How To Talk About Poverty

We all love to be heroes. We love to know we are making a difference. And this, unfortunately, affects the way we talk about poverty.

When we talk about giving or serving to make a difference in the lives of the materially impoverished. We almost always talk about the negative -- starving children, slums, filthy water, lack of education... But we rarely talk about the potential for success and the skills/talents/ability that those people bring and we almost never let them speak for themselves.

Because of our need to be saviors from the first world swooping in to save the poor third-worlders, we speak for them when they are more than capable of speaking for themselves.

We might mean well, but the way we talk about the materially poor gives them very little dignity and robs them of the voice they have.

Craig Greenfield wrote a brief but powerful article about how we talk about poverty.

See the original article here:
How to talk about poverty without being a jerk