When the timeframe of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) ended in 2015, the UN adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to achieve by 2030. Unlike the MDGs, the SDGs are designed to leave no one behind, and to prioritize empowering those furthest behind. The first goal? To end poverty, in all its forms, everywhere.
Hearing this may evoke many different feelings. When I was at the Youth Assembly at the UN, I met many high schoolers with a lot of idealism and optimism who fully bought into that being an attainable goal. As for my peers in their last year of college and beyond, this goal instead brings a lot of doubt and comes off as an impossibly abstract notion that can never be realized.
Because of this, one of the sessions I was most excited to attend the Youth Assembly was the workshop to create tangible ways to tackle Goal 1. For such a crazy goal, I wanted to hear some crazy ideas that just might work.
Going into my senior year, I have seen many different forms of poverty in the world. My university, Washington and Lee (W&L), has an amazing Shepherd Poverty Studies Program that defines poverty through a human capabilities approach (largely based on Martha Nussbaum’s work). This means that poverty isn’t solely a financial state, but also includes other things that hinder people from enjoying full dignity and respect – like having bodily integrity or the opportunity for play. We also talk about how poverty can be relative and, in this sense, poverty will always exist because there will always be some people left worse off than others.
In my college community, I have served over 2000 hours with various community organizations that allowed me see what rural poverty looks like and how it creates other problems. After my freshman year, I interned in remote Red Hook, Brooklyn and saw a different kind of urban poverty. A year later, I traveled to the Dominican Republic and worked with Haitian migrants. This year, I spent a month in southern Spain and saw a poverty that reminded me much of the poverty I was used to, coming from suburban Massachusetts, that resulted from the Great Recession of 2007-2008. This week, I am part of a group of 35 upperclassmen leading service trips for 105 incoming W&L students that go to 7 cities to learn more about poverty issues. Understandably, with all I have seen and heard, I am doubtful that ending poverty, in all its forms, everywhere is possible by 2030 – but, that doesn’t mean we can’t start to eliminate some forms of poverty by then, in some places.
At the workshop, I heard the same ideas I was used to – we need to build more schools, provide job training, and eliminate corruption. Each of these of course proves to be more complex than it seems. Providing job training sounds great, but for what jobs are we training people? Hopefully, sustainable ones. Teaching English in developing countries so that people can run tourism industries might work in the short-run, but counting on tourism as a long-term industry to back up a country’s whole economy is dangerous. Likewise, building schools also sounds like a noble way to address poverty – but it is similar to throwing money at a problem. If a school does not offer quality education, it is not worth building. And, if there are no jobs that can come of the education offered by these schools, or there are no affordable ways to continue education such as in university, how can people value those schools enough to make them work? Finally, how can corruption be eliminated when it has long been built into many government systems? Culture is not easy to change, though it can be done.
Perhaps the best way to start alleviating poverty in the world is to not think of it in such grandiose terms. Instead, take the grassroots approach. If we all commit to doing something -- anything really – in our small corners of the world, I believe change can happen. We might not be able to get rid of poverty in every country, but maybe we can help those in our own communities not go hungry and can organize clothes drives so less is thrown away and more is given to those in need. In our efforts, creativity and collaboration can go a long way – and we shouldn’t underestimate our own true potential for making the world a better place. The cynical part of myself won’t let me believe in Goal 1, but the many amazing youths I met this summer gave me hope to believe that we can still put our idealism to work and accomplish parts of Goal 1.
