Poverty Initiative Immersion reflection of first day
From January 13-22, students attending Union Theological Seminary, in New York City and members of the Poverty Initiative's Poverty Scholars Program are engaged in an immersion course to confront the reality of poverty in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States.
Yesterday was the beginning of yet another exciting chance to think critically with fellow believers in the fight to end poverty. We discussed the disparity of wealth and poverty in today's society as well as why its necessary to have many leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. in our movement to end poverty. In order to address the issue of disparity it is essential to deconstruct an economic system that perpetuates the concentration of wealth to the minority of Americans and poverty concentrated to the majority. Only then can economic and social equity be dispersed evenly. However this can never be attained if we don't continue to develop many leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. to not only sustain the movement but to unify the masses to take action and achieve economic equality.
Willie Baptist led group discussions and drawing upon examples from his own life, stressed the responsibility each of us has to imagining a society with greater equity. “Abandonment in the midst of Abundance” is the term he used to diagnose what is happening in our culture. As the day began to wrap up we watched a documentary about the establishment of The Poor People’s Campaign which MLK JR. gave his life to create.
As we departed for the evening our groups were forced to wrestle with the challenge of continuing the Poor Peoples Campaign in our era, which still deals with the same fundamental issues that King’s generation dealt with in the 1960s.
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Text by Koby Murphy and Tim Moyer. Photos by Tim Moyer.
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