The 2012 Legislative Session began on Tuesday! Together with you, A Minnesota Without Poverty (AMWP) is energetically working statewide to end poverty in Minnesota! It is time once again to bring our message to the Capitol. We must continue to help keep alive the Recommendations of the bi-partisan Legislative Commission to End Poverty (LCEP)! And in order to do this, WE NEED YOU! Attached please find three things:

1. AMWP Call to Action:This one page document provides specific actions you can do to end poverty in Minnesota, ranging from registering to vote and attending precinct caucuses on February 7, 2012, to reading the LCEP's Recommendations and personally asking your legislators to do the same. It even has a handy-dandy checklist that allows you to check-off the important actions you plan to do. Of course, we hope that you will check all five!

Check out photos from the Enough for All Campaign in Grand Rapids on Jan 18: Circles of Support "In Search of Enough" production; arts reception at MacRostie (also attended by Rep McElfatrick--3B), and Jan 19: Learning Stations and facilitators; rice bar; Enough for All and Half in Ten presentations; panel discussion with 2 current state legislators (Sen Saxhaug and Rep Anzelc), 2 candidates for 3B (Gould and Medure), and 3 candidates for CD 8 (Anderson, Clark, Nelson); and a call to action. 

    

 By Jim Jordal

"We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty."

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, 1910-1997

As this year begins we in the movement to end poverty might well consider the words of Mother Teresa that there is another kind of poverty equally corrosive of human lives as the one we war against. We focus on the poverty related to income shortfalls, joblessness, homelessness, hunger, poor education, and a lack of medical care. We agitate in the halls of power hoping that someone, sometime, somewhere will hear the cries of those unable to help themselves, and join us in the struggle. We believe that deep in the human psyche there resides that small spark that cares for the welfare of others and is able and willing to give sacrificially to those in need. We believe also that what is needed is an igniting force capable of transforming that small spark into a raging conflagration of mercy and justice. These things we believe and work for.

But there is another even more insidious form of poverty that lurks among us---that awful poverty of spirit that arises, as Mother Teresa so artfully said, from being unloved, unwanted, and uncared for. In our complacent attitudes of selfishness, ignorance and denial we too often conclude that this form of poverty troubles only people in other cultures, in more distant lands, or in families different from ours, or in people unlike ourselves. We delude ourselves into thinking this type of poverty does not belong to us. No, it belongs to others not able to see things as clearly as we do or to provide the physical resources necessary to the good life.