Funding The Future Today

How To End Poverty…In One Generation

If you grow up poor it is easy to have  a defeated/helpless attitude.  That is, it is easy unless your parents do not have a “poverty mentality.”

I once knew a family, and you probably know one too, who came here from Vietnam with nothing.  The parents worked constantly mostly at the local gas station/food mart.  The children all did well in school and the parents helped them go to college.  They graduated and went on to become Pharmacists and Doctors.  How did this family succeed in getting out of poverty where so many others fail?

I think they succeeded because of their investments.  The parents wisely understood that they would not be leaving any great legacy of stock earnings to their children.  What they would leave them with was an education with which their children could pull, not only themselves but their parents as well, out of what could have been hope-crushing poverty.

The parents invested in their children.  They stayed the course through all the really tough years of raising children.  It was not easier for them than other families but harder; they worked all the time.  Older children had to supervise younger children.  Homework had to be checked and curfews enforced.

They were frugal, yes and they lived on what they earned.  They did not own a house which they could not afford. They did not own a house at all.   Yet, they ended their poverty in one generation!

You see these parents had internalized the concept of  ”servant leadership.”

You have probably heard the story about the man who visits Heaven and hell.  In hell people are sitting around a pot of stew with spoons 5 feet long strapped to their arms.  They are starving because they cannot get the spoons back from the pot to their mouths; the spoons are too long.

In Heaven folks sit around a similar pot of stew with the same 5 foot long spoons strapped to their arms.  But in Heaven everyone is fat and happy because they use the spoons to feed each other.

If one poor Vietnamese immigrant family can end their poverty in one generation, why can’t one town, one city, one state, one nation?

Brenda Standlee