At this year’s Student Leadership Conference (SLC), my fiancé and I facilitated a workshop titled, “What is Poverty? Challenging the Way We View Wealth and Prosperity.” The aim of our workshop was exactly that, to critically question and challenge the ways that we view people in our society who may be impoverished in material standards.
Poverty’s complex. It’s a devastating reality for millions, no, billions of individuals around this world. It strips people of opportunities they are destined to pursue. I don’t think many would argue that eradicating poverty would make our world a better place. Yet, how do we go about that exactly? Many of us in the GRS program aspire to mitigate poverty disparities in some form or another, either here in Canada or abroad. Yet, how do we attempt to alleviate poverty without stripping people of their dignity in the process? How do we ensure that we are not neglecting to consider cultural values?
There’s no straight-forward definition to poverty. Who is even defining this term in the first place? These are all questions and comments that we raised in our workshop. Too often, I feel that people living in “poverty” are portrayed in a way as if they are less human than those of us living in places such as Canada. I feel that the lack of understanding surrounding poverty is aided by mainstream media not covering issues comprehensively. Deep subjects, such as poverty, are treated in a shallow way. The focus is on selling stories; thus, systemic and structural aspects of poverty are often not reported. Ultimately, this all leads to a lot of ignorance and assumptions being made about what it must be like for individuals living in poverty. A person who may be living in what we deem as “poverty” may indeed have a completely different personal perception than what we may assume, which we need to begin to recognize. It’s important to look at the richness of people, than just a person’s material living standards.
Overall, in our workshop, we wanted to convey how multi-faceted poverty is. We stressed the importance of understanding how the term poverty is conceptualized in our society, and what the potential implications of that are. However, we wanted to also empower the youth that attended, by highlighting the important role they play in all of this and how they can make an impact in either directly alleviating poverty, or restoring the dignity of individuals living in poverty.