Essay on Culture of Poverty
WORKING PAPER SERIES
Theories of Poverty and Anti-Poverty Programs in Community Development
Ted K. Bradshaw
RPRC Working Paper No. 06-05
February, 2006
Rural Poverty Research Center http://www.rprconline.org/ Introduction
Community development has a variety of strategies available to meet the needs of those persons and groups who are less advantaged, usually in poverty. Community developers help all communities, but their passion lies disproportionately with people who do not have adequate personal resources to meet their needs or with communities with large populations of people who need assistance. These people and communities receiving attention from community developers are extensively varied in most other respects than being poor—the poor are both rural and urban, they are ethnically minority or not, they live in places with weak and strong economies, and they have been helped for decades or neglected for as long .
Poverty in its most general sense is the lack of necessities. Basic food, shelter, medical care, and safety are generally thought necessary based on shared values of human dignity. However, what is a necessity to one person is not uniformly a necessity to others. Needs may be relative to what is possible and are based on social definition and past experience (Sen, 1999). Valentine (1968) says that “the essence of poverty is inequality. In slightly different words, the basic meaning of poverty is relative deprivation.” A social (relative) definition of poverty allows community flexibility in addressing pressing local concerns, while objective definitions allow tracking progress and comparing one area to another.
The most common “objective” definition of poverty is the statistical measure established by the federal government as the annual income needed for a family to survive
.
1. Poverty Caused by Individual Deficiencies.
This first theory of poverty is a large and multifaceted set of explanations that focus on the individual as
Theories of Poverty and Anti-Poverty Programs in Community Development
Ted K. Bradshaw
RPRC Working Paper No. 06-05
February, 2006
Rural Poverty Research Center http://www.rprconline.org/ Introduction
Community development has a variety of strategies available to meet the needs of those persons and groups who are less advantaged, usually in poverty. Community developers help all communities, but their passion lies disproportionately with people who do not have adequate personal resources to meet their needs or with communities with large populations of people who need assistance. These people and communities receiving attention from community developers are extensively varied in most other respects than being poor—the poor are both rural and urban, they are ethnically minority or not, they live in places with weak and strong economies, and they have been helped for decades or neglected for as long .
Poverty in its most general sense is the lack of necessities. Basic food, shelter, medical care, and safety are generally thought necessary based on shared values of human dignity. However, what is a necessity to one person is not uniformly a necessity to others. Needs may be relative to what is possible and are based on social definition and past experience (Sen, 1999). Valentine (1968) says that “the essence of poverty is inequality. In slightly different words, the basic meaning of poverty is relative deprivation.” A social (relative) definition of poverty allows community flexibility in addressing pressing local concerns, while objective definitions allow tracking progress and comparing one area to another.
The most common “objective” definition of poverty is the statistical measure established by the federal government as the annual income needed for a family to survive
.
1. Poverty Caused by Individual Deficiencies.
This first theory of poverty is a large and multifaceted set of explanations that focus on the individual as