Shriver Center: Leading the Change

[Editor’s Note: John Bouman, the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law’s director of advocacy, gave these remarks at the Shriver Center 2006 Awards Dinner on November 30 in Chicago.]

Sargent Shriver’s favorite question is, “So, what are you going to do to change the world?” That’s quite a challenge. But with your help and partnership the Shriver Center is doing its best to lead the change in the State of Poverty. Here are some highlights of action led by Shriver Center staff this past year:

Wendy Pollack, director of our Women’s Law and Policy Project, and Katherine E. Walz, senior attorney, wrote an innovative law to protect the housing rights of victims of domestic and sexual violence. It is called the Safe Homes Act, and due to their efforts it is now the law in Illinois and becoming known in other states.

Dan Lesser, senior attorney, made sure that Illinois would have a state program to care for needy elderly and disabled refugees who were scheduled to lose their federal subsistence benefits due to bureaucratic delays with their citizenship applications. This is a national problem, and Dan is showing advocates in other states how he did it here.

Margaret Stapleton, senior attorney, and I put together a national coalition and filed a nationwide class action court case to stop 50 million Americans from losing their health care benefits because of onerous new citizenship documentation requirements. As a result of the case the government already has exempted 8 million of the most vulnerable elderly and disabled people from the new requirement. I am particularly proud of the coordinated national media campaign orchestrated by our ace communications director, Rikeesha Cannon, that helped produce this result.

Dory Rand, supervisor of our Community Investment Unit, has been making sure that financial literacy training is available to women in welfare-to-work programs, and she is showing the curriculum and her strategies to advocates in other states.

Bill Wilen, director of housing litigation, had the great pleasure this year to help a lifelong public housing resident and tenant leader move into a beautiful mixed-income condominium with a view of the skyline. This is an outcome of Bill’s project to help change the old Henry Horner homes on Chicago’s West Side. Bill is using the Horner experience as a national model for public housing redesign.

Ilze Hirsh and her team made sure that Clearinghouse Review continued to be the nation’s leading journal for ideas for legal and policy innovation. We published two significant special issues of the Review this year. One was about the federal government's role in ending poverty, and the other involved the movement for a right to counsel in civil cases.

This is leadership for change in the tradition of Sargent Shriver.
As we look ahead, I think about a contemporary of Shriver’s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King was unjustly jailed for leading nonviolent lawful protests. While sitting in jail, he was publicly scolded in the newspapers by pastors and rabbis for being impatient and an extremist. In the famous letter from a Birmingham jail, King taught some lessons about leadership for change that resonate here tonight.

One pastor wrote to lecture King about patience. King answered: “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of people,... [T]he time is always ripe to do right.”

On being accused of extremism, King wrote: “The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be…. [W]ill we be extremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?”

To those who would say, mind your own business, make and keep your own money, and take care only of your own people, King wrote this great summation: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

All of us believe that. It is what brings us here tonight. We’re all impatient for the changes that will end poverty. We’re all the right kind of extremists in that cause. Which is to say, we are leaders for change. We understand and embrace the inescapable network of mutuality. It matters to all of us what happens to any of us. And it matters to those who are comfortable that there are still so many others living in the State of Poverty.

And so we promise to assert leadership, to take action to end poverty, with the right kind of impatience, and the right kind of extremism. We’re so grateful that you are with us leading the change and that we’re all in this together.