Letter from the President
We are living through transformative times. That much is clear as our economy wobbles, the information revolution accelerates, and the political winds shift. But transformation into what?
At the Northwest Area Foundation, we think our nation’s prosperity may very well depend on whether we can come together to redefine the common good in this period of profound change.
“The common good” — it’s an old-fashioned phrase, but its time has come again. Of course, respect for the private good is also central to our national identity. But only looking after ourselves will not be good enough in the decades ahead. That other profoundly American impulse, the community impulse — to work together, neighbor-to-neighbor, to raise a barn or improve a city or right a wrong — must flourish if we hope to be proud of the nation we’ll leave behind for our children and grandchildren.
Indeed, it seems to me that a passion for the common good is 21st century patriotism. Why? Consider these basic facts: in rough figures, the population of China is 1.3 billion; the population of India is 1.1 billion; the population of the Unites States is 311 million. Our nation competes within a global economy where many countries have lower costs of living and rapidly expanding populations of both highly skilled and unskilled workers.
Given these numbers, how can the United States thrive if we continue to lock millions of our people out of economic opportunity? We have over 46 million people living below the official poverty threshold — $22,314/year for a family of four.¹ When the supplemental poverty measure is applied, which figures in expenses such as medical costs and child care, the poverty rate increases to more than 15 percent or 49 million people.
Of these, 7.5 million work one or more jobs², full time or part time. Another 53 million live at up to 200 percent of the threshold³ and still struggle to make ends meet. We are not fully tapping their energies, ideas, enthusiasm and perspectives. As a country, we need every one of us, or we can’t compete.
Plainly put, America can no longer afford poverty. That means leaving racism in the rearview mirror. It means opening new doors of opportunity in isolated rural places. It means developing our most precious asset, our people, with particular attention to those in poor urban, rural and reservation communities. It means building on-ramps to the workforce of tomorrow for every child and every worker in this country. In order to get out and stay out of poverty, low-income people need to be able to build assets and wealth. They need access to affordable high-quality education, healthcare, housing, and practical training for living-wage jobs.
At the Northwest Area Foundation, we’ve chosen to focus our grantmaking on three long term goals for our eight-state region:
- Increasing the assets and wealth among people with low incomes.
- Increasing the capacity and leadership of organizations and communities to reduce poverty.
- Improving public policy solutions to reduce poverty.
For us, framing those outcomes is just the start. We will spend the years ahead working in concert with proven and promising organizations throughout our eight states to explore truly transformative programs, policies, and possibilities. We will experiment, we will invest in what works, and we will advocate for changes that move the region toward prosperity — broadly shared and lasting.
Thank you for visiting nwaf.org. I hope you’ll find value here, and I encourage you to let us know what’s on your mind as you think about the future of the common good.
Kevin F. Walker, President and Chief Executive Officer
Northwest Area Foundation
¹ U.S. Census Bureau, September 2011, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/threshld/threshld/
² Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007, http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/09/rgtrends.pdf
³ U.S. Census Bureau, 2005–2007, http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/STTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-qr_name=ACS_2007_3YR_G00_S1701&-ds_name=ACS_2007_3YR_G00_&-_lang=en&-_caller=geoselect&-redoLog=false&-format=
