Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director of the Center for Community Change Action. Photo courtesy of the Center for Community Change Action.
In the richest country in the history of the world, we are never more than a degree away from poverty.
We see it everywhere in our daily lives.
The woman who makes our sandwiches at the deli. The custodian who cleans the restrooms and empties our waste baskets at work. The cashier who rings up our groceries.
They are among the 106 million Americans living on the brink. They are the mothers and fathers and the young and old forced to choose between paying their rent and making sure their families have enough food in their bellies.
These are the families juggling to make ends meet with second jobs or by scraping enough hours on minimum wage work that allows them to take care of children or elderly parents.
Too often, these Americans are treated as separate from the rest of America, relegated to some "other" group that should remain on the margins, invisible and silent.
Yet their labor fuels our economy. We depend on each other, but we don't always realize how intertwined our lives are. We don't always listen to the people fighting the hardest to overcome the barriers to success.
That's what we seek to change by writing. We aim to provide a voice for people like Patrice Mack, a single mother of four from Ohio and a college graduate who is looking for work. She is tapping into her retirement savings to make ends meet and says she is one paycheck away from poverty.
Or for people like Katie Logue, a gas station cashier in Maine. A few years ago, when she was a newly single mom with a six year old, she was struggling to find appropriate housing and make ends meet on a $9 an hour wage. Food stamps and government health insurance helped Katie meet basic needs, but she couldn't afford to pay rent, so she had to move in with her mother.
Our mission at the Center for Community Change Action is to build the power of people trying to make ends meet, especially people of color, and raise their voices, so that they can change their communities and public policies for the better.
In our blog posts, you will read about the efforts that work to help families obtain good jobs with fair wages. You will learn about grassroots movements calling attention to the need for economic, environmental and racial justice. You will find the stories that show the need for immigration reform for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country. You will hear about how this country's reliance on mass incarceration has trapped more than two million people into a vicious cycle of poverty that keeps them ensnared in the criminal justice system.
But most of all, we hope you will find the humanity in our fellow citizens -- the cashier who rings up your order or the custodian who cleans the restroom -- because only then can we change their lives and the lives of millions of Americans.
--Deepak Bhargava