My publishing company, the Dundurn Group, has signed up for a blog blast on the subject of poverty, and as one of their authors, I volunteered to write up a post about poverty. Unfortunately, I almost missed the month. If I wanted to make excuses, I’d blame my kids, but the truth is, I had a busy month, as many young families, I’m sure, can sympathize, juggling toddlers, pre-school, grocery shopping, commutes, trips to the park, and so on. And my kids aren’t even old enough to take up hockey practice.

Technically, my family has never been below the poverty line. We’ve cut it close at times, and it seems like we’re always scrimping to make ends meet, but we’re not what you would call poor. And I think there are a lot of reasons for this. We’ve worked hard, but we’ve also been very lucky. We have close family members who are willing to lend a hand. We’ve had lucky breaks in our careers. We have plenty to be thankful for.

Despite this, we have needed, made use of, and been incredibly grateful for a number of government services that Canada offers. We’ve had two babies, and we haven’t had to pay for our medical care. We’ve collected unemployment insurance while on maternity leave. I’ve taken advantage of training programs to kickstart my career. And, of course, there’s the schools I’ve attended, and the schools my daughters are about to attend, all paid for through my tax dollars. And lets not forget the roads we drive on, or the parks we take our kids to, or the libraries they’ll use.

On the other hand, my American wife has experienced intensive hospital care south of the border, and while we can’t complain about the quality of care, the costs she had to bear out of pocket almost bankrupted her. So it is possible to visualize how much harder life would be, for ourselves but especially for those less fortunate than us, if we didn’t have this safety net beneath us.

I pay taxes as grudgingly as the next person, but I cannot think how we could have handled our lives without the help that was made available to us in our society, and I can only imagine how much harder it can be, and how much more necessary these programs are, for those people who have less than we do. And that’s why we need to protect these services, so they remain available for our children.

James Bow is the author of two previous books in the Unwritten Books series: The Unwritten Girl and Fathom Five. A transit enthusiast, urban planner, and freelance writer, he lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

My father came to Canada from Holland in the early 1950s at the age of twenty-three. His origins were lower middle class (at a time when class mattered to the Dutch), and Europe was still recovering from the war. Not surprisingly, his pockets were empty when he stepped onto Canadian soil.

His first years as an immigrant were tough. He worked at various jobs – baker’s assistant, milkman, stock-boy — and was barely able to make ends meet. He was fortunate that his neighbours refused to eat an animal’s soft parts, because butchers at that time would sell the liver and kidneys for next to nothing. My father lived in a claustrophobic room, walked to work to save himself the bus-fare, and treated himself to a movie once a month. And always, unfailingly, he set a dollar aside from his salary each week.

“You were poor,” I told him, when he regaled me with these stories from his past. This was fifteen years later, when he was working as a well-paid accountant. His response amazed me.

“I was never poor,” he insisted, “I was broke, that’s all. Being broke is one thing; poverty is much more difficult.”

When I pressed him to explain the difference, he told me that ‘broke’ people have the resources to recover from their bad luck – they have tangible skills, education and, most important, the belief that if their former prosperity has eluded them, it can be retrieved. The poor, he went on, have not been granted such blessings. True poverty has no visible exit, no skills that the world is willing to reward, and no self-image that a population will respect or admire. Worse, it provides no vision of happier days when the necessities of life, as well as its pleasures, were there for the asking.

He almost trembled when he launched this explanation, as if poverty were one of the worst afflictions he could think of, as if it were a chronic state of ‘brokeness’ impervious to cheerful thoughts and the hardest of efforts.

“That’s why I set aside a dollar from my salary each week,” he concluded.

“To save up for the future?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, giving me a look that suggested I had missed his point, “To provide for people who were genuinely poor.”

Nicholas Maes is a high-school history teacher and teaches classics at the University of Waterloo. His adult novel Dead Man’s Float was published in 2006, and he has published several short stories and reviews in a variety of journals. He lives with his wife, three children, and a rabbit in Toronto.

There is enough. That’s the thing that’s so disturbing about poverty. Planet earth isn’t poor. There’s more than enough food to go around. There’s more than enough everything. Food, money and resources are all present in abundance. Wealth and plenty flow like water in opulent societies.

There is enough, and yet, children starve. They lay down with hunger and rise up with it. It becomes a cruel and constant companion throughout lives that are cut off all too soon.

In 1994 Kevin Carter brought world hunger to centre stage with his Pulitzer winning photo of a famine-stricken child crawling toward a UN food camp while a buzzard watched in the background.

I cannot see that picture without this thought rising: There is enough.

Carter’s experiences and photographs suggest otherwise. In his suicide note, just months after receiving the Pulitzer, he wrote: “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children …”

Starving children. Who among us could see a starving child without offering help? How then is it that we can be unmoved by this plight when it is shared by so many? Do we need to be confronted, to come face to face with it before we react?

I have no eloquent words to lay down and no wisdom beyond the simple understanding that, if poverty exists when there is enough, it exists, not for lack of food, or the want of wealth but because of a different sort of poverty – a barrenness in the human spirit.

I believe this. I believe that all it would take would be for each of us to do something. To do our part. Countless organizations exist to do the work for us, all we need do is care enough to commit.

If there is want, it is the want of compassion and of the sense of responsibility. There is no other explanation for the desperate plight of families and communities and countries that wither and die because we do not care enough to help, even though there is enough.

There is enough. And yet, there is far, far too little.

Valerie Sherrad is the author of 9 previous titles, including Kate, Sarah’s Legacy, Sam’s Light, and the Shelby Belgarden Mystery Series. Searching for Yesterday is the sixth Shelby Belgarden book. Valerie’s books have been shortlisted for the Red Maple, White Pine, Snow Willow, MYRCA, and Arthur Ellis Awards, recommended by IODE Violet Downey Award, and selected as Our Choice by the CCBC. She lives in Miramichi, New Brunswick, with her husband, Brent.

Today’s poverty is commonly defined as a person surviving on less than a dollar a day, which applies to one-quarter of the world’s population, or roughly one billion people. This is beyond gravely concerning, it is inhumane. Some 20,000 people die every day because they are too hungry, too sick, and just too poor to live.

The United Nations Development Programme, which assists the developing world with issues that are impeding their social, economic and political growth, has identified through its Millennium Development Goal (MDG) twenty-one priorities that need to be addressed. Number one is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. Eight of the twenty-one goals include the provision of universal primary education, gender equality, combating disease, the environment, among them, and all twenty-one are targeted for major improvements by 2015. Poverty is identified to be cut in half.

Most heartening is the fact that eradicating extreme poverty has met with a modicum of success, especially in China and India. In September 2008, a report presented to the UN on the progress of the MDGs noted that the number of people considered very poor has dropped from 1.9 billion in 1981 to 1.4 million.

It was also announced that the MDG had received some $16 billion in new funding from governments, foundations, philanthropists, business groups and various civic societies around the world.

Thirty-five years ago, rich countries pledged to set aside .07 percent of GDP for development aid. This was renewed in 2002 to support the MDG priorities of helping the developing world eliminate its crippling, widespread problems that precludes many countries from competing fairly in the global market economy. Yet numerous governments have not met their monetary pledges, including Canada. A call for leadership is required to achieve the MDG targets. To address this shortfall, an interim meeting is planned for 2010 to hold governments accountable.

Meanwhile, savvy, charismatic individuals rush in where governments fail to tread.

One of them, Jeffrey Sachs, past director of the Millennium Project and special advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, remains a strong advocate of the MDG and its objectives. Futurist, economist and author, most recently in 2005 with his publication of The End of Poverty, Sachs has inspired millions of individuals to join in the universal goal of ending poverty.

When political leadership falters and as one country’s crisis has a widespread, exponential effect, increasingly its cause is taken up by super-stars. Whether economists or rock stars, they are able to attract adherents to causes as powerful as their personas.

There is much evidence to support the notion that a new world order has been championed, in large measure, by rock stars.

When ex-Beatle George Harrison learned from India’s acclaimed musician Ravi Shankar about the poverty facing people in Bangladesh, Harrison felt deep sympathy for them, lacking life’s essentials of food and shelter. In 1971, he produced two rock concerts in Madison Square Garden in New York with guest stars Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan. The concerts raised more than $10 million in aid for Bangladesh. (Worth $122.5 million in 2007, using relative share of GDP.)*

Harrison inspired others, such as the Bee Gees, who donated all proceeds of their rendition of the Beatles’ music “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Band” to UNICEF. This raised $10 million for hunger programs.

Then in 1985, when Bob Geldof organized his “Live Aid” concert for feminine relief in Ethiopia, the $100 million that poured in astounded even the most optimistic observer. Geldof still fights the battle of hunger with music.

Poverty and its dire consequences of hunger, infectious diseases, illiteracy, joblessness, substandard wages, uninhabitable shelter, unsafe water, polluted air, environmental degradation —the breeding ground for abject despair and, many claim, political upheaval that incites terrorism—are attracting passionate celebrities to these issues.

There would be far less recognition of and significantly less research in the funding for HIV/AIDS without personal initiatives powered by a handful of celebrities who helped de-stigmatize AIDS and raise funds for finding a cure. Notable among them are U2’s Bono, Elizabeth Taylor, Elton John and Diana, Princess of Wales.

Currently in the philanthropic spotlight for their commitment to various social issues in developing countries are Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Richard Branson and many super-rich philanthropists who work quietly to support the world’s calamities.

A huge philanthropic donation rocked the not-for-profit sector in 2006 when Warren Buffet announced he was giving away 85% of his wealth to five foundations. The foremost recipient, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (with an endowment of $38.7 billion in 2007), received shares of Berkshire Hathaway in 2006 valued at about $30 billion. According to Forbes magazine, in 2008 Buffet dethroned Gates as the richest man in the world, by virtue of his $62-billion pile. Gates dropped to third, with a mere $52 billion.

The Gates Foundation donates some $500 million annually to the Global Health Initiative for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria programs, a critical factor in worldwide poverty.

The signals are clear. If not arrested, the damage wreaked by poverty that is killing millions of people annually will continue to kill millions more, with the prospect of there becoming significantly increasing numbers of “us” of the haves, who will join “them” of the have-nots.

*www.measuringworth.com

A certain amount of material from the foregoing is adapted from my book, Generation Deluxe: Consumerism and Philanthropy of the New Super-rich, 2004, The Dundurn Group.

Iris Nowell is the author of five books. Writing her 1996 book, Women Who Give Away Millions, has given her a solid foundation of philanthropy, the not-for-profit sector, and the wealthy. She has also written a memoir of Canadian artist Harold Town, and a biography of artist, filmmaker, and impassioned feminist, Joyce Wieland.

In Delhi, feverish with flu, I checked into the Hotel Furama to recuperate. I opened the curtains of my beautifully appointed room and, there, below, were dozens of people, mostly dark-skinned women in bright saris, picking through a field of garbage. The urge to close the curtains, to shut out such a disturbing and unsightly view, was strong. Believe me. But, instead, for a long while I stood and watched them from my window. “Why you down there and me up here?” I asked out loud, leaving a small circle of fog on the air-conditioned glass.

The answer: Sheer dumb good luck.

The sheer dumb good luck of having been born in Canada in a world where 1.4 billion people – that’s one in every six people on the planet – live on $1.25 a day or less.

Back in 2000, in a spirit of turn-of-the-millennium good will and pre post-9-11-paranoia, my rich country, and twenty-one of the other richest countries in the world, decided to share a bit of their good fortune. That was the year they pledged 0.7% of their Gross National Incomes [GNI] toward the Millenium Development Goals [MDG] of, among other things, cutting world poverty in half by 2015.

Well, it’s now the tail end of 2008, over half way to that deadline, and the lucky countries of the world aren’t even contributing half that amount. Last year the twenty-two richest countries in the world gave an average of only 0.28% to the poorest. Thankfully, a handful of more generous countries, like Norway and Sweden, which each contributed over 0.9% of their GNI, kept that number from being smaller. The United States gave only 0.16% last year – the smallest percentage of all twenty-two countries.

The U.S. argues that, while it might give the lowest in percentage of its GNI, the country contributes the most in terms of actual dollars. This is true. In 2007, the United States gave nearly 22 billion dollars to development assistance – almost double that of second place Germany’s 12 billion.

But then I think of the THREE TRILLION DOLLARS the US government has spent on the war in Iraq since 2003, or the 700 BILLION DOLLARS it spent last week bailing out Wall Street fat cats, and 22 billion dollars starts to look like pocket change. Peanuts.

Crumbs from our table.

I want to scream or cry or puke when I think how much good that THREE POINT SEVEN TRILLION DOLLARS could have done in the world. Instead of destroying homes, that money could have been building them. Instead of killing people, that money could have been feeding them, educating them, immunizing them, protecting them from mosquito bites. Instead of bailing out Wall Street, it could have, oh, I don’t know, bailed out the entire continent of Africa!

And, I hate to break it to you, my fellow Canadians, but our rich country was not among that handful of more generous countries like Norway and Sweden. Last year, Canada contributed only 0.28% of its GNI to the MDG. So, while we like to think our country a paragon of benevolence in the world, it turns out we are pretty average (and stingily so). As the former UN envoy to Africa for HIV/AIDS, Stephen Lewis, recently put it, “If we’re not prepared to [give 0.7%], just forget it. It means that Canada’s position is completely without substance. It’s all rhetorical nonsense.”

The good news is that, despite falling well short of the 0.7% promised, the 0.28% has made a difference. Over two million people in Africa are now on AIDS medication, up from only 50,000 in 2002. Between 2001 and 2006, 29 million kids in Africa went to school for the first time and 26 million were immunized against life-threatening illnesses. The purchase of 59 million bed nets has considerably reduced the number of malarial deaths — in a world where a child dies every 30 seconds from the disease – in the poorest of the poor countries like Rwanda.

This is all good. But just think how much better it could be, how much more things could change, if we just kept our promise of 0.7%. This is what United Nations’ secretary general Ban Ki-moon wanted to remind world leaders when he invited them to a meeting in New York City on September 25th. The goal of the meeting was to reinvigorate the world’s commitment to the MDG, to get that number up closer to 0.7%. (You’d be forgiven if you didn’t hear about it, though. That was the same day investment bankers on the other side of town were running around like Chicken Littles with their heads cut off.) Rock star Bono was there. Economist and humanitarian Jeffrey Sachs was there. Bill Gates was there. Seventy-five world leaders were there, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who made an impassioned, inspirational speech, and new Japanese PM, Taro Aso, who flew all the way from Asia, stayed for ten hours, then flew back.

Guess who wasn’t there? Canada’s own Stephen Harper.

Sure he had an election campaign to run, but you’d think the guy could have at least put in an appearance, if for no other reason than to not incur the wrath of Bono. Or at least to show that, even if Canada isn’t willing to pony up the cash, we still care.

In his speech to the UN, British Prime Minister Brown said, “…throughout the ages the fate of the hungry, the homeless, the deprived, and what we do to help, has been the touchstone of compassion, the crucible in which our morality is tested.”

Well, Canada, our compassion and morality are being tested.

And some days it makes me feel terribly helpless. What’s an individual Canadian to do? The numbers – often closer to astronomy than economics — are staggering, the inertia of politicians and governments frustrating. But why wait for politicians and governments? Individuals have done more to change the course of history than any government ever has. And while we can’t all be Nelson Mandela, we can each do something.

“Live simply so others may simply live,” Ghandi once said and (ironically) bumper stickers tell us. But there is something to this tailgate wisdom. Perhaps it’s time we rich folks learned to cultivate a bit of poverty in our own lives, because, as we now see, the uncontrolled greed we have been practicing for decades has done nothing but deplete the environment and bury us in debt.

In 2007, the average Canadian income was $38,400.00. Divide that by 0.7% and you get $268.80. All by itself, $268.80 looks like a lot of money. But, really, that’s less than the cost of two tall coffees a week at Starbucks for a year. That’s what I paid for my room at the Furama in Delhi. That’s the cost of 38 anti-malarial bed nets at seven dollars each. That’s what it costs to save 38 lives. And I get to keep 99.3% of my money.

I think I can afford that.

Excuse me. I’ve got to go. It’s time to quit blogging and cut a cheque …

Medecins sans Frontieres, Malaria Bites, Make Poverty History …

JoAnn Dionne has lived in Japan, Mexico, China, and more recently, Hong Kong — her home of five years, where she worked for a time as an editor at Oxford University Press. Little Emperors is her first book. Currently she lives in Victoria, B.C., but she grew up in Salmon Arm in the province‘s interior.

He told us that one day, he had got to his first shift too late to have breakfast, so he went hungry. He went right from that job to another so missed a chance to have lunch (not that he had any way to prepare a lunch for himself). Finally, in the early evening, he finished work and went to a Salvation Army facility where supper was being served. But because he arrived too late to sit for the sermon that night, he was refused dinner. That was how life went on the street.

I had been shocked because he wasn’t the first one of my friends to tell me this. In fact, I was alarmed because I have a growing sense of concern over the “invisible poor.” It’s easy to find poor people. We know what neighbourhoods they live in. We know where they hang out. We think we know what goes on in that part of town.

Some friends of mine are on welfare and can only afford to live in areas that contribute to the stigma and struggle with poverty itself. Even some friends who have jobs can only afford these places. When I pick them up at their apartment buildings in these areas, within a few moments of pulling up, my car windows are knocked on by prostitutes and johns wanting my business. Crack houses are open for business across the street. A makeshift cross marks where a bystander was shot by a stray bullet a few weeks ago.

What about the person in your workplace, perhaps in the next cubicle or on the bench across from you? Is he or she struggling to make ends meet? Where do they sleep at the end of the day?

At my kids’ school, there is a Breakfast Program that gives some nutritious food to children who may be rushed off to school without a hearty breakfast in the morning. One scenario suggested when it was set up was that some parents have to leave for work before the kids get up, and so they may not have anyone making breakfast for them. But those who actually dish out the porridge or cut up fruit or fill bowls with Cheerios tell me other things. They tell me of kids whose only meals all day are what they get in the “Breakfast Program.” And some kids who don’t even attend school there, looking to sit in as well.

Even in middle-class neighbourhoods.

Poverty is not just something that is “over there.” It’s right beside us. Hidden. Invisible. Or, perhaps, it’s just invisible to those who don’t want to see it. Even if we can point to poverty somewhere in the distance, far away from the safety of a warm house in the suburbs, we have to recognize that it’s out there.

Maybe as near as our own dinner tables.