment

    My husband and I are big “Baby Whisperer” fans. Well, OK, we were, with our first son, and then when we had twins we fully embraced the whole “do absolutely anything that seems to work in the moment” philosophy in order to manage life with 3 kids aged 2 and under. But, in my rare moments to reflect on parenting, I still think that the Baby Whispering advice makes sense–basically, take time to know your baby, to figure out what is really going on with him/her, and be purposeful and present, emotionally as well as physically, in order to develop healthy patterns of interaction and help babies figure out how to comfort themselves. The whole idea is to avoid what she calls ‘accidental parenting’, where, in an attempt to rapidly fix some problem, we end up missing the bigger picture.

    That’s a big part of the way that I parent, really, which is somewhat surprising, perhaps, given that, before I was a mom, I tended to rush through life, making decisions on the fly and managing crisis after crisis. As a parent, soon to be of 3 toddlers, I think that the idea of hanging back a bit, diagnosing before acting, and trying to get to the root of problems is what has helped my kids to adjust to the world as well as they have (not that I haven’t succumbed to the ‘just give him children’s Tylenol’ temptation at 3AM before!).

    I thought of Baby Whispering in class the other day (it’s funny, sometimes, how much my mind jumps from Mommy to social work mode, and back). In the global poverty course, my students were working through a poverty simulation exercise that I developed to help them understand a bit more intimately the problems that people around the world face as they attempt to survive in the current global economic order. I broke them into 3 groups of 4, and each group was assigned to read through one of the family case scenarios–Ohio, Mexico, or the Philippines. They had to answer a series of questions and also make decisions, given the real price information that I included. Students certainly took it seriously, and the feedback that I received was pretty positive–they did feel that it helped to personalize somewhat our earlier lecture and discussion regarding the nature of poverty in the global economy.

    But what I observed, and what made me think of baby whispering, was the way in which all 3 groups, independently, tended to jump to judgment about the families and their actions, and tended to immediately look to micro-level ‘solutions’ to deal with some of the symptoms of the problems. For example, the group talking about the Marshall family from Ohio focused in on how the family might trim its grocery bill with some more selective shopping, what might help Todd better deal with his decimated financial position in order to get his drinking under control, and how to counsel the family to adjust their expectations in line with their reduced economic position. Certainly some of those interventions are valid responses to the Marshalls’ very real, very urgent pain, but none of them begin to discuss what is causing the Marshalls’ hardship or how, indeed, those root causes are threatening the very existence of the middle class in much of the United States. Kind of like putting your baby in the swing for yet another nap, because at least it gets her to go to sleep, even though you still haven’t figured out why she hates that crib that she needs to learn to sleep in.

    I think that social workers are often ‘guilty’ of this. We want to fix things, and the root causes are often much harder to fix, so we zero in on that which brings some quick relief. We are attuned more to the pyschological impact of poverty and discrimination than the political and economic conditions that contribute to them. We focus on individuals, the level of intervention where we feel most comfortable, rather than social structures, where the real problems are.

    As I circulated among the groups, talking with students, I found myself probing in ways not unlike the Baby Whisperer. She had a catchy acronym for it: STOP: Stop, Listen, Observe, What’s Up? I encouraged them to take a step back and ask critical questions about the families’ situations and the conditions that contribute to them, before trying to intervene. I challenged them to really listen to what the individuals involved were saying about their circumstances, their fears, their goals, their very real anger. And I insisted that they examine the injustices at work, the structural reforms needed, and the role that they as social workers could play in pursuing such radical change, before they applied more micro-level interventions that, while often a component of how we render aid (just as I don’t believe in just letting a baby cry and cry), will at best fail to prevent the same problem from recurring and at worst will mask the true structural violence of a system that creates crises.

    Just as, in those weak moments in the middle of the night, as a parent I tend to reach for whatever I think will make the crying stop, so, too, do we as social workers sometimes grab desperately (in the dark!) for something to stop the bleeding, so to speak. But it is my hope, in this class and as an instructor more generally, to give my students some of the tools they need, in the light of day and with a more well-rested perspective, to work towards new systems that will help all of the vulnerable people we serve sleep easier.

    → Leave a comment

    Posted in Analysis and Commentary

    Tagged , ,

    Guilt and the Global Economy

    Posted on June 8, 2009 by | Leave a comment

    I’m teaching a class this summer, new to me (and fairly new to the
    School) on Poverty in the Global Economy. The title of the class, actually, is the Globalization of Poverty, but that suggests, to me, the global diffusion of poverty, which is quite different than what the master syllabus outlines and what I intend to teach, but that’s a whole different topic…

    I’m excited about this class; even though I dislike the summer format, really, because it is so condensed as to be pretty immediately overwhelming to both student and instructor, I have an outlined planned that I think (fingers crossed) will really work: lots of class activities, debates, discussion, videos, guest speakers. We’re going to cover global health (especially HIV/AIDS), the Millennium Development Goals, the role of international financial institutions (World Trade Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund), grassroots anti-poverty action, migration and the global economy, the impact of the current financial crisis, global aid and debt, the role of violence in perpetrating economic disaster…OK, so it may still be pretty immediately overwhelming.

    I’m sure that I’ll have more thoughts on those topics, and how to communicate them effectively to students (or not) throughout the rest of the month. One of my greatest challenges is to convey a sense of relevance and integration, given that these are topics, at least in this global context, that are quite literally foreign to Bachelors social work students, who tend to be somewhat parochially focused. But the challenge that I’m facing this week, as I go through my notes for final course preparations, is how to cultivate a sense of shared destiny, common responsibility, interdependence, without crippling my students with a middle-class guilt that will choke out all meaningful praxis.

    If you’ve ever traveled on a “Reality Tour”, so to speak, you know the paralysis of which I speak. When you first come back to the U.S., you have trouble eating (because you can’t stop thinking about all of the hunger you saw); you obsessively check labels on everything (thinking about the working conditions where it was produced); you interrupt your friends with morose commentary about the number of children who have died in the past hour of diarrheal disease.

    Conscious, yes, which is arguably preferable to the oblivion in which many of us live much of the time, but not too conducive to the kind of real solidarity-building and righteous campaigning for social change that economic, social, and political realities demand. I’ve had many such experiences, and they are very much on my mind as I put together this class.

    How do I make the tragedies real without making victims out of the courageous people who live them? How do I highlight the complicity of the U.S., particularly our trade arrangements, without romanticizing nationalistic economic development? How do I steer students towards promising anti-poverty policy without minimizing the intractability of the desperation? How do I make it connect to their work without oversimplifying?

    I don’t expect anyone to have the magic answers for me; I am hopeful that my students and I will hit upon some of them as we struggle through the material together, but it’s a quandary that I think anyone who endeavors to teach about poverty and need in a way that seeks to aid, not further exploit, those who are subjected to them, must face. And I’d welcome anyone’s thoughts about how to tackle it.

    → Leave a comment

    Posted in Analysis and Commentary

    Tagged , ,