Bridges Across Every Divide Podcast – Episode 2: Tomorrow is another day

with Gene Krebs

Phil DeVol: How do we get people from the left and right into this? One of the things that we look at in the different aha! Process books is the four causes of poverty. It’s not just two.

Of those four causes, there’s one that conservatives pay attention to, which is individual choice, behavior, circumstances, and responsibility. And then the one that the liberals look for and their think tanks are creating, is the socioeconomic, political structures that lead poverty.

Those turn into the “either/or” debates of today. Those are the narratives that we hear all the time, and that’s how they pass policy. And what we’re saying is that it’s not either/or. It’s actually true that poverty is caused by the individuals and their circumstances, and poverty is caused by political and economic structures.

So we come at it from “both/and.” And we honor the research on both sides.

We also discovered that there are causes of poverty that have to do with where you live. And poverty is different in every city, county, state, and some places upward mobility is easier than others. Poverty in the small counties in northeastern Colorado? it’s going to be harder to get out of poverty there than it is in some place like Columbus, Ohio, or one of the Eastern cities, where the resources are all around, and so are opportunities. So where you live matters.

And then the fourth category is: How much exploitation are people in poverty facing?

Listen to the podcast for more.

Philip DeVol2020-06-26T10:41:10-05:00May 15th, 2018|Community|

About the Author: Philip DeVol

Phil DeVol is an international consultant who has been working with aha! Process since 1997. He used aha! Process concepts to make institutional changes at the addiction treatment center where he was the executive director for 19 years. During this time he also co-wrote Bridges Out of Poverty with Ruby Payne and Terie Dreussi-Smith. His book Getting Ahead in a Just-Gettin’-by-World is being used to engage people in poverty in the work of building communities where everyone can live well. It worked so well that DeVol used it as a basis for a prison reentry model called Getting Ahead while Getting Out. He works with community leaders to help them move quickly from an attraction to application of Bridges concepts. Getting Ahead and Bridges are being used in hundreds of communities in the U.S., as well as a number of sites in Canada, Australia, Ireland, Scotland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. His books have been translated into Spanish, Slovak, and Czech.