End Poverty

2006-02-27T11:10:00.000-08:00

Poverty has many faces, they say, and lots of them are hungry.

Last year 25 million Americans — that’s 9 million children and 3 million seniors — visited a food bank to pick up a meal.

One-third of them have no other place to go to find food. That makes it hard to concentrate and work and even harder to pay attention in school.

One third of them had to make a choice between buying food and paying rent. Another third had to choose between buying food and paying the doctor’s bill.

Horrifying, right? To have to make a choice between having a place to sleep, staying healthy or going hungry…

This, in country where farmers are paid subsidies to destroy their crops and there’s a fast food joint at every intersection.

Read more about hunger in America’s Second Harvest’s new report online.

2006-01-31T17:58:00.000-08:00

Capitol Hill.
February 2. 2005.

A year ago today (almost), when the president delivered his last State of the Union address. A year ago, he talked of a healthy, growing economy, with more Americans going back to work.

It was all about the fastest growing of any major industrialized nation. In the past four years, we provided tax relief to every person who pays income taxes, overcome a recession, opened up new markets abroad, prosecuted corporate criminals, raised homeownership to its highest level in history, and in the last year alone, the United States has added 2.3 million new jobs.

And he promised to make our economy stronger and more competitive, to reward, not punish, the efforts and dreams of entrepreneurs.

The stuff of fluff and games, really.

During the fourth quarter, economic growth slowed down to its slowest rate in three years. Businesses stopped investing, and even the government stopped spending. And unemployment is on the rise.

Maybe life in the average household is not so easy.

But life is good in corporate America, especially for our friends in the oil industry.

Exxon Mobile set a record for profits last year. It booked $36 billion worth of income.

Is that what’s going to build the prosperity of future generations?

Let’s see what he has to say tonight.

2006-01-19T20:24:00.000-08:00

Lets take a little break, a short reading adventure.

In her new book, “Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead,” Tamara Draut argues that even if you do everything right, it’s still not enough. Even if you go to college, go to grad school. get a job and get married, there’s no cute white picket fence waiting on the other side. Instead, there’s debt— from school and credit cards and mortgage payments and the rest.

It’s a book that began when Draut started thinking about her and her husband’s lives. They were both working after finishing grad school, and selling their music collection to pay for dinner. Between them, they had $57,000 in loans to repay for school and another $19,000 in credit card debt. She started asking around and discovered she wasn’t alone. By 2000, 65% of college students left school in debt, and one-quarter of them over more than $25,000. Less than half, just 49%, left college in debt in 1993.

For Draut, it’s more than just failing to take responsibility for your own spending. She makes the case that the 20- and 30-somethings aren’t making it because there’s institutional failure. She blames the government’s lack of funding for higher education —and points out that half of Congress went to college free on the GI bill— on the credit card industry and on her generation’s disengagement from politics.

This Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle had a review. I encourage you to read the review, read the book and think about what Draut has to say—

2006-01-01T11:51:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

2005-12-28T17:20:00.000-08:00

‘Tis the season.
Food and drink and family and friends, and yes, a whole lot of shopping.

It’s not all about the XBOX when you’re poor. Take a trip down to Joe and Cindy’s house in San Francisco. After rent, they’ve got $609 to spend every month. That’s for food and bus fare, school supplies, electricity, new clothes and the occasional movie ticket.

So what happens in December, when a gift needs to land on the teacher’s desk and then more under the Christmas tree? When you need to bring flowers to your neighbor and send a card to your sister-in-law in Chicago?

It’s not easy. The National Retail Federation, the group that counts department stores and discount chains and online sites among its members, tracks holiday spending.

If Joe and Cindy were the average American consumer, that’s $421 on gifts for family, $79 on presents for friends, $21 for the people at work and $44 on the people who make life easier, the teachers and babysitters and clergy.

It takes another $41 to decorate the Christmas tree. Plus $28 for Christmas cards, another $88 on candy and food, and $16 on flowers.

All told, the holiday season comes with a $739 bill.
Not so easy to pay when you’ve only got $609 to spend.

2005-12-22T11:24:00.000-08:00

What is poverty, exactly?

Here in the U.S., it's a set of statistics measured by the government's Census Bureau. They count how much money each member of the family brings in annually-- a salary, income from a retirememt fund, child support payments, etc.-- and then divide that income by the number of people who live in that household.

Let's take our friend Joe. He lives by himself and makes $9,645 a year. He's poor.
Joe's sister moves in. They both work, but, together, they don't pull in more than $12,344 annually. They're poor.
Joe soon finds a girlfriend. Cindy and Joe get married and have two kids. Can they add a puppy and a white picket fence to their American dream? Unlikely. They make $19,307 a year. They're poor.

But numbers are numbers and don't really mean anything.

So let's pluck Joe and Cindy out of cyberspace and drop him into our hometown, beautiful San Francisco.

It's a great place to live, but it's also the country's second most expensive city.
What would Joe and Cindy and their two kids' life look like?

Hard to say.
It's hard to imagine a single landlord who would rent to them, at least the type of landlord who owns a place you might actually want to live in. The people who think and write about these things says that you should spend no more than 30% of your monthly income on rent. That gives Joe and Cindy $482.68 to spend.
A studio apartment in this town averages $1,000. There's city-subsidized housing out there, but not enough to go around. So say our happy couple didn't get their forms in on time, or didn't have all the right documents signed and notarized. Whatever happened, they didn't qualify.

So they're paying $1,000 for a studio apartment in the city's Excelsior district. Not the nicest neighborhood in town, sandwiched between the freeway and the Bayview district. There's a little bit of industry there, lots of immigrant families, and a recent spike in gang activities. But it has all the basics-- decent places to shop for groceries, a drugstore, banks-- and lots of public transportation. So Joe and Cindy and the kids are content.

But with all that money going to rent, there's only $609 for everything else.

2005-12-20T14:30:00.000-08:00

These are the things I believe in:

Hurricane Katrina didn't expose anything. Hurricane Katrina was just a spark. All those images of crumbling houses, people on their porches as the roof crumbled and the muck floated up the stairs-- it was all there if you stopped to look. The things is, no one had stopped to look. No one sees poverty until it shows up on their television screen before dinner, or on the radio and in their newspaper before the morning commute. And it rarely does.

Not everyone gets their fair share. Schools aren't created equal. Small business owners don't have the same access to capital and resources that corporations do. And people say it over and over again, but it's true; the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The gap is growing. And there is such a thing as a fair share.

It is possible to end poverty. One gesture at a time, one person at a time. Schools can help, community groups and neighborhood organizations and local companies are part of the puzzle, too. It's not easy, certainly, but it is possible.

These are the things I don't:

Capitalism, by definition, leaves some people behind. Poverty is a question of simple economics, and some people just end up losers.

People are poor because they're lazy.
People are poor because they have too many kids and don't educate them and smoke crack and then send their kids out on the streets to sell drugs to make more money to smoke more crack.
People are poor because they choose to be poor.

Poverty is too big a problem to tackle all at once.

My name is Yobie. Welcome to and my blog. I am an immigrant born into poverty in the Philippines. I arrived in California about 25 years ago. I'm no longer poor, I'm a tech geek and an entrepreneur. Silicon Valley has been good to me. I want to give back. I want to meet the people who are tryong to make a difference and the organizations that support their work. I want to be involved with companies that are committed to their employees, to their communities and to a socially responsible profit. I want to end poverty.

Stay tuned.