The mission of the Poverty Initiative is to raise up generations of community and religious leaders committed to building a social movement to end poverty led by the poor, united across color lines and other lines of division. In April of 2014, we celebrated our 10th anniversary. Through speech, song, and ritual, we held up our ancestors and fallen fighters, drew strength from the rich history of the leadership of the poor, and put forward a vision for the future.

Over the last 10 years, the Poverty Initiative has focused on the growing scourge of poverty and economic inequality in American society, on the twin roles that religion and commitment to human rights must play in addressing this crisis, and on the need to unite leaders emerging out of different fronts of struggle to make possible a broad social movement to end poverty. We have built our work around 5 core principles that can respond to the contradiction between wealth and poverty in these times.

1 — The Leadership of the Poor and Dispossessed as a New and Unsettling Force

Just as the abolitionist movement required the leadership of slaves and former slaves to build the broad-based social movement that ended slavery, and the women’s suffrage movement required the leadership of women to end their exclusion from political rights, the movement to end poverty must be led by the poor and dispossessed.

Those who have come before us have understood this reality. In fighting for the leadership of the poor we have drawn on the powerful example of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign and his call for the poor to take action together to transform the basic structures of power in our society.

The Poor People’s Campaign brought together poor Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and indigenous peoples around what these groups held in common. We see that in our time the need for the unity of the poor and dispossessed has not disappeared — if anything it has grown more pressing.

2 — Teaching as We Fight, Learning as We Lead, the Struggle is our School

Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy. Deeds uninformed by educated thought can take false directions. When we go into action and confront our adversaries, we must be as armed with knowledge as they. Our policies should have the strength of deep analysis beneath them to be able to challenge the clever sophistries of our opponents.
— Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go from Here?”, 1967

Transformative social movements in US and world history reveal that building a movement to end poverty will mean educating ourselves and each other on the roots of this social ill, drawing on the gathered wisdom of the centuries of struggles of the poor and dispossessed around the world. Through the unity of action, reflection, and study we can build the kind of engaged scholarship — poverty scholarship — that these times and the tasks ahead of us demand.

Since the founding of the PI in 2004, this kind of engaged poverty scholarship has been central to our mission. Through 3 national poverty truth commissions, 2 leadership schools, 11 poverty immersion courses, 10 faculty-sponsored semester long courses, 16 one-day seminars, 4 books and numerous religious and theological resources, 9 strategic dialogues, 6 intensive study programs and numerous events and exchanges with global grassroots and religious leaders, the Poverty Initiative has established a wide and deep network of community and religious leaders, spanning 30 states and 17 countries around the world.

3 — Poverty in the Midst of Plenty: the Right to Not Be Poor

The ongoing and emerging struggles of the global poor expose the inequities of the poverty-producing system that we live with.

At the same time, people in struggle are living and presenting visions of a different world — one defined by justice and human rights. Taking up this struggle means proclaiming that there should be no poverty when there is plenty; there should be no abandonment amidst abundance.

4 — True Compassion: Growing A Freedom Church of the Poor

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam”, April 1967

The PI has worked to develop a lived way of understanding the Bible that values the leadership of the poor. We understand the Bible not as blaming the poor for the condition of poverty, nor as advocating charity as the way to approach poverty. Instead, we see in the Bible a mandate to end poverty through the leadership of those most affected by it.

Over the course of our ten years, we’ve produced Bible Studies, sermons, and other resources for worship that foreground this mandate. You can find them here.

5 — This Kairos Moment: Building a Movement to End Poverty

This is not just another moment but a very special moment, what the Bible calls a Kairos moment: a moment of truth, a moment when the foundations shake, a moment of grace and opportunity, a favorable time in which God issues a challenge to decisive action.

Jesus challenged the hypocrites of his day to read the signs of the times. We are challenged to do the same today. We see that a world full of greed, poverty, exploitation, indifference, and inequality is not the world that God created. But around the world, a different reality is breaking through.

The Poverty Initiative has created the Kairos Center to study and act on the signs of our time, and to bring together on a global level the power of religions, of human rights, of the poor and dispossessed and all who have a moral vision. We are calling on everyone to join in the building of a new Poor People’s Campaign for our time—one that will lead to changes in the whole structure of American life, one that will help build a movement to end poverty forever. All of us are needed to fulfil this Kairos moment.