It’s a lot like that and the good thing about this plan is we have solutions. Childcare is one of the areas of poverty that you could address. In the action guide, you pick the sectors that we talked about, but you could pick from nine different areas. Those areas are basic needs or childcare, education, employment, financial stability, health, housing, safety or transportation. You pick one of those areas. If childcare is the issue, once you pick your sector and you pick childcare, you’re going to get a menu of actions you can take.
You could use the data to say, “It looks like this is the one we need the most.” To your point, childcare is a lot like the SNAP benefits, which is to say getting a job sometimes makes it less affordable to live. This is about partnerships. One thing this plant screams is to not walk alone in this. Form partnerships. If you’re a business, form a partnership with a civic association or with an educational institution nearby.
Maybe what you could do is you could find childcare providers in those sectors for your employees. When you hire someone, if you can’t yet pay them enough to get by on their own, maybe you can reduce their costs by having childcare offerings or transportation deals because you’ve partnered with the local government. This is a plan that does emphasize the importance of collaboration.
I’ve been mentoring a company in the Boulder area with a co-working space. One of the selling points or the differentiators is that they are a co-working space for working moms where they have onsite childcare. That becomes something that enables people to either get out of the house for their own mental health but have access to onsite childcare where they know that they can spend some time working and their kids are going to be able to be watched by a professional staff member. There are people out there who are taking real action and creating a shift in how things are done so that we can hopefully enable some people to be their best selves in this space.
There’s a lot of creativity. There are many people implementing creative plans and programs and ideas. The caveat I will add is that we have to make sure that those who are the most vulnerable and in the greatest need are our greatest priority. That’s what we have to do. We’re going to use our creativity now to come up with these great ideas. Let’s start by solving the problems of those who live in economic scarcity, in poverty. That is the key to this and it makes sense.
Think about it like a family. Let’s say you’re a family and you have three kids. One kid is brilliant. The other kid is an average student. The third kid has some challenge that doesn’t allow this student to perform well in school or even to live what we might call a normal life. All the energies go to that third kid. Everybody understands it.
What we’re going to do is we’re going to make sure this child has the support necessary. That’s all we’re talking about here. Let’s make sure that those with the greatest needs are our greatest priority. We will find that people we think are needy or in need have so much talent that collectively grows dramatically once we free up their potential and talent by ensuring they don’t have to worry about hunger.
Have you done any research into the core psychological or sociological reasons behind why we, as a culture, don’t tend to take care of those most in need is as well as we could?
That may be my favorite question of all time, but I’ve never had the answer. I can tell you, I got my Doctorate in Sociology and my dissertation was on the shift from mechanical thinking to holistic thinking. A very simple example is you have neck pain and you take a pill because you want a muscle relaxer instead of saying, “How do I sleep,” or, “Is somebody looking over my shoulders when I work,” or “Am I thinking about a tense, personal situation?”
In other words, “What are the causes?” Instead, we just treat the symptoms. That’s our society. We are very symptom-oriented and we tend to see ourselves as individuals separate from other beings. It’s because we don’t see the deep interconnectedness that defines our existence. We live as if we are separate beings and that’s the problem to me, this lack of connection. That’s why poverty endures. The more that we can see that we’re all in this together, not cliché but truly in this together, then we will arrive at the solution. That’s why this plan is so inclusive.
It reminds me of two things. One is that old metaphor of building the hospital at the bottom of the river where you have bodies coming down the river and you build the hospital down there instead of just going up the river to figure out what’s causing all the people to be in this state of shape. The other one, I talk about ecosystems a lot, both in terms of marketing and in terms of just how we live together and the idea that we aren’t all part of this ecosystem.
You can take that out to whatever levels you want to. It’s overlapping. When we have one part of this system that’s not healthy, it does affect the rest of the system. We tend to ignore that when it’s outside of our own selves. If my thumb hurts, I want to fix that because it changes the way that the rest of me operates. However, when some other person is hurting within an entirely different ecosystem, but I’m part of that as an individual, people have that tendency to overlook that or think that someone else is going to fix it for them.
The charge for all of us is to think bigger and not in a clichéd way on our social media to write a nice phrase about it but to live that way. If you understand how interconnected we are, then your self-interest goes to the back because you get what you thought was your self-interest was a very small view of life, but that you are intimately tied to the wellbeing of others, whether or not you feel it on a conscious level.
To me, it’s a sad and small life to not put others way ahead of you. Gale Sayers was onto something when he said, “I am Third.” You can’t be first in this. You can’t say, “What about me first?” You will then condition yourself to worry about yourself and your entitlements first, instead of thinking about those others who may need some support.
By supporting them, your life gets more whole. That’s the way we exist. The more we do for others, the more healed or the more whole we are. The word heal and whole come from the same sacks and roots. If we want to be healthy, we have to be whole and if we want to be whole, then we have to live in this deep sense of interconnectedness with each other.
I’m hoping that the readers are taking note of all of these things because I would imagine it’s an amazing way to change one’s perspective and live a much fuller existence as we make that shift into thinking about how we all fit together in this system of interconnectedness.
