Treating her patients who are poor takes more than just medicine, says pediatrician Maritza Alvarado.
“We need to understand our clients better,” said Alvarado.
Alvarado is one of the 3,000 local graduates of a national educational program called Bridges out of Poverty. The program focuses on training service providers and businesses with low-income employees to understand the roots of poverty.
The national initiative is based on the work of Dr. Ruby K. Payne, who is a long-time educator and author. She wrote the book, “A Framework for Understanding Poverty.” Its aim is to help people in poverty and those who work with them in local communities communicate better. The theory is once low-income people have better services, they move into economic stability.
The need for the Bridges approach, say advocates, is clear from some statistics on poverty around Syracuse. For example:
- About 27 percent of Syracuse’s population — or about 37,000 people — live below the federal poverty line. That’s an income of $17,603 a year for a family of four.
- The Syracuse poverty rate is higher than both the state and the national.
- Statewide, 14.5 percent live in poverty; nationally 12.7 percent.
Angela Douglas, a certified trainer for the Bridges program, urges anti-poverty groups to take advantage of the Bridges approach. “The reality of it is, we have a war in our country against poverty and we’re not making good strides,” said Douglas. “We are asking organizations to go back and look at how they serve their clientele.”
Syracuse was introduced to Bridges in 2005 when its founder, Ruby K. Payne, came to speak at a conference hosted by the nonprofit organization, Contact Community Services. “It was such a successful event—standing room only. With that kind of turnout, we wanted to go further with that,” said Douglas, the trainer for Bridges.
Contact Community Services, a nonprofit mental health support agency, adopted the national program and trained 20 people from its organization in 2006. The certified trainers have gone throughout the community to train workers at organizations such as the Salvation Army, the Onondaga County Department of Social Services and the Syracuse Police Department.
The training focuses on a few tenets:
- The lower class, middle class and upper class all have their own customs, language and rules.
- No class is better than another, just different.
- People in poverty are great problem-solvers
- Poverty isn’t just due to individual choice. Exploitation and unequal political structures play a role.
Since bringing Bridges to the Syracuse area, Contact Community Services has developed a coalition to further the Bridges goals. The Coalition was formed this year. It hired Kim Hanna as a full-time employee to train more community members about poverty, recruit more members, and to advocate for the fair treatment of low-income people.
“The coalition was formed to support people who have been trained and to continue advocacy to make sure exploitation is identified and eliminated,” said Hanna. “Then we will evaluate the results in Syracuse.”
Pediatrician Alvarado is one the people trained who remain in contact with the coalition.
Years after her training, Alvarado has found that some of the ways to better serve low income people is to keep health clinics open later to accommodate working parents, to have a caseworker available, and to create health centers in schools. Some of the issues low-income people face is a lack of transportation, no health insurance, and higher food prices, she said.
Sometimes simply connecting with the patient can better improve services. Said Alvarado: “You have to understand what people in poverty go through on a daily basis in order to give them the support mechanisms they need.”
(Koren Temple is a graduate student in magazine-newspaper-online journalism.)
-30-
