Antipoverty Programs, Community-Based

Strategies

One strategy is to address the consequences of poverty communitywide, using tactics from public health, health promotion, agronomy, water management, economic development, and institutional development, particularly in the realms of community infrastructure, safety, local food supplies, and education. Organizations using this strategy likely engage specific groups and related social problems such as human trafficking, child labor, and exploitation of women and the local ecology. Alternatively, these organizations may also engage in community campaigns involving the empowerment of women, the protection of children, prevention of infectious disease, and promotion of sustainable livelihoods. This grand strategy likely incorporates methods of community organization.

A second grand strategy involves the support of individuals and households that are coping with poverty. Here, individuals and families can fulfill basic needs and access amenities that local antipoverty programs deliver at the household level. While the first grand strategy fosters community development, the second grand strategy seeks to address the serious consequences of poverty, ensuring that a particular family can [Page 63]negotiate the issues that they face because of changing economic circumstances, culture, and societal and/or ecological conditions. This antipoverty strategy means that local organizations are addressing the threats to human wellbeing, and even existence, induced by factors that bring about poverty. Refraining from blaming people who are in poverty for the conditions or circumstances that they experience is an essential practice within this strategy.

Sound antipoverty programs recognize the pernicious nature of poverty, and how circumstances beyond the control of an individual or family can induce serious negative consequences. While local community-based antipoverty programs seek to proactively address poverty on a community level, these same programs are somewhat reactive because they must assist people who are living in poverty. In sound antipoverty programs, reacting to such circumstances oftentimes requires the provision of goods, social services, and opportunities that are designed to buffer the stress that poverty can create for people and their families. The delivery of such essentials of daily life may be temporary or ongoing, depending on the value set, temporal perspective, or resource availability that come to define local antipoverty organizations.

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