Networking the Poor

Like me, Greg Bloom at Beyond Bread noticed the conspicuous lack of a focus on poverty at Netroots Nation last week.  (Difference: Greg was there.)  He offers two thoughtful and provoking posts about how the NN agenda reflects the interests of its members, who are on-line and active - and stratified according to race, class, gender, ability, etc. more or less as in "real life."  To incorporate issues of poverty and inequality at Netroots Nation, activists like us must incorporate our low-income neighbors into our on-line activism, or move beyond noble but limiting motivations like "help" and "charity" to "empowerment" and "equity".

But here's what I love about Poverty in America at Change.org: most days, I'm talking about and thinking about poverty with poor activists.  The community we have built here is not only middle-class "do-gooders" (as a friend's father once called me, and not proudly), it is a mix of people speaking from lived experience and those of us who are devoted to bringing about positive social change to equal the playing field, pursue fairer distribution and access policies here in the US, shift mindsets, and so forth.

The digital divide is real, and opportunities for political activism are sharply curtailed by class and race.  But Change.org is proof that these cross-class, cross-cultural connections exist, and it is up to us to harness them.  Maybe we start with guest posts from those living through economic hardship and evolve over time to organizing campaigns together...personally, I'm still figuring out how to take these virtual connections "live".  But I love Greg's point about diagraming the US Social Forum and Netroots Nation to find the overlap.  I hope Poverty in America and Change.org might show up as one node in such a network.

(Photo by Marcin Wichary of four PCs from the One Laptop Per Child initiative "to  create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children")