Notes from a Raised-Poor Support Group
English translation of the above:
This is a report on a raised-poor support group led by Dipti Baranwal, assisted by Glenda Linares. The report is based on notes written by our support group between September 2019 and December 2020. For our one-year anniversary, we revisited the notes and wrote the report together!
No one should grow up in poverty, and no one should be poor. While we work to end class oppression and create a world without poverty, we also get to acknowledge that growing up poor gave us important contact with reality, our humanness, and people’s intelligence.
Below are some of our responses to the questions “What is good about your experiences as a raised-poor person? What reality-based insight or connection do you have because of your experiences?”
- Being able to grow plants and food
- Knowing that relationships matter most
- Being creative about money
- Being raised and taken care of by my grandma because my mom couldn’t afford to pay for childcare
- Having a tight-knit family and circle
- Creatively figuring out what to eat
- Imagination
- Protecting my circle
- Not being shy about helping people, even if I’m at risk
- Generosity
- Having no choice but to be connected, no boundaries between homes
- People being open about money
- Time being different—outside the bounds of capitalism
- Watching animals be born and taking in stray animals
- Automatically sharing; assuming it’s good for everyone to have something
- Independence and not being overly monitored
- A sense of being trusted
- Playing with other poor children, being creative, having a sense of my own mind and creativity because I wasn’t constantly watched
- Problem-solving as a group and not looking to someone else; not waiting (“I hope someone else handles this”) but also not urgently feeling “Oh, my god, I gotta [have to] figure this out by myself!”
Gwen Brown’s RC pamphlet, We Who Were Raised Poor, includes a list of experiences that people who were raised poor may have had. [Gwen Brown is the International Liberation Reference Person for Raised-Poor People.] For example, “I grew up in a home that sometimes had no electricity or water.” We read the list out loud and threw our hands in the air and made a joyful noise when we’d had one of the experiences.
Below are some more of our thoughts and experiences:
- People could have “poor pride” in the way that LGBTQ people fight to have visibility and safety with pride celebrations in the streets. (We all discharged after hearing that idea.)
- My Co-Counselor always reflects back to me that my warmth and sincere kindness are part of my raised-poor upbringing.
- Poor people are the majority of the world’s population but are made to feel small, ashamed, and like a “minority” group.
- Raised-poor people are targeted for elimination and genocide. The economy needs us but also constantly tries to destroy us. The good things about us—the reality we’re in touch with, the insights we have—are not at all about romanticizing poverty. No one should have to be poor. Ever. At the same time, we have insights and a certain intelligence from being raised poor.
- Discharging on our experiences of being raised poor is important for many reasons: We want to help our RC Community be a good place for currently poor and working-class people. We want to take responsibility for our current level of resource and power in society. We want to live with integrity and not drag old distress patterns around that can make us feel powerless and small. We want to be able to act with our full intelligence in our current class positions.
Los Angeles, California, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of wide world change
(Present Time 204, July 2021)